Simon Willison’s Weblog

Redis is open source again (via) Salvatore Sanfilippo:

Five months ago, I rejoined Redis and quickly started to talk with my colleagues about a possible switch to the AGPL license, only to discover that there was already an ongoing discussion, a very old one, too. [...]

I’ll be honest: I truly wanted the code I wrote for the new Vector Sets data type to be released under an open source license. [...]

So, honestly, while I can’t take credit for the license switch, I hope I contributed a little bit to it, because today I’m happy. I’m happy that Redis is open source software again, under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.

I'm absolutely thrilled to hear this. Redis 8.0 is out today under the new license, including a beta release of Vector Sets. I've been watching Salvatore's work on those with fascination, while sad that I probably wouldn't use it often due to the janky license. That concern is now gone. I'm looking forward to putting them through their paces!

See also Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license on the Redis blog. An interesting note from that is that they are also:

Integrating Redis Stack technologies, including JSON, Time Series, probabilistic data types, Redis Query Engine and more into core Redis 8 under AGPL

That's a whole bunch of new things that weren't previously part of Redis core.

I hadn't encountered Redis Query Engine before - it looks like that's a whole set of features that turn Redis into more of an Elasticsearch-style document database complete with full-text, vector search operations and geospatial operations and aggregations. It supports search syntax that looks a bit like this:

FT.SEARCH places "museum @city:(san francisco|oakland) @shape:[CONTAINS $poly]" PARAMS 2 poly 'POLYGON((-122.5 37.7, -122.5 37.8, -122.4 37.8, -122.4 37.7, -122.5 37.7))' DIALECT 3

(Noteworthy that Elasticsearch chose the AGPL too when they switched back from the SSPL to an open source license last year).