In March 2024, Redis removed the open source license of its popular in-memory database and added the SSPL-1.0 license, a non-open source license according to the Open Source Initiative, the steward of the open source definition.
In April 2025, Redis reversed course and re-relicensed back to open source by adding the AGPL-3.0 license to its software.
Redis’ strategy change is a great example of what I called the triple licensing strategy of commercial open source firms back in 2019.
In the triple-licensing strategy, commercial infrastructure component vendors offer three licenses
- A to-pay-for commercial license,
- A non-compete license to drive adoption, and
- A strong copyleft license to lend open source goodwill.
Redis is not the first company to follow this strategy. Only recently did Elastic Search re-relicense to open source by adding the AGPL-3.0 license as a third license to its software.
There are two main benefits to the triple-licensing strategy. For one, it keeps or brings back the mantle and goodwill of open source.
For another, it simplifies licensing. Real-world commercial software licensing is messy. The audience in my open source license compliance seminar or open source business strategy workshop regularly gasps when they see the (now abandoned) Redis licensing mess, see the following figure.
This complexity is a consequence of developing and selling infrastructure components. In the original open source strategy, to keep competition away, the core code is often copyleft-licensed. In order to drive adoption through open source, however, a vendor has to shield its users from this copyleft effect, so all interface code has to have a permissive open source license. This shielding allowed a new type of competitor, the hyperscalers, to compete with the vendor, because it kept any copyleft-licensed code decoupled from their code, and because the hyperscalers don’t care much about the license of the core code to compete with the original vendor.
One thing triple-licensing does not do is to drive adoption. Adoption today is driven by non-compete licenses like the SSPL-1.0, which replace the original permissive-shields-for-a-copyleft-core strategy.
Another thing that triple-licensing does not do is to foster collaboration. Unless you are a die-hard free software supporter, nobody collaborates around strongly copyleft-licensed code. Few, if any, vendors will touch it.
Triple licensing is a strategy for mature software vendors, most notably after the community forked their original open source code, as was the case with both Redis and Elastic Search. It sole purpose is to bestow some open source goodwill, nothing more, nothing less.
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