Consolidation of control and brand recognition. As soon as Redis revealed their hostile intentions, forks split off. Valkey seems to be the favored one, and in my direct experience is what projects are using moving forward. If we don't intend to use Redis' commercial services we have no reason to use them given the license fuckery.

Like IBM with Redhat, they tried to overstep their position and exert undue control, so the community rejected their status as BDFL. Now IBM has Rocky and Liberty to deal with, and Redis has Valkey rapidly gaining credibility as the go-to solution. The social contract of FOSS goes both ways, and greed is righteously punished with the loss of power.

This was the obvious play when the original Garantia Data-now-Redis Labs went on their acquisition spree and subsequent buttoning up of the ecosystem via their cloud/hosted enterprise offering even before 2013 and then taking the Redis name for themselves. I believe it was only slowed down because of the community aspect pushing back against the stupid licensing changes of it, otherwise they would have gone full steam into it to get even more control. It's so sad to see a good product like that be hung out on the whims of some scummy leeches.

I’m sure most of it is trademark preservation. Trademarks are enforce it or lose it.