August 12, 2012 - Database vendor Redis Labs Inc. has officially announced that it has changed its name to Redis, dropping the “Labs” signifying the maturity of the company and the open source project Redis, according to the official statement.
Today, we are leading the evolution of Redis from a single service use, such as caching and session management, to offering a wide range of capabilities that enable it to power the world’s most critical applications," said Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO of Redis. Our (new) name reflects what we offer: a single Redis, pure and simple.
Redis Labs provides commercial services around Redis, and since June 2015, development of Redis has been sponsored by Redis Labs. Redis Labs provides commercial services around Redis, and since June 2015, Redis development has been sponsored by Redis Labs, and prior to that, Redis development was supported by VMware and Pivotal.
Over the past 10 years, Redis has developed a range of scalable data models for Redis, including JSON, AI, graph, and time series, supported by powerful search and programmable engines, as well as creating RedisRaft, a stable version of which will be released with Redis 7.0 to bring robust data consistency to Redis clusters. These enhancements transform Redis’ original caching and session management, extending usage scenarios and opening up more possibilities for developers, enterprises, and partners.
Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, joined Redis Labs as its lead open source maintainer back in 2015 and transferred the intellectual property and trademark rights to the Redis project to the company in 2018. However, Sanfilippo decided to step down as Redis maintainer as of June 2020, but remains on the company’s advisory board. Following Sanfilippo’s retirement from maintenance, the Redis project abandoned its previous authoritarian management model in favor of a new “community autonomy model.
“Open source software for systems like Redis requires strong support to grow. The challenge has always been to grow the business without compromising the openness of the project. redis Labs has proven to be able to do this for several years, creating a strong business while still providing an open platform with efficient, transparent governance,” said Sanfilippo, “After I stepped down from R&D leadership, they have improved the development process, made the new core team more open, and continue to provide an open platform to many developers and companies around the world. I believe this company is worthy of the Redis title.”
Redis has emphasized that the name change will not affect the new governance model introduced last year and will continue to be licensed under the BSD license. Under the new governance model, the core team responsible for open source work successfully released Redis 6.2 in March of this year, with over 35 community members contributing. the number of PRs created by the Redis OSS community increased 56% year-over-year, and the number of PRs closed increased 156% year-over-year. the number of Redis project Git authors also increased 86% year-over-year.
To differentiate, Redis has said that in the future, when it says “Redis,” it will specify whether it is the Redis company or the Redis open source project. The open source project will continue to use redis.io, and the company’s website will be redis.com.