antirez 1895 days ago. 306523 views.

I consider myself very lucky for contributing to the open source. For me OSS software is not just a license: it means transparency in the development process, choices that are only taken in order to improve software from the point of view of the users, documentation that attempts to cover everything, and simple, understandable systems. The Redis community had the privilege of finding in Pivotal, and VMware before, a company that thinks at open source in the same way as we, the community of developers, think of it. Thanks to the Pivotal sponsorship Redis was able to grow, to reach in the latest years a diffusion which I never expected it to reach. However for the final user it always was just a "pure" OSS project: go to the community web site, grab a tar ball, read the free documentation, send a pull request, and watch the stream of commits as they happen live. In order to not stop this magic from happening, and in order to have enough free time to spend with my family, during these years I made the decision of not starting a Redis company. However I encouraged the creation of an economic ecosystem around Redis. There are multiple companies about Redis doing well at this point. There is one, Redis Labs, that made a remarkable steady work over the years in order to build a very strong company, with a team of developers hacking on the core of Redis, and a great set of products that provide Redis users with the commercial choices they need. At some point it started to look like a good idea for me to move to Redis Labs. Running a big cluster of Redis instances and having a set of developers on the Redis core is the key asset for Redis future. We can work together in order to improve Redis faster, with a constant feedback on what happens into the wild of actual users running Redis and the efforts required in order to operate it at scale. Redis Labs was willing to continue what VMware and Pivotal started. I'll be able to work as I do currently, spending all my time in the open source side of the project, while Redis Labs continues to provide Redis users with an hassles-free Redis experience of managed instances and products. However because of my close interaction with Redis Labs I believe we'll see much more contributions from Redis Labs developers to the Redis core. Things like the memory reduction pull requests which are going to be part of Redis 3.2, or the improvements to the key eviction process they contributed for Redis 3.0, are a clear example of what happens when you have great developers working at Redis, able to observe a large set of use cases. I, Pivotal, and Redis Labs, all agree that this is important for the future of Redis, so I'm officially moving to Redis Labs starting from tomorrow morning. Thank you Pivotal and Redis Labs, we'll have to ship more OSS code in the next years, and this is just great. EDIT: Redis Labs press release can be found here: https://redislabs.com/press-releases/redis-creator-salvatore-sanfilippo-antirez-joins-redis-labs