Ofer Bengal on licensing
From Innovation Conference: Ofer Bengal, Founder and Chairman at Redis. · · Boardroom Club
“We came up with another license which is a source available license meaning that anyone can get the source code but it comes with certain limitations.”
On , Ofer Bengal, CEO & Co-Founder at Redis Labs, spoke about licensing during Innovation Conference: Ofer Bengal, Founder and Chairman at Redis. on Boardroom Club.
About Ofer Bengal
Ofer Bengal, co-founder and former CEO of Redis Labs (now Redis), has been discussing the company's evolution from an open-source project to a commercial entity, particularly its licensing changes and competition with major cloud providers. In a March 2025 interview, Bengal stated that Redis and other open-source projects are "not open source anymore" under the Open Source Institute's definition, as they adopted a "source available license" with certain limitations. He described the shift as a response to cloud providers monetizing the open-source code without contributing, saying, "We felt stupid, you know, we are working hard, they don't contribute anything to the open source, they take 95% of the commercial market whereas we take 5%." Bengal also noted that over 50% of Fortune 100 companies are Redis Enterprise customers, and that OpenAI uses Redis to cache repetitive prompts. Bengal has also reflected on Redis's growth and competitive strategy. In a 2023 interview, he discussed the challenge of competing with cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which offer their own Redis services, and described negotiating with cloud providers to have Redis Enterprise counted as part of customers' cloud commitments. In a 2021 keynote, he highlighted partnerships with Google Cloud and Azure, and noted that Redis Enterprise was named a challenger in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for cloud databases. Earlier, in 2018, Bengal said the company was building toward an IPO, projecting it would take about two and a half years, and emphasized Redis Labs' capital efficiency compared to competitors like MongoDB.