Redis relicensed from BSD to SSPL in March 2024, stranding commercial projects with no tool to audit which codebase files break the Valkey drop-in

In March 2024 Redis Ltd switched Redis from its decade-long BSD-3-Clause license to RSALv2 and SSPLv1, which blocks most commercial SaaS deployments. The Linux Foundation launched Valkey (backed by AWS, Google, Oracle) within days. Over 70 percent of surveyed Redis users said they were evaluating alternatives and 83 percent of large companies had adopted Valkey or were testing it. The binary-level swap is trivial but the hard part is auditing which files in a multi-language monorepo use Redis-specific commands that changed in Valkey: WAIT semantics, OBJECT ENCODING for LISTPACK, cluster failover behavior, and client library version requirements per driver. No existing tool does a deep Redis SDK scan across Python, Node.js, Go, and Ruby files and emits a per-file compatibility report with Valkey migration instructions. The redis-valkey-migration Go CLI migrates data only. LicenseWatch scans package.json for license strings but does not trace SDK usage or behavioral diffs.