Who owns your Datastore? The Valkey Fork and the Case for Digital Sovereignty

In March 2024, Redis abandoned the open-source BSD license it had used from the start and switched to a restrictive source-available model. Within weeks the Linux Foundation, alongside a coalition of contributors and cloud providers, launched Valkey. A BSD-licensed fork of Redis 7.2.4 which changed the future of one of the world’s most widely deployed datastores overnight. This talk tells that story: why the relicensing happened, how the fork was organised and governed, how Valkey diverged technically from its origin, and why Redis itself partly reversed course by adding AGPLv3 in 2025. But the real subject is digital sovereignty : what does it mean to depend on open source software whose licensing and right to use it can change underneath you? how does open licensing plus neutral governance change that? Attendees leave with a concrete framework for assessing licensing and governance risk in the open-source software they build on, using Valkey throughout as one of the most consequential forks of the decade.