Dec 14, 2024
Since the inception of DiceDB, our vision has always been rooted in building a high-performance caching backbone for modern architecture. Today, we are thrilled to announce that DiceDB is now open source under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) 3.0. This marks a significant milestone in our journey - one that reflects both our technical clarity and our commitment to the open source ethos.
Why we switched
In the early days of DiceDB, we explored a Business Source License (BSL) to balance monetization and community engagement. However, as our product evolved, so did our understanding of its core mission. By streamlining our technical and business priorities, we realized that the AGPL 3.0 license better aligns with where we are headed — an open, collaborative ecosystem for the future of caching infrastructure.
As engineers, we believe in removing artificial barriers that gatekeep innovation. The AGPL’s principles align deeply with our philosophy — software should be free to use, inspect, and improve. By adopting this license, we’re doubling down on accessibility and transparency. We believe that great infrastructure shouldn’t be proprietary; it should be a shared foundation for the ecosystem to build upon.
The AGPL license removes ambiguity around our open source intent, signaling to developers and organizations alike that DiceDB is here to stay as a truly open technology. This clarity encourages collaboration, enabling developers and engineers to confidently build, adapt, and contribute back to the project. Whether it’s improving availability, or performance, or even building advanced connectors, every contribution will strengthen DiceDB for everyone.
Additionally, the AGPL is designed to ensure fairness. It prevents the “freeloading” problem — where companies take open source software, modify it, and deploy it as a proprietary service without contributing back. With the AGPL, any modifications made while running DiceDB as a service must also be shared under the same license. This keeps the playing field level, ensuring that innovation remains a collaborative effort rather than being siloed.
What this means for developers
Developers now have the freedom to innovate with DiceDB. You can freely use DiceDB, modify it, and build applications tailored to your specific needs. By sharing improvements under the AGPL, you’re contributing to a broader ecosystem that evolves together. Every line of code written to build DiceDB is open for inspection, learning, and improvement.
A glimpse into the future
This license switch isn’t just a symbolic move; it’s a strategic decision. Our roadmap includes multi-tenancy, horizontal scalability, infrastructure abstraction, reactivity, observability, persistence, fault tolerance, seamless cluster management, and a robust control plane.
We are also enhancing query capabilities and data structure support to meet the demands of AI-first applications - an approach poised to become the standard in the coming decade. Furthermore, lightning-fast replica creation will reinforce DiceDB’s ability to handle production-grade workloads with exceptional reliability and resumability.
By going fully open source under AGPL 3.0, we’re inviting the community to join us in building the caching backbone that powers the next generation of applications. Together, we can push the boundaries of what’s possible.
We’re excited about this next chapter and can’t wait to see how you use and contribute to DiceDB. Here’s the repository, let’s build the future of real-time data together.
Things you will find interesting
As you explore DiceDB, you’ll uncover several intriguing facets of our journey. Dive into our community hub to learn more about our vibrant community and browse through notes from our weekly calls. If performance excites you, don’t miss our benchmarks showcasing how DiceDB achieves 10x better throughput by leveraging the full potential of the underlying hardware.
At our core, we’re just a group of passionate engineers pursuing an ambitious vision; join us and help shape and build the caching backbone of modern architecture.