Yesterday, it was a very intense day. In Italy it was 1st of May, the workers holiday, so in the morning I went for a 4h walk in the Etna with friends <3, I love walking, and I often take pauses when coding just to walk, to return later at the keyboard with a few more kilometers on my legs, and walking in the Etna is amazing (Etna is the largest active volcano in Europe, and I happen to live in Catania, that is on its slopes). Then at 6PM I was at home to release my blog post about the AGPL license switch, and I started following the comments, feedbacks, private messages, and I learned a few things in the process. 1. Regardless of the different few clauses, that IMHO make a difference, the AGPL vs SSPL main difference is that AGPL is "understood". In general, yesterday for the first time I realized that in licensing there is not just what you can do and can't do, but the degree a given license is understood, tested, adopted, ... 2. I was very touched by the words of Simon Willison on the matter (https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/1/redis-is-open-source-again/) because it is very peculiar that different persons, living in different parts of the world, but with a similar age and background in software, feel *so similar* about things. I, too, when was writing Vector Sets, was thinking: I would never use it if it wasn't going to be released under the AGPL (or other open source license I understand). This sentiment, multiplied by a non trivial fraction of the community, makes open source eventually win even in the complex software landscape that there is today. 3. People still care a lot about software distributions. Not that I didn't care, but in the past I burned my fingers with it. I was a very initial Linux user, with SlackWare 3.1 or something like that. During the years I wrote my device drivers, contributed a few patches to the kernel, during the years Debian had maybe ~10 packages of stuff that I wrote, from hping, to the Visitors web log analyzer, dump1090, Redis, and a few more. But, eventually, I started to see all the fragmentation, the rigidity of certain processes (binary compatibility of modules for the Linux kernel), the lack of a consistent design, the lack of a binary format for software distribution with all the libs inside, and so forth. I switched to MacOS on the desktop and continued using Linux on the server in a very pragmatic way, often times more happy to "tar xvzf software.tgz; make" than relying on what distributions offered. And, maybe, my obsession with shipping software with zero dependencies has something to do with it. But people still care a lot, and probably it is important to have Redis as distribution packages in many situations where you want to make things as automatic and reproducible as possible? Well, now there are many folks asking if Redis will re-enter the distributions. My take on that is simple: Redis and ValKey diverged already in a significant way, and will diverge a lot more in the future. I believe distributions should have both, so that users can have a choice, and sometimes this choice is forced by the features difference. Trivially: if you need to do vector similarity searches, you need to use Redis; if instead your company has a no-AGPL policy, you need to use ValKey, and so forth. 4. People are kind to me. In the comments around there were a few harsh takes, and this is normal and even healthy (after all it is part of the reason many companies believe more and more they can't use SSPL or other licenses but an OSI approved one). Yet, when addressing me personally, I see a lot of good words. I just want to say: thank you for all that. 5. We kinda live in a bubble. In one of the forums out there at some point somebody said: "But did you ever switched from Redis to one of the forks?", and there was a chain of comments: "never", "who cares if I can use it" and so forth. And this is true for ValKey too, that if people write apt-get install redis and ValKey is installed instead, and they use SET, GET, DEL, a few more, they don't care. What I mean is that software is no longer the one in 1998 (to use a very crucial and symbolic date for open source, the Internet, and myself) where we were all open source software license experts. Most people, especially the newer generations, have a different and more practical take. So all this is very important (vital, to me), but there is to understand that not every sensibility is alike. In the end, what is the most important aspect of all, is trying to ship good software.