The community rallied around a community fork with an open source licence instead of a VC funded startup with a penchant for changing licences.

Microsoft appears to be the only major player that isn't going with Valkey and established some sort of licensing deal with Redis [0].

[0]: https://redis.io/blog/introducing-azure-managed-redis

Microsoft also last year released their own Redis-client-compatible key-value store, Garnet: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

> Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community rallied behind Big Tech instead of a small startup though. Just saying.

The community rallied behind the project that ensures the software they care about remains free and open and available to all without the risk of being blind-sided.

Around competitive prices and terms rather than a monopoly.