I wonder how the oss community will react if the sequence of events were a little different.

1. Redis Inc creates a fork of Redis and names it say RedisNext or anything else(xyz) without a reference to Redis name at all.

2. Announces that, xyz is a fully compatible next gen version of Redis with enterprise features but it is only available under SSPL license.

3. Also announces that original Redis software is feature complete and will be under maintenance with only critical bug fixes.

This will be them playing by the same rules as any other third-party.

Will the community still manage to find fault with Redis Inc?

Will it feel entitled to continued updates or the Redis brand demanding a project handover to a different "group"?

Cannot speak for the community, but I'd assume that the right thing would be to handover Redis brand to a FOSS foundation.

Anything else just complicates things, like we see today, where Valkey and others are referenced as being Redis compatible (at least as far as RESP is concerned), and we either have specific clients (such as valkey-go), or existing Redis clients, that seem to want to maintain compatibility with most (all?) of them.