Hello users. I haven't actively maintained this library in a very long time as you probably noticed. I am still controlling the entry on crates.io for it alongside the redis release team and @badboy individually additionally.

As far as I'm concerned that project can do just fine without me, and you should consider that project to not be related to me. However as it stands I got an email from the company currently controlling redis (Redis Inc.) which basically informs me that the present state of this library is not acceptable to them. I also had a 45 minute call with someone from there to walk me through their thinking. They offered some options but it basically comes down to these it seems:

• Commercial buy-out and transfer to Redis Inc.
• Renaming the package on crates.io where the name of the library constitutes a trademark violation in their mind
• Continued continue maintenance under the governance of the Redis project.

As someone who is not very active with this crate any more, and historically has built it largely for my own uses I do not feel qualified in making a call here. However it's very clear to me from that call, that Redis has some increasing interest in client libraries. They have some customers now that want Rust support and they need to figure this out somehow. They also transferred the Python and Go client libraries to redis, not sure under which terms and they are trying to do this with the remaining ones of interest.

When I created this project I did not expect to have to make decision between commercial enterprises here so I rather have the actual users and current maintainers of the library to weigh in.

I personally have started to use Valkey for my own use and I have a pet project that uses this library to connect to it. There was also some talk recently in #1409 that Valkey should be a test target in the CI matrix. I got little reassurance that Redis the company has any interest in Valkey support but I also do not know if users of this library care much about Valkey either.

For some context: this crate was in parts written for me to learn Rust. In 2015 or so it was marked as the recommended rust library on redis.io which back then by antirez. Whatever the trademark policy was back then, I'm assuming this use of the client library was okay with at the time. That might not be the case any more, so legal might have a case here.

While this crate is probably the most popular one for Rust, in the grand scheme of things it's not particularly popular or business critical I would guess, compared to other libraries for Redis. I'm not sure to which degree Redis Inc. actually cares about it.

Personally I do not want to be involved in a legal fight here so my desire is to take myself out of any potential trademark enforcement that Redis Inc. might want to do here.

The most important questions for me:

• Are people using this crate with Valkey?
• Are there risks in transferring the crate to Redis Inc.?

cc @redis-rs/release-team