steve o'grady

@sogrady
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218 Posts
helped found @redmonk. if you see someone at a tech conference wearing a Red Sox hat, that's probably me. wrote the new kingmakers and the software paradox. married to @girltuesday. eph.
work:redmonk.com
personal:sogrady.org
for my daughter:thisistheway.us
steve o'grady2d ago
Valkey turned two years old last month, so i thought i'd check in on some of the project metrics
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/06/valkey-at-two/
Two Years of Valkey

Two years ago last month, a group of former contributors to the Redis project announced their intention to collaborate instead on a competitive fork. Triggered by the decision to shift Redis away from the permissive open source BSD license to source available alternatives – the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License

tecosystems
steve o'gradyApr 1
ahead of the MCP Dev Summit, thought i'd check into some of the metrics
steve o'gradyApr 1
in case anyone's looking for a new book i had to turn the red sox off, so figured i might as well write up what i've been doing since the last review
https://sogrady.org/2026/03/31/books-spring-2026/
Books: Spring 2026

Having promised myself if no one else that it wouldn’t be another eight year span in between book reviews, here I am back four months later. I’d put it off again, but my list is already long enough…

sogrady.org
steve o'gradyMar 25
where do open source licenses stand in 2026?
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/03/25/open-source-licensing-2026/
The State of Open Source Licensing in 2026

As far back as 2012, a RedMonk colleague was asserting that we were living in a “post-open source world,” meaning a world in which open source had been so successful that the very things that underpinned it – open source software licenses, for one – were taken for granted and thus, ignored. This hypothesis was

tecosystems
steve o'gradyFeb 10
some thoughts as we enter 2026 on AI, its costs and its benefits, its impacts and its promise, and its inevitability
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/02/10/besieged/
Besieged

As the last digit on the calendar rolled over from five to six, it took less than a month to realize the coming year was going to be different than the year that preceded it. Arguably the stage was set late last year with the November “inflection point” but with open source AI projects becoming

tecosystems
steve o'gradyJan 8
what do VMs, microservices and agents have in common? and what does Yeats have to do with all of that?
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/01/08/tide-of-agents/
The Blood Dimmed Tide of Agents

Many years ago, a large European bank spoke to analysts after its first transition from purely physical hardware into virtual machines. While expressing overall satisfaction with the move, its enthusiasm was clearly tempered. When pressed on the hesitant endorsement, the bank’s representative stated that virtual machines had, in fact, accomplished all of the desired goals:

tecosystems
steve o'gradyNov 7
some belated thoughts in the wake of GitHub Universe
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/11/07/github-2025/
GitHub in 2025

GitHub Copilot was originally released in October 2021, four years ago. So much has happened since, it can be challenging to remember what a revelation it was. As has been discussed previously, it wasn’t that the idea itself was without precedent, but the capabilities, the scope and the scale were without peer. Though the concept

tecosystems
steve o'gradyOct 8, 2025
some thoughts on the Anthropic / IBM partnership as well as the weird math of the wider AI space
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/10/08/enterprise-ai-market/
Anthropic, IBM and the Future of the Enterprise AI Market

In recent years, funding for AI has been a spigot opened wide. Investors threw money at startups in the space, even more money at those providing hardware for those startups and boards the world over directed their enterprises to embrace AI first and ask questions later. Recently, however, the economics of the space are facing

tecosystems
steve o'gradySep 2, 2025
some thoughts from me on the news regarding DocumentDB that dropped while i was on vacation.
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/09/02/documentdb/
DocumentDB and the Future of Open Source

Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons It can be difficult to remember in the wake of PostgreSQL’s ongoing renaissance, but MySQL was for decades the default open source relational database, which in those days meant it was the default open source database. While the former’s evolution from Ingres was unfolding slowly over the

tecosystems
steve o'gradyAug 6, 2025

back in june, we had our first briefing on the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

it was terrifying, and we were shocked that its implications were not widely known. we've since had more briefings and read the act itself.

it's still terrifying. here's a bit on why.
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/08/06/cra-five-alarm-fire/

The Cyber Resilience Act: A Five Alarm Fire

On October 21, 2016, CNN’s website was knocked offline. So was the BBC and Guardian’s. Amazon, Etsy and Shopify too, along with Quora, Reddit, and Twitter – among others. Huge swaths of the internet were taken down by a series of attacks on the DNS provider Dyn. These Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were

tecosystems