Valkey is a Redis fork supported by the Linux Foundation. It is free and open source.
Why Valkey?
Redis was doing good on its own. But there occurred a license change from open source BSD licence to source available licence.
According to the Redis blog
QuoteFirst, we openly acknowledge that this change means Redis is no longer open source under the OSI definition.
According to reports, Redis is the 6 th most popular database in the world based on the number of users. Various news sources say the Redis team is not happy about Valkey and called it an excuse by cloud providers to pay a fee. Cloud providers who use Redis as a part of commercial package earns money and gives back nothing to Redis (opinion).
Redis will go dual licenced as of v7.4 and will keep the old versions under open source licence.
Valkey got wide support from players AWS, GCP and Oracle.
You can read more about the same in the Linux Foundation blog post
For the moment, we can say that Valkey is a well funded alternative to Redis.