>Ultimately a small community will struggle to maintain a lot of clients, so I think we need a larger (and likely commercial) investment into keeping clients open

I'm not sure that this is true, at least not the commercial part. Redis clients are pretty simple (compared to Redis itself, at least). Redict is leading an effort to encourage community forks of the official Redis clients, as well as sending patches downstream to third-party clients. We set as an explicit goal to fork the ecosystem as well; we've started this work with hiredict and don't intend to stop.

I think there was some mention at some point about our two forks working together on maintenance of the protocol specification independently of Redis Ltd, which would be a good way to ensure that the clients remain broadly compatible with both of our forks.