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0 pointsjrochkind12y ago0 comments

It looks to me like people start with open source licenses because that's helpful to get them market-share (and in some cases community contributors and maintainers), and then they switch to a non-open-source license reserving certain rights to profit to them hoping to maintain the users that they wouldn't have gotten if they started with that license.

I am curious for examples of any projects now *starting( with one of these non-open-source rights-to-profit-reserved licenses, now that is clearly "understood". Are there any examples? Are they successfully attracting users? Contributors?

0 comments

growse2y ago

Cockroachdb started with BSL I think.

jrochkind1OP2y ago

Wikipedia suggests it was initially apache, changed to BSL in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB. But still perhaps an example of fairly quick switch to BSL before it had gotten wide market/mind share? I don't know the history.

orangechairs2y ago

That's correct - CockroachDB's license changed in 2019, from Apache 2.0 to a permissive version of the BSL: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach...

"We’re adopting an extremely permissive version of the Business Source License (BSL). CockroachDB users can scale CockroachDB to any number of nodes. They can use CockroachDB or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license."

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