Business Source License

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The Business Source License (SPDX id BUSL [1] ) is a software license which publishes source code but limits the right to use the software to certain classes of users. The BUSL is not an open-source license, [1] but it is source-available license that also mandates an eventual transition to an open-source license. This characteristic has been described as a compromise between traditional proprietary licenses and open source. [2]

Contents

The originator of the BUSL is MariaDB Corporation Ab, where it is used for the MaxScale product, not for the flagship MariaDB. [3]

Terms

The Business Source License requires the work to be relicensed to a "Change License" at the "Change Date". The "Change License" must be a "license which is compatible with GPL version 2.0 or later". The Change Date must be four years or sooner from the publication date of the work being licensed.

The Business Source License by default restricts production use. The license allows copyright owners to specify an "Additional Use Grant". In a 2020 survey of adoption of this license, open source developer and entrepreneur Adam Retter summarised this:

Additional Use Grant (Optional) The BUSL by default prohibits production use of the software. This parameter can optionally be used to grant additional rights to the licensee by the licensor. For example, so that it may be used with various restrictions in some form of production environment. It cannot be used to limit the other rights granted by the license. [4]

Adoption

The BUSL has been used by some projects to move away from open source licensing to achieve a sustainable revenue model by applying restrictions not possible with an open source license, while aiming to provide many existing users with the same access and contribution rights as under the original open source license. Each specific instance of the license is expected to define the user class which is prohibited; the default is to exclude production use. Typically the exclusion applies to production use or to cloud vendors charging for hosted access to the software. Such users must obtain a commercial license.[ citation needed ]

The move of some projects away from open source licensing is controversial in the open source community. In October 2023 the Linux Foundation addressed this with an article, and used the Business Source License as the defining representation of this threat to open source [5]

HashiCorp

In August 2023, HashiCorp announced it was moving all its previously open source products to the Business Source License 1.1 [6]

The motivation for the change from an open source license to the BUSL in the case of HashiCorp is explained thus:

Organizations providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp will no longer be permitted to use the community edition products free of charge under our BUSL license. Commercial licensing terms are available and can enable use cases beyond the BUSL limitations. [7]

The move of HashiCorp's Terraform and Vagrant software to the Business Source License sparked the creation of the OpenTofu and Viagrunts forks. OpenTofu describes the Business Source License as being "ambiguous" and "challenging for companies, vendors, and developers using Terraform to decide whether their actions could be interpreted as being outside the permitted scope of use". [8] [9]

Other projects

Other prominent projects which moved from an open source license to the Business Source License include CockroachDB (with over 28K GitHub stars), [10] and SurrealDB [11]

Relicensing and the CLA controversy

The license change is enabled by requiring contributors to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which assigns to the project sponsor the right to publish contributions under non-open-source licenses, even when the project license was an open source license. The Kyodo Tech blog says that "Recent shifts in the open source landscape, such as HashiCorp’s decision" have "reignited debates on balancing business needs with open source principles. The use of Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) sits at the heart of this discussion" [12]

Related Research Articles

Berkeley DB (BDB) is an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open-source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays and supports multiple data items for a single key. Berkeley DB is not a relational database, although it has database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging. BDB runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including most Unix-like and Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.

The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.

Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source. The licenses associated with the offerings range from allowing code to be viewed for reference to allowing code to be modified and redistributed for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eclipse Public License</span> Free software license similar to the Common Public License

The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is a free and open source software license most notably used for the Eclipse IDE and other projects by the Eclipse Foundation. It replaces the Common Public License (CPL) and removes certain terms relating to litigations related to patents.

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-domain-equivalent license</span> License that waives all copyright

Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux Foundation</span> Non-profit technology consortium to develop the Linux operating system

The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects.

A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft, that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.

MongoDB is a source-available, cross-platform, document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database product, MongoDB utilizes JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and current versions are licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL). MongoDB is a member of the MACH Alliance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-core model</span> Business model monetizing commercial open-source software

The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vagrant (software)</span> Software for portable virtual development environments

Vagrant is a source-available software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments; e.g., for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, Parallels, and AWS. It tries to simplify the software configuration management of virtualization in order to increase development productivity. Vagrant is written in the Ruby language, but its ecosystem supports development in a few other languages.

Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) is an embedded transactional database in the form of a key-value store. LMDB is written in C with API bindings for several programming languages. LMDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, has a range-based search capability, supports multiple data items for a single key and has a special mode for appending records (MDB_APPEND) without checking for consistency. LMDB is not a relational database, it is strictly a key-value store like Berkeley DB and DBM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CockroachDB</span> Distributed database management system

CockroachDB is a source-available distributed SQL database management system developed by Cockroach Labs. The relational functionality is built on top of a distributed, transactional, consistent key-value store that can survive a variety of different underlying infrastructure failures, and is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL which means users can take advantage of a wide range of drivers and tools from the extensive PostgreSQL ecosystem. A CockroachDB cluster consists of a number of nodes that can be spread across failure domains such as data centres or public cloud regions. A cluster can be scaled both horizontally and vertically. It can provide high levels of resilience and availability and can be run in a variety of environments such as bare metal, VMs, containers and Kubernetes, both in private data centers and in the cloud. CockroachDB gets its name from cockroaches, as they are known for being disaster-resistant.

HashiCorp, Inc. is an American software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides tools and products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run and connect cloud-computing infrastructure. It was founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar. The company name HashiCorp is a portmanteau of co-founder last name Hashimoto and Corporation.

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grafana</span> Platform for data analytics and monitoring

Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

Consul is a service networking platform developed by HashiCorp.

References

  1. 1 2 "Business Source License 1.1". Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). Linux Foundation. May 22, 2024. Retrieved June 13, 2024.
  2. ↑ "Business Source License (BUSL): Requirements, Terms - FOSSA". Dependency Heaven. 2023-08-23. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  3. ↑ "Projects using BUSL 1.1". MariaDB. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  4. ↑ Adam, Retter (2020-03-26). "Business Source License Adoption". Down the Code Mine. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  5. ↑ "How open source foundations protect the licensing integrity of open source projects". www.linuxfoundation.org. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  6. ↑ "HashiCorp Adopts Business Source License for All Products". InfoQ. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  7. ↑ "BUSL Faq Q6" . Retrieved 2023-10-13.
  8. ↑ "FAQ | OpenTofu". opentofu.org. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  9. ↑ https://github.com/viagrunts/viagrunts [ dead link ]
  10. ↑ "cockroach/LICENSE at master · cockroachdb/cockroach". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  11. ↑ "SurrealDB | License FAQs | The ultimate multi-model database". SurrealDB. Retrieved 2024-01-19.
  12. ↑ Tech, Kyodo (2023-08-11). "Balancing Business & Open Source: Permissive Licenses, Copyleft, and CLA". Medium. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
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