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It's a weird license that seems to say "you can use this as long as you don't compete with us", with an automatic switchover to Apache 2.0 in 5 years. Definitel
by dsrw 3y ago
It's a weird license that seems to say "you can use this as long as you don't compete with us", with an automatic switchover to Apache 2.0 in 5 years. Definitely better than closed source, but probably not Open Source by the OSI definition.
- romange 3y agoBSL license is more company-friendly than AGPL.
- madeofpalk 3y agoBeing company-friendly is a separate point from being open source.
- kakwa_ 3y agoRestricting Usage or Distribution makes it de-facto not OSS. It's actually a slightly different form of an old debate. I'm thinking in particular about the Crockford license (the MIT-like one with "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." bit). It was determined to be non-free quite a while back due to such restrictions. That being said, it hard to be a commercially successful software editor with an OSS model (RethinkDB comes to mind). I do understand why BSL exists, but it feels to me like an unsatisfactory compromise.