Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source
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The new coming relicensing scare?
What if commercial source-available vendors stopped licensing their product under their source-available license and only offered a traditional commercial license? In my current research interviews on commercial open source, two alternative intellectual property (IP) strategies are becoming visible: (1) Stay with open source and rely on trademarks, quality, and speed and (2) forego open source…
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Re-relicensing to open source explained
In March 2024, Redis removed the open source license of its popular in-memory database and added the SSPL-1.0 license, a non-open source license according to the Open Source Initiative, the steward of the open source definition. In April 2025, Redis reversed course and re-relicensed back to open source by adding the AGPL-3.0 license to its…
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What is “openwashing” (in software)?
“Openwashing” is a term used by proponents of community open-source software against commercial open source companies. The goal is to shame the companies into changing their business model as well as to prevent the business model in the first place. The claim is that commercial open source companies may be providing open-source software, but are…
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What now, open source infrastructure startups?
It took exactly eight days for the Linux Foundation to announce they’ll be hosting a fork of the last open source version of the popular Redis key value store after its owner announced a license change to the SSPLv1, a source-available (non-open-source) license. The fork is well supported by industry heavyweights, and it appears industry…
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What about skipping the “open source” part in commercial open source?
GitButler, a budding better git client, just announced that it is making its source code available under the Functional Source License (FSL), a source-available/non-compete license. In a tweet, GitButler states that this is open-source software. Previous attempts at calling competition-curbing licenses open source licenses failed, and I expect it won’t be different here. What’s new…
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How to think about a dependency on commercial open-source software
Another day in open source land, another vendor relicensing away from an open source license to a source-available license. What was new for me this time, however, was that Apache Flink, a community open source project, had a dependency on Lightbend’s Akka, the commercial open source project that relicensed. This is surprising, because in my…