Business Source License

The Business Source License (BSL) is a trademarked software license which publishes source code but limits the right to use the software to certain classes of users. The BSL is not regarded as an open-source license, but it is source-available license which 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.[1]

The originator of the BSL is MariaDB Corporation Ab, where it is used for the MaxScale product, not for the flagship MariaDB.[2]

## Contents

* 1 Terms
* 2 Adoption
* 2.1 HashiCorp
* 2.2 Other projects
* 3 Relicensing and the CLA controversy
* 4 References
* 5 External links

## 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 BSL 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.[3]

## Adoption

The BSL 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[4]

### HashiCorp

In August 2023, HashiCorp announced it was moving all its previously open source products to the Business Source License 1.1 [5]

The motivation for the change from an open source license to the BSL 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 BSL license. Commercial licensing terms are available and can enable use cases beyond the BSL limitations.[6]

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".[7][8]

### Other projects

Other prominent projects which moved from an open source license to the Business Source License include CockroachDB (with over 28K GitHub stars),[9] and SurrealDB[10]

## 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"[11]

## References

1. ↑ "Business Source License (BSL): Requirements, Terms - FOSSA" (in en). 2023-08-23. https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-provisions-history/.
2. ↑ "Projects using BSL 1.1" (in en-US). https://mariadb.com/projects-using-bsl-11/.
3. ↑ Adam, Retter (2020-03-26). "Business Source License Adoption". https://blog.adamretter.org.uk/business-source-license-adoption/.
4. ↑ "How open source foundations protect the licensing integrity of open source projects" (in en). https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/how-open-source-foundations-protect-the-licensing-integrity-of-open-source-projects.
5. ↑ "HashiCorp Adopts Business Source License for All Products" (in en). https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/08/hashicorp-adopts-bsl/.
6. ↑ "BSL Faq Q6". https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#who-is-impacted.
7. ↑ "FAQ | OpenTofu" (in en). https://opentofu.org/faq.
8. ↑ https://github.com/viagrunts/viagrunts
9. ↑ "cockroach/LICENSE at master · cockroachdb/cockroach" (in en). https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/LICENSE.
10. ↑ "SurrealDB | License FAQs | The ultimate multi-model database" (in en). https://surrealdb.com/license.
11. ↑ Tech, Kyodo (2023-08-11). "Balancing Business & Open Source: Permissive Licenses, Copyleft, and CLA" (in en). https://medium.com/@kyodo-tech/balancing-business-open-source-permissive-licenses-copyleft-and-cla-a5032e667965.

## External links

* Text of the Business Source License

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