Stewart: Cockroach Labs adopted BSL, open-sourcing code after three years
Nate Stewart · Fireside Chat: Nate Stewart (CPO & BOD at Cockroach Labs) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark) · Aug 5, 2020 · at 33:13
Nate Stewart, CPO at Cockroach Labs, explains how the company protects its database software from cloud providers selling it as a managed service while maintaining an open-source commitment.
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“One of the big things we did is we did change our open source license. So it's still source available. It's still free, but we moved from Apache to a license called the business source license. Which is just like Apache, you can use the software, you can redistribute it, you can make copies, you can sell it, those services around it. You just can't offer it as a commercial database as a service, unless you buy a license from cockroach. And the important thing about that license, the DSL is that it has an additional term, which says after a certain number or a certain amount of time the BSL code reverts to the Apache code. So in our case, after three years from a release, the BSL code will become truly open source.”
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