Relicensing your open source projects from * to BSL (Business Source License)

As a creator and contributer to open source projects I am often torn as how to license my projects to encourage the greater community to contribute and have creative freedom with a project. However I would still try to ensure that I maintain control over as much of the intellectual property (IP) or business value as possible – especially if this value is what I have in place as a revenue generator and would enable me to continue development of the project.

Sentry – which is a great error logging/monitoring tool – recently evaluated their open source licensing and had some reasonable goals in mind:

  • Anyone should be able to run Sentry for themselves or their business
  • No difference between our cloud service and our open-source product (no open-core model)
  • Minimal limitations on usage of code; as free as possible
  • Protection from other companies selling our work

Due to the weight on the last point, Sentry decided to change their license from BSD-3/Apache-2.0 to BSL. read more