[zachmu]

The BSL doesn't make it closed source, it prevents a competitor from running their own DBaaS business using Cockroach as the backend. This has happened to various open source projects, AWS started selling their technology and ate their lunch.

BSL is a totally fair compromise for commercial open source licensing imho.

If you see BSL as the first step to an announcement like today's, that's a fair criticism. Not sure how often that happens. But BSL doesn't disqualify software from being open source.

[chrisoverzero]

> The BSL doesn't make it closed source […]

Yes, that’s right!

> But BSL doesn't disqualify software from being open source.

No, that’s wrong: https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html

> The Business Source License […] is not an Open Source license.

[tsimionescu]

Any license that prevents others from selling your code and eating your lunch is, by definition, not an open source license.

One good way of looking at the goals of open source licenses is to force companies to compete on offering services related to the code. Whether this is a sustainable idea is a different question, but this is one of the bedrock ideas about OSS (and FLOSS as well). The other is of course that the rights of those running the software are absolute and trump any rights that the original creators have, except where the users would try to prevent other users from gaining the same rights.

[jen20]

The BSL is not an OSI-approved license, so it’s certainly not “open source” by the commonly used definition.

I agree it’s a reasonable license. But it’s not an open source license.

[immibis]

The OSI is a consortium of cloud platform vendors (really - check for yourself). Of course they'll define open source in a way that excludes licenses that restrict them from turning your work into closed-source cloud platforms. The good news is that we're not beholden to their definition as they have no official status whatsoever. We don't have to believe them just because they put the words Open Source in their company name.

The BSL is clearly not open source since it requires approval from the licensor in certain applications, but the OSI also rejected the SSPL, which is just an extended AGPL that requires source code publication in even more cases, and is clearly open source because of that.

[LtdJorge]

It even says it is not an open source license right in the license

[lolinder]

> The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license. However, the Licensed Work will eventually be made available under an Open Source License, as stated in this License.

— The Business Source License

https://mariadb.com/bsl11/