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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

I would value hearing more about the business risk that going BSL was designed to address: https://github.com/earthly/earthly/blob/main/LICENSE

the associated PR just says "doing it" without saying why https://github.com/earthly/earthly/pull/730

I have a very hard time imagining "AWS Infinibuild(R)" that eats the "makefile + dockerfile that builds locally" use case, which is why I was curious to learn more

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Separately, I would value GitHub's license detector gizmo using some of that sweet machine-learning sauce to identify the BSL, since it seems to be the path forward for these situations

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GitHub licensee (the detection gizmo) uses ChooseALicense as the source. They recommend filing a PR there, but BSL doesn’t fit the requirements at https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/C...

https://github.com/licensee/licensee/blob/master/docs/CONTRI...

Hi, We have a blog post discussing the license change here: https://earthly.dev/blog/every-open-core-company-should-be-a...

Thank you for that; I would suggest putting that link in the PR description (or a comment) since not everyone who is similarly curious will be on a Show HN thread with the authoritative parties

I'm not trying to start trouble or get into a massive licensing thread on HN, but I want to point out that 2/5ths of those exemplar links of BSL success are in fact Apache 2.0 licensed, and not just source-available. I believe you that there are (evidently) parts of Kafka which one must pay money for, but my understanding is that the Apache Software Foundation would not tolerate hosting source-available projects on the apache.org domain nor in the apache GitHub organization.

I wish you all the best with your project

Makes sense. Kafka is Apache, confluent platform is open core. So I agree the post is a bit confused about that. We can update it and link in the PR. No intention to misrepresent the facts on our parts, just a small team trying to build stuff.

Hi mdaniel - just to clarify the blog post says that Confluent / Kafka follows an open core model. It doesn't claim that Kafka has a source available license. A few notable switches to source available licenses have been named in another part of the blog post though. Hope that makes it clearer.

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