While still meeting most of the OSI criteria for being open source. It basically says "you can use the features covered by this license for most uses, except creating your own SaaS offering of this product", plus some of the typical boilerplate about ensuring the license travels with the code.

It's basically a license that was created in response to how Amazon has been operating, co-opting open source technologies (whose business models focused on creating SaaS offerings of their open source tech) and creating their own managed services, directly competing with the creators (Redis even called this out a few years ago when they changed their license, see https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/redis-labs-changes-its-ope...).

They also indicate that at some point the license will change to Apache 2 ( https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/tree/dev/licenses ); it's BSL right now likely to give them enough legal protection to keep competitors who'd operate Redpanda as a SaaS away, while they build up the enterprise (paid) features (which has a separate, far more wordy, license). I'd imagine they'd look to make the switch when they feel they have enough value and customers of the enterprise features.

I don't work on open source, or anything licensed by BSI, and from such an outsider perspective you sound...very dogmatic.