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Comment by webstrand | Hacker News Reader

So if I understand this correctly, I have _no_ license to use the software until late 2027? Including installation and contribution instructions in the README seems deceptive, since neither can be done legally.

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You cannot use it in production. I'm actually curious how this license works for them.

If they get a contribution without a CLA, then they themselves can hypothetically not use it in prod too?

Edit: you can actually use it for your own, but you can't compete with their offering until the date mentioned in the license:

> You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document Service. A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that allows third parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access the functionality of the Licensed Work by creating teams and documents controlled by such third parties.

I missed that, I guess that counts as a license. But it's fearfully short, even MIT is longer than that. But there's no grant for contributors, so you have to violate the copyright to make a contribution, even with a CLA (which is a license from the contributor to the rights-holder, not usually the other way round).

The license allows all use _except_ competing with the cloud offering – you can run in for personal use, or your company without issue. This style of BSL license has become fairly common to protect the business model that allows the software to remain under development.

I don’t think that’s right. You have no license to use it to host a commercial offering to third-parties, until the BSL rolls over to fully open source.

But the license explicitly allows free self-hosting for your own company / employees.

BSL can be quite open-source-like or extremely restrictive depending on the additional use grant. For example this project seem to allow most things besides offering a hosted version as a SaaS, but the BSL itself disallows any production use and "production" as a term is not defined.

I would be weary of even setting up a personal instance of BSL software for anything besides development or evaluation since it could be counted as "production".

I thought it is licensed under BSL 1.1 until 2027, after that it will become Apache 2. You can install and use it as long as you don't provide commercial service with it.

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