ScyllaDB – Why We're Moving to a Source Available License

There are plenty of corporate projects that don't require rights assignment to submit changes, just a DCO or even just $(git commit -s)

Buuuttt... projects like these would probably never haven gotten the traction they have now if they wouldn't have started out as opensource but being closed source. For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource. So in that sense these license changes are a bait and switch.

In the 90s, we had shareware/freeware/beerware. No one expected source availability. At universities, the Unix world had open source, in the real sense. Then something happened that caused these two tracks to merge.

Maybe the university students grew up and carried on their belief in open source, but also had to create the business. After 20 years, they realized (1) it doesn't have to be open source to _feel right_ and (2) maintaining in the open is more expensive. They're now in management positions, not coding. Selling B2B doesn't require code to be open to the public, since you can have source available licenses. And as you said, perhaps ScyllaDB isn't really targeting the hobbyist. We'll continue this trend.

Or perhaps open source has stopped being a buzzword. We're now much more of a SaaS world, where being open source isn't as important as costing $10 per month or having 200 "data partners" that need to track you.

That said, I think there's a really good reason for core libraries and security-sensitive libraries to be open. I want to be able to inspect them, before using them. And I'm in the HN crowd of actually using open source code because I can fix bugs as I encounter them, but I realize this is a small crowd.

I'd love for open source to be a useful word again, and not something that goes on the Silicon Valley PR budget.

This is the primary appeal of open source software to most businesses - free software and free labor.

Nobody will touch your product if it's not OSS doesn't mean you should call it OSS and then rug pull. Build it proprietary from the beginning you cowards. The people who do this are the same as the corporate shills who infiltrate subcultures to monetize them and ultimately destroy the community in the process. If you don't actually share the values of the community you're trying to join, then don't join it.

This little SV "growth hack" where the success of your OSS project is the proving ground to get funding has to die. It's turning a high-trust community into a low-trust one.

Where it exists in a small community of other developers, most of whom have a similar mindset, it works fine.

And for very popular projects, there’s enough users for whom it makes economic sense to have some devs on staff to support their usage, tailor stuff, and keep it moving forward to maintain the project.

But in the middle, where most things are, it kinda doesn’t work.