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Comment by mihaelm | Hacker News Reader

You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.

HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.

I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.

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Looks nice. Two main differences:

- BUSL is OSI-approved and listed in SPDX, so corporate lawyers won't be scared away by it: https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html

- With BUSL the restriction is revenue-based. You can still create competing products, but would have to pay a licensing fee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License:

  Debian FSG compatible No
  FSF approved          No
  OSI approved          No
  GPL compatible        No
  Copyleft              No

I'm sorry - what I meant to say is that it is listed in the SPDX (https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html) as a recognized license. The revenue gate means it will never be considered an open-source license by the OSI.

> BUSL is OSI-approved

Of course it isn‘t.

I was a bit surprised to read that there was an OSI-approved license with usage restrictions and wondered if I had missed the memo. But you seem to be correct and it's not OSI-approved and therefore is not generally considered to be an open source license.

Good points, the second is very "dual-licensing" in nature. BUSL is certainly the more "mature" option and there's a higher likelihood people came across it in the wild.

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