Open source companies going public: Timeline

Open source may be the building blocks of the modern software stack, but companies build businesses on the backs of open source software. they face a constant struggle between keeping their communities happy and ensuring that third parties don’t abuse the permissions granted by the license.

Many companies start out with lofty open source ambitions, only to duck into hiding once the realities of the commercial world hit home. All this is to protect their own profits, especially to appease investors (public or private).

But it can be hard to keep track of all these changes, and it can be difficult to distinguish between those who abandon open source altogether and those who seek refuge behind a less permissive (but still open source) license. Loves the element and Grafana did in the last few years).

So TechCrunch has compiled a timeline of the open source companies that have changed course over the past decade.

Transportable Species (2013)

Portable type created an open source version of the web publishing software (called MTOS). In 2007 under “copyleft”. GPL open source license is a move that puts it closer to WordPress. Such licenses grants certain liberties, but requires that all derivative works be released under a similar license. Anyway, this movement continued until 2013, when Movable Type’s then the owners abandoned the open source product, believing that commercial versions “hurt adoption”.

“The community didn’t grow thanks to MTOS, and we didn’t see download numbers higher than our paid versions of Movable Type, so at this point it doesn’t make economic sense to continue to maintain and distribute something that’s getting little use,” the company said. wrote at the time.

SugarCRM (2014)

Originally founded in 2004, a manufacturer of customer relationship management (CRM) software SugarCRM announced in 2014 stated that it would not provide a more open-source “community edition”, noting that its two main markets – developers and early CRM users looking for a low-cost solution – were not effectively served by the product.

The company continued to support the final version (v6.5) of its open source incarnation for another four years before pulling the plug. in 2018.

Redis (2018)

RedisThe creators of the popular in-memory database store are moving away from their open source roots after migrating “Redis Modules” since 2018 (eg. Search again) from open source AGPL ” with the Apache 2.0 licenseGeneral Provision” addition (i.e. commercial restrictions). The next yearRedis has replaced the Commons Clause with its own Redis Source Existing License (RSAL) that promised to preserve some freedoms, but with notable limitations relative to competing database services provided by companies such as AWS.

In many ways, this was a harbinger of things to come, as other companies would later cite the “Amazon problem” as a reason to change their licenses. Earlier this year, Redis’ transition into the proprietary world was complete. when he announced its core software will change from a BSD Clause 3 license for a dual-licensed installation — RSAL or server-side public license (SSPL).

MongoDB (2018)

in 2018 database company MongoDB went away from open source AGPL license for SSPL. The reason? Yes: Prevent cloud hyperscalers like AWS from selling their own version of the service without contributing back.

Confluent (2018)

Ended with “year” to change the open source license Mixed upA company that sells enterprise-grade tools and services around Apache Kafka, transition Some components of the core platform from Apache 2.0 to proprietary Confluent Community License.

This license contains an express exclusion prohibiting any competing service from offering Confluent’s products “as a service.”

Cockroach Labs (2019)

Cockroach Labscreator of the eponymous word A distributed SQL database known as CockroachDBcontinued to undermine the ethics of licensing.

Founders of the company in 2019 announced that they have moved CockroachDB from the permissive Apache 2.0 license to the Business Source License (BUSL). Still, cloud hyperscalers like AWS were the driving force behind the change.

“We’re seeing highly integrated providers take advantage of their unique position to offer ‘as-a-service’ versions of their OSS (open source software) products and deliver superior user experiences through their integrations.” the founders wrote then.

In August, Cockroach Labs announced another change: would consolidate own product under a single enterprise license to encourage larger businesses to pay for the features they actually need.

Watchman (2019)

Watchmanthe 3 billion dollar company behind software performance monitoring platform of the same name, existed under a permit BSD 3-Clause open source license. But in 2019, the company moved to BUSL, along with co-founder and CTO David Cramer, said it was to counter “funded enterprises plagiarizing or copying our work to compete directly with Sentry.”

Sentry last year started his own Functional Source License (FSL), similar to BUSL, but slightly simpler. And starting this year, the Sentry punches above its weight a new licensing paradigm As TechCrunch reported at the time, it was called “fair sourcing” “designed to bridge the open and proprietary worlds, rich with new definition, terminology and governance model.”

Elastic (2021)

It was several years in preparationhowever Elastic — creator of enterprise search system Elasticsearch and Kibana visualization dashboard – gone owner in 2021. It was a familiar story, AWS that could be traced back to 2015 turned himself on Managed the Elasticsearch service.

However, Elastic is somewhat alone as one of the only companies to move away from open source and then pull back. Elastic announced in August could be accepted AGPL license — Different from the Apache 2.0 license used before 2021, but still open source.

HashiCorp (2023)

HashiCorp It also abandoned its open source ship last year, announces said that he turned it into a popular “infrastructure as code” tool Terraform from copyleft open source license to BUSL.

The familiar reason was to prevent some vendors from making money from Terraform without contributing anything to the project.

It was an open source fork called OpenTofu launched earlier this year by third parties and notably, IBM acquired HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.

Snowplow (2024)

Snow blowera VC-backed platform helping companies collect behavioral data for AI applications this year changed from open source Apache 2.0 license for Snowplow Limited Use License Agreement.

The reason, the company says, is that it needs to fund its “exciting technology roadmap,” so anyone running the software in production should “pay what they’re getting.” The new license also expressly prevents users from creating a competing product built on top of SnowCleaner.