Licensing Tradeoffs in Open Source Startups
Talkat Cloud Native StartupFest 2024 · on Tuesday, 2024-03-19· at 15:50· Pavilion 7 | Level 7.3 | Room E01·
summary
Argues that permissive open source is no longer sustainable for cloud-first startups because hyperscalers can rehost projects and capture value, so many companies move from dual licensing (Red Hat model) to source available / BSL licenses. Cites MongoDB, Confluent, Elastic and others shifting cloud revenue share from roughly 30–50% toward ~70% after launching hosted services and changing licenses. Gives Dragonfly as a BSL-first project, notes templates exist, and reports no high-profile litigation enforcing BSL yet.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:03History of Software
- 3:22Dual Licensing
- 5:10Cloud Platforms
- 6:59What is Source Available
- 7:53Why did these emerge
- 9:27Business Source analogy
- 10:12MongoDB
- 11:14Cloud Services
- 12:16Going to Market
- 14:14Predictions
- 16:21Questions
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