Using Dragonfly - question about BSL license?

[davejoyce-lab49]

As a consultant who develops distributed systems for clients, I am keenly interested in using Dragonfly as a component in my projects. Could you clarify which situations allow for open source licensed use vs commercial use, per the BSL 1.1?

The situations described in "Additional Use Grant" clause are unclear to me.

Additional Use Grant: You may make use of the Licensed Work (i) only as part of your own product or service, provided it is not an in-memory data store product or service; and (ii) provided that you do not use, provide, distribute, or make available the Licensed Work as a Service. A “Service” is a commercial offering, product, hosted, or managed service, that allows third parties (other than your own employees and contractors acting on your behalf) to access and/or use the Licensed Work or a substantial set of the features or functionality of the Licensed Work to third parties as a software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar services that compete with Licensor products or services.

If I build software for clients rather than for my firm to sell as a product, that requires a commercial license?

[romange]

The underlying intent is to provide protection against unfair competition. If you build software that uses Dragonfly and this software has nothing to do with in-memory stores or databases, i.e its primary goal is to fulfill a business need that is not database related then you are clear. While the license speaks in general terms, in practice, it protects us against a handful companies and they wont come here to ask this question 😃

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On Fri, Jun 3, 2022, 16:00 Dave Joyce @ Lab49 ***@***.***> wrote: As a consultant who develops distributed systems for clients, I am keenly interested in using Dragonfly as a component in my projects. Could you clarify which situations allow for open source licensed use vs commercial use, per the BSL 1.1 <https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/blob/main/LICENSE.md>? The situations described in "Additional Use Grant" clause are unclear to me. Additional Use Grant: You may make use of the Licensed Work (i) only as part of your own product or service, provided it is not an in-memory data store product or service; and (ii) provided that you do not use, provide, distribute, or make available the Licensed Work as a Service. A “Service” is a commercial offering, product, hosted, or managed service, that allows third parties (other than your own employees and contractors acting on your behalf) to access and/or use the Licensed Work or a substantial set of the features or functionality of the Licensed Work to third parties as a software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar services that compete with Licensor products or services. If I build software for clients rather than for my firm to sell as a product, that requires a commercial license? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#86>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA4BFCG6XT67BXTRLCWOAUTVNH6YPANCNFSM5XYWEPZA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[davejoyce-lab49]

Thanks for the quick, succinct answer! 😃

[readall]

Although this is marked as answered. The text of BSL 1.1 has following statement:
"Text of BSL 1.1

The Licensor hereby grants you the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of the Licensed Work. The Licensor may make an Additional Use Grant, above, permitting limited production use. "

Does this mean I can not use dragonflydb source available version for having production grade setup, even if my product has noting to do with providing Database-as-service of any kind (in-memory or otherwise)?

Please help me understand.

[mainpart]

same question here. what about production?

[romange]

it's all the in the license text. Also we have FAQ.md in this repo that talks about this. TLDR: you can run dragonfly in production for free as long as you do not sell dragonfly APIs as a service.

Additional Use Grant: You may make use of the Licensed Work (i) only as part of your own product or service, provided it is not an in-memory data store product or service; and (ii) provided that you do not use, provide, distribute, or make available the Licensed Work as a Service. A “Service” is a commercial offering, product, hosted, or managed service, that allows third parties (other than your own employees and contractors acting on your behalf) to access and/or use the Licensed Work or a substantial set of the features or functionality of the Licensed Work to third parties as a software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar services that compete with Licensor products or services.