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Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch
- iLoveOncall 1y ago[flagged]
- jstanley 1y agohttps://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- iLoveOncall 1y ago[flagged]
- poly2it 1y agoUnlike yours?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nubg 1y agoNot necessarily, as there is also "source available".
- SirSavary 1y agoNot so: > So-called source available software is a software for which its source code is made publicly available for access. It might or might not be legal to share or modify the software or its source code. (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available) See https://github.com/FakeFishGames/Barotrauma https://github.com/FakeFishGames/Barotrauma for an example of such a project
- iLoveOncall 1y agoYes, so liquibase is still perfectly open source according to this definition.
- Freak_NL 1y agoAre you deliberately being obtuse? Do you have an axe to grind? 'Open source' has a commonly agreed upon meaning, 'source available' has a meaning. You are mistaking open source for just source available.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago[flagged]
- nubg 1y agoWhat is the difference between "open source" and "source available" then, according to you?
- omnicognate 1y agoThat's the definition of "source available", not "open source".
- Etheryte 1y agoSource available is not the same thing as open source. Words and terms mean something.
- NSPG911 1y ago^ any app has its source available if you try hard enough
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoPretty much everyone I know switched to Firebase. Paying a license and playing by the rules of a myriad licenses is a chore even for those who can afford it.
- iLoveOncall 1y agoLiquibase and Firebase has absolutely nothing in common. Liquibase is a database migration tool...
- Arkan 1y agoI supposed you misread - both tools are completely different.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoMistyped. Of course I meant Flyway. Funny how the LLM in the brain hallucinated )
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
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- chromehearts 1y agoMaybe Pocketbase as an alternative?
- DrBenCarson 1y agoI would imagine Flyway would be the most robust alternative
- freetonik 1y agoThe only thing those have in common is the word `base` in their names.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Macha 1y agoHuh, did not realise Liquibase changed their license. Seems a bit weird when basically every web framework has an alternative in house, and there's Alembic and Flyway as framework-generic alternatives.
- 12345ieee 1y agoNot to mention their pro features keep breaking syntax of the community version, obviously with 0 transparency. Now, of course they should get paid for the work they do, but these sort of "we were FOSS and surprise we're not anymore" are becoming commonplace and are always done hoping no one notices.
- saddist0 1y agoHonestly, FSL doesn't break any flow for day to day developers. What's the harm? I am curious to know. On the contrary I like competitive vs non-competitive distinction.
- sarchertech 1y agoIt’s because big tech companies have spent millions to foster goodwill towards the OSI Open Source definition. And there’s a general feeling that software that fits that definition is pure and any that doesn’t is unclean.
- DetroitThrow 1y agoMost of us don't want to let a court decide if we compete with a very general distinction you describe, and can't afford lawyers to evaluate a 2 year old license without much case law. Most of us prefer not to bring on a dependency in our project that is primarily designed to extract commercial value from users and is less friendly to contributors than similar open source projects.
- h1fra 1y ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 1y agoSource available is not the same thing as open source. Words and terms mean something.
- oguz-ismail 1y ago[flagged]
- preisschild 1y agoRead the literal open source definition https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- sonnig 1y agoThis conversation reminds me a bit of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676 some time ago (similar misuse of the term "open source")
- wobfan 1y ago> it's open source, get over it (and this one even convert to open source after a while) You're literally acknowledging that it's not open source in the brackets.
- Arch-TK 1y agoThe source is available for you to read. English is a language in which words can have more than one meaning depending on the context they are used in. "I am sick" meaning that I am not feeling well. In the context of someone watching a performance: "This is sick!" as an exclamation that something they saw was impressive. In the context of someone watching something gut wrenching: "This is sick!" as an exclamation that something they saw was horrible and unpleasant. In the context of someone stepping in a puddle of vomit while walking around London: "This is sick!?" as a dismayed exclamation of realisation that what they stepped in was a puddle of vomit. I can go on, and so can anyone who can speak English. So, please stop this bullshit of "I want this word to mean this one thing that it has not meant at least the past 30 years." It's extremely useful that we can agree on what words mean despite the fuzziness of English. You are intentionally trying to muddy the water.
- k2bt 1y agoI don't like any of these licenses, but if I was playing devil's advocate here, "open source" as a term on its own surely just implies the source code is publicly available? Which it is.
- k2bt 1y agoSorry, I stand corrected quoting from the OSD: "Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code".
- fukka42 1y agoThe OSD is just some people's opinion. They hold no legal or official weight. It's like me starting the cheese initiative and trying to control what others call cheese, a job that's typically reserved for governments.
- pessimizer 1y agoThe OSI are the people who made it up, and the only reason why anybody cares about it. If you call yourself Open Source and you don't comply with the OSI definition, you're a parasite trying to commit fraud with the good will generated by other people. I also don't care if somebody in 1975 said "I like to be open, and I'll let anyone look at the source." Old McDonald had a farm before McDonald's was a restaurant, but that doesn't mean that if you open a restaurant called McDonald's that is decorated like a McDonald's, you're not a scammer. I know your plastic fruit is carbon-based, but if you label it as "organic" you're a thief. If you're not trying to scam people, be creative and make up your own catchphrase for letting people look at your source code - or don't even, because the whole idea of having a branding for allowing people access (and rights to) the source is imitation of the FSF and OSI.
- fukka42 1y agoThey're in no way, shape, or form official and they didn't come up with the term open source. Like I said above, they're as official as the cheese initiative I just made up. No government has endorsed them, and open source is not a protected name in any country I am aware of. They're just some arrogant American organisation that expects the entire world to bend to their whim, as usual.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoEveryone I know switched to Flyway.
- real_joschi 1y agoOne thing that Liquibase does better than Flyway is supporting multiple different database systems with the same migrations by abstracting the changes instead of relying on raw SQL statements such as Flyway. Liquibase and Flyway are the only major frameworks on the JVM which could be embedded into a JVM application to get rid of a sidecar or a startup process which has to run before the actual application could start.
- sam_lowry_ 1y ago> abstracting the changes instead of relying on raw SQL statements such as Flyway. That's exactly why Liquibase turned source-available. These abstractions are leaky, error-prone and are better maintained via the money from support contracts. "Make problem, they earn money fixing them" is a reasonable modus operandi.
- nesarkvechnep 1y agoI really like Sqitch these days.
- miniwark 1y agoThanks for the discovery, i did not know of this one. From the docs, it look like promising to me.
- johnjames87 1y ago[flagged]
- SCdF 1y agoFor those who were not familiar with the licence they have switched to: https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/functional-source-license-fsl https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/functional-source-license-...
- benterris 1y agoFor more context, the FSL was created by Sentry, who explain why it's been created and what problems it was trying to solve here: https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-license-freedom-without-free-riding/ https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...
- aitchnyu 1y agoIs 2 years too little? The deep pocketed companies I know dont mind 5 year old software and I'll be okay with 2012 Redis or 2020 Postgres.
- watwut 1y agoI think it is meant to be useable by them. It is meant to be unuseable by those who directly compete with liquibase.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoThe only closed source license I find acceptable is the BuSL "Business Source License" because it eventually becomes opensource. It guarantees you a 4 year moat on the code before it becomes open source, and it remains source available until then. This ought to be good enough for valid uses and prevents needless license proliferation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License
- evanelias 1y agoFSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too. At this point, FSL appears to be more widespread than BSL. Adoption of BSL has waned; even its creators (MariaDB, for their MaxScale proxy product) recently stopped using it.
- amaccuish 1y agoWhat's up with the comments here? Either just reading the "base" part and plugging some unrelated service, or claiming source available is the same as open source
- saghm 1y agoSome people just don't find the distinction between "open source" and "source available" to be meaningful, or at least don't find it meaningful enough to warrant the outsized level of attention it gets. I can't speak for anyone else, but at least to me, "open" is pretty much synonymous with "available" in the way it's used in the term "open source", and despite this debate going on for years now I've yet to see an argument for why it makes sense for those terms to mean different things that doesn't essentially boil down to "because that's what OSI says". I don't find the argument that I should have to agree with the definitions from one specific organization for extremely generic-sounding terms to be particularly compelling, and if anything, the backlash anyone gets from conflating the terms purely based on those definitions as if they're the only morally correct ones just makes me even less inclined to buy into them. It's basically an attempt to trademark via astroturfing.
- rcakebread 1y agoFor those arguing it is still open source, Liquibase says it is not. "Is FSL an open source license? No." https://www.liquibase.com/blog/liquibase-community-for-the-future-fsl https://www.liquibase.com/blog/liquibase-community-for-the-f...
- DetroitThrow 1y agoThis was less than a month ago, so the README may not simply have been updated yet then, rather than the frustratingly large number of projects that are source available but want to brand themselves as something they are not.
- donohoe 1y agoFair point, but it takes less than 10 minutes imho to update a README. Perhaps less than 1. And they took the time elsewhere to update other docs. So it’s fair criticism when a month later it’s still saying things that are no longer true.
- jamietanna 1y agoIf we want to be very picky it is "open source" not "Open Source". The capitalised term indicates it's a license approved by the Open Source Initiative, which is commonly used as the basis of "actual open source" (I do agree that this gets a little murky, especially with folks who don't understand the nuance, which is a large percentage of folks talking about this) I do agree that not calling something even "open source" if it's under a license like the FSL is best
- ktosobcy 1y agoanyone thought about forking? :)
- real_joschi 1y agohttps://hachyderm.io/@joschi/115378071393408064 https://hachyderm.io/@joschi/115378071393408064 https://bsky.app/profile/joschi.xyz/post/3m3a76o6nkc2c https://bsky.app/profile/joschi.xyz/post/3m3a76o6nkc2c
- Meneth 1y agoSo Liquibase made an open-source project, used Apache instead of strong copyleft (e.g GNU AGPL), and then expected others to not do the thing Liquibase chose to allow them: make closed-source derivatives. Liquibase has only itself to blame.
- firesteelrain 1y agoIt looks like they auto switch to Apache after some time. I am not sure if that makes it better or worse
- DetroitThrow 1y agoOrganizations can still achieve their goals with the AGPL instead of a source available license. Redis switched, and their own organization was pleased, as well as their community. I don't think any Liquibase user would be unhappy with Liquibase being dual licensed with AGPL.
- dig1 1y agoAFAIK, AGPL is no-go for EPL/Apache-licensed projects, unless the whole project is under (A)GPL, or use some "exceptions" wording. Wrt Redis community, it's the shadow of the former itself, everyone who plans to invest in Redis long-term, moved to Valkey.
- jraph 1y agoShould probably be called "open source with a two year delay", or "open source in two years". Or "open source when obsolete" because that's what it is, fundamentally. Of course, it sells less and makes it way more obvious what these delayed open source licenses are at their core: "we'd like to make people believe we respect their freedom, but are not actually convinced with giving them that".
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoopen source for enterprise is often more about trust and transparency than "freedom". Source avaliable has most advantages of FOSS without the legal and monetization issues. There is this blind trust in open source model taken to a unhealthy or misguided extreme in a lot of online discussion. A two year delay is pretty reasonable and liberal. It allow costumers that dont want to accept the new licence able to continue as-is by simply following an older version.
- jraph 1y ago> There is this blind trust in open source model In my case, it's not about any open source model, it's about software freedom. What's unhealthy is non-free software, and there's nothing extreme in having this opinion.
- Dylan16807 1y agoIt's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses. If you base your opinions on pure black and white tests without considering the actual tradeoffs of the license then that's blindness.
- jraph 1y agoIf you base your opinions on compromises and always making tradeoffs on your core values, you've lost your direction. What do we do now? > It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses Nope. "Free" has specific meaning in this context, this qualifier doesn't apply here. It's the whole point. If you believe it applies, you've fundamentally misunderstood the free software definition and what's at stake for the free software movement. More specifically, the qualifier is not relative to a specific entity and what freedom it actually needs / uses at some given point in time. I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist. To go further with the comparison, there's nothing in being against compromising on the freedom of the press that's blindness or being black and white (or maybe it's being black and white, but I can't see how it would be wrong).
- jsiepkes 1y agoApparently this also poses a problem for OSS projects such as Keycloak since they can't use non-OSS licenses according to the CNCF [1]. I wonder if a project which uses Liquibase can be included in Debian, Fedora, etc.? Since these projects also have requirements on OSS licenses for the software they distribute. [1] https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/issues/43391 https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/issues/43391
- mhitza 1y ago> I wonder if a project which uses Liquibase can be included in Debian, Fedora, etc.? Cannot be included in the main repositories, but nothing stops them from being part of other repositories (custom, or if something like rpm fusion non-free exists for Debian based distros as well).
- sarchertech 1y agoBig tech companies (the money behind the Open Source Initiative) have done a few things. 1. They co-opted the free software movement and made it more business friendly. 2. They convinced people that Open Source is pure and software that isn’t Open Source is unclean. 3. They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon. 4. They convinced a well meaning subset of those developers to police the other devs and pressure them to release their software under big tech approved licenses.
- thedevilslawyer 1y agoOr you know, like, the 4 freedoms matter?
- sarchertech 1y agoThis was the original 1986 definition of “free software”. ‘The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.’ Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
- cube00 1y agoThe conglomerates can also host it on their extensive cloud infra at a price small competitors will never be able to match because they own the cloud infrastructure too. Somehow the service+infra is the same cost or cheaper then buying the infra alone and trying to deploy the open source version to it.
- jrochkind1 1y agoI don't know, they were focused on freedom for users not for vendors/programmers. I think it's very intentional that a restriction on what you can do with software -- including reselling it -- is a violation of the "four freedoms" -- freedoms for what someone can do with software, including redistribute it or use it for any purpose they want (including reselling it). These licenses meant to prohibit users from using the software in ways that harm the business interests of the programmers -- I am confident the original creators of free software four freedoms would agree they are not free software. It is very intentional that they were saying the freedom of users to do what they want with software should not be limited for the convenience of the business interests of those who wrote the software.
- einrealist 1y agoI have just created a task to find an alternative in case 4.x cannot be used anymore. I have nothing against someone trying to monetise useful software. However, switching from an open-source software (OSS) licence is essentially a bait-and-switch tactic. This immediately destroys trust. It also destroys the part of the user base that is difficult to monetise but still has the potential to be monetised. I was hoping that the Elastic and TerraForm debacles had taught people a lesson. Flyway is also questionable at this point. If Liquibase is switching, what's to stop Flyway? Unless a fork is happening, I'm considering creating my own migration library tailored to our actual needs and usage. It should not be so hard. Liquibase was more of a convenience.
- nashashmi 1y agoIf the previous code is on GitHub, then the previous code is open source. All future development will be under fsl. And released two years later.
- pards 1y agoThis is a shame. We use Liquibase on my project and I have a few bugfixes / functional gaps that I was planning to contribute back but I doubt my large enterprise client would sanction contributions to a commercial codebase.
- dylanowen 1y agoWhy not, if liquibase isn't directly completing with your company and your bug fixes help their business, why would they care?
- rana762 1y ago[dead]
- Arcuru 1y agoI agree that this isn't technically "open source", but the FSL blocks competing use. Is anyone here actually blocked from using Liquibase because of their switch to the FSL?
- exabrial 1y agoI think from the get go the should have planned their enterprise vs open source a bit better and it would have worked out
- mawadev 1y agoI use liquibase at work because there was a large marketing campaign saying this was the standard for db schema versioning in the java world. Now that I look at flyway, it seems to be a tiny bit better... I had mixed results with liquibase, if you don't use the xml changeSets you are in for a ride and its not that easy to do a simple diff on two databases. It kinda works but feels iffy... During my frustrations I read blogposts saying you can implement schema version changes easily by yourself and I kind of see it... You have to do the thinking by yourself anyway when you declare changeSets?
- einrealist 1y agoBe careful, or you could end up in the same situation with Flyway. I'm not sure how many contributors are employed or paid by Redgate Software. But what's to stop them from doing the same to Flyway once their competitor has made this change to Liquibase?
- preommr 1y ago> if you don't use the xml changeSets I find it crazier that people use xml changesets. My setup is to use sql files versioned by date. Each file has changsets (regions demarcated by comments) for single transaction actions (like creating a database), along with it's rollback actions written as comments in it's respective changeset. I don't trust rollbacks, I mostly use them for dev purposes for scripts that are wip. If i have to "undo" changes to a db, better to write specific scripts that revert the actions (i.e. manually move columns around to a tmp table). I essentially just use liquibase as a language-agnostic db-migration tool that can connect ot a db and run a series of sql files. I could write scripts for that, but it's nice to have a third-party solution.
- donmcronald 1y agoI haven't used it for 15 years, but this is exactly what I used to do. I felt like using SQL helped me understand what was actually happening to the database and having a tool that automatically did the right thing for applying those snippets between versions was great. For example, think of one install going from 1.0.0 > 1.0.2 while another is going from 1.0.0 > 1.1.0. Sure, you could write something to do that yourself, but I'd rather use an existing library that already covers tons of edge cases. The number of Docker containers I've used that need to be rolled through a special incantation of several versions to get things upgraded cleanly make me shake my head sometimes. Every time I have to do that I still think of Liquibase and wish that I could just grab the most recent version and have the database schema magically updated like I could do with Java apps 2 decades ago.
- dylanowen 1y agoThe comments here are pretty surprising. a lot of commenters are very worried about something that seems like a very reasonable change. The license change is to prevent someone like AWS offering managed-liquibase. It might not be technically open source anymore but why does that matter? You can still read/fork/contribute to the source and leverage liquibase internally. The fact that liquibase the company exists and provides this library is great. They shouldn't have to live in fear of their hard work being co-opted into managed liquibase to pass some open source purity test.
- ciferkey 1y agoI've been collecting a history of this sort of thing, and list of companies here: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/on-self-hosting-opentofu-and-formerly-oss-licensed-software/#a-high-likelihood-that-you-screw-up https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/on-self-hosting-opentofu-an... . I'll have to add this one. Let me know if there's more I can include!
- bityard 1y agoThere's also https://isitreallyfoss.com https://isitreallyfoss.com
- halfmatthalfcat 1y agoAkka by Lightbend (now called Akka)
- kordlessagain 1y agoThe timeline problem: Copyright/patent law says: You wrote it at time T Therefore from T to T+70years, you control it Anyone who writes the same thing at T+1 is "copying" But if we both arrive at the same solution independently, causality matters more than chronology. If your code didn't cause mine, why should your timestamp give you power over me? This breaks the whole edifice: If independent discovery isn't "theft," then copyright only makes sense for literal verbatim copying. And even then - if I retype your code character-by-character because it's the best solution, am I stealing or just recognizing truth?
- kube-system 1y agoCopyright law and patent law are two entirely different things and handle conflicts entirely differently. Lumping them both together is legally nonsensical.
- dizlexic 1y agoThe only "free" software license is MIT. We can talk about Stallman's "vision", but frankly he's a commie who wants to dictate usage rights for others. Free as in speech not as in beer. I read as total freedom. Not freedom to do what I think you should.
- acefaceZ 1y agoWhatever Stallman’s vision was - It seems he didn’t care enough to fight for it when sh@# hit the fan with Neo4j. If you don’t know what I am talking about check out link below. https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/adverse_appeals_court_ruling_could/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/adverse_appeals_court...
- mx_03 1y agoIs opensource synonym of free?
- jraph 1y agoIf you mean free as in "free software", not really. 1. The philosophy is completely different: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... 2. Technically, mostly but not quite; there are technical differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604258 If you mean free as in gratis: nope, you can sell open source software, there are several possible business models around this.
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y agoTYL that Open Source ≠ Free Software.
- acefaceZ 1y agoAt least Liquibase isn’t masquerading under a well known open source license, unlike Neo4j’s infamous AGPL bait-and-switch. Neo4j quietly slipped the Commons Clause into what looked like a standard AGPL license, complete with the FSF copyright and preamble, until a single person called them out. Instead of owning up, Neo4j spent nearly a decade and tens of millions trying to crush one person. Not the best business minds over there… Anyway - it sounds like Liquibase didn’t go to that extreme and fixed their messaging as soon as the community educated them.