The Shift in SaaS Licensing

In recent years, companies such as MongoDB, Redis, and Sentry have transitioned from permissive Open Source Software (OSS) licenses to source-available models. The primary objective of these pivots is to prevent third-party providers from offering their software as a managed service.

While these companies frame these changes as a defense against cloud providers, the shift represents a fundamental change in how software ecosystems work, and closely mirrors the "give and then take away" features often associated with "enshittification". For the uninitiated, that's the process where a platform's creators prioritize short-term rent-seeking over the long-term health of the ecosystem, in an ever-descending cycle of user-abuse.

The Licensing Cycle

The transition typically follows a predictable technical and economic cycle:

• A company develops a tool and releases it under a permissive license.
• This openness serves as a marketing engine, driving rapid adoption and community trust, largely based on the idea that even if one particular company goes away, there will be a larger ecosystem of providers that can be substituted. See: static hosting.
• Once the tool achieves sufficient market share to establish a "moat," the company changes the license terms, due to financial pressure. The only apparent way to monetize is to charge for hosting, but competing with AWS is not viable.
• The new "source-available" licenses explicitly forbid others from hosting the software as a service, to prevent hyperscalers from undercutting the authors' own hosting service.

This strategy uses the promise of openness to capture a market, then removes that freedom once the software becomes a standard.

The Value of Decoupling

The debate regarding "fairness" in software licensing often focuses on whether cloud providers should profit from code written by others. However, a more fundamental question is the core value provided by Open Source Software: the ability to decouple software from its original vendor. Copyright guarantees certain rights for authors, and these author explicitly chose a license that returns those rights to the users.

The utility of the OSS commons is the guarantee of choice. If a tool is truly open source, a user can host it on private hardware, niche providers, or major cloud vendors. This competition ensures that users can select a provider based on security, cost, or performance.

If the industry moves toward a model where essential infrastructure, like PostgreSQL, Apache, or Nginx would only be hosted by "blessed" vendors, our digital infrastructure would become more fragile and have more single-points-of-failure. If you want to foster an ecosystem of sites, you have to foster the ability to host as a service. By restricting the right to host software as a service, companies are converting (what empirically amount to) public utilities into walled gardens.

Impact on the Commons

Restricting SaaS competition attacks the concept of the "commons." The digital commons relies on the principle that software belongs to the ecosystem once it is released. When companies pull back their licenses to protect margins, they make others doubt their commitment to open-source, and almost universally spawn a fork that moves much more quickly than the original repo.

Assuming engineers care about the longevity of their solution, they must choose libraries, services, or frameworks considering the authors, organizations, and funding of the libraries they choose to build upon. Maturity, and evidence of hardening are also important.

Conclusion

Companies like MongoDB and Redis are betting that their market dominance is high enough that users will tolerate the loss of freedom. This is a trade-off of long-term brand trust for short-term margin protection. If the "license trap" becomes the industry standard, the era of the open commons will end.