Sharetribe Go Becomes Source-Available After Being Open-Source for 8 Years

Summary

Today, we are changing the license of Sharetribe Go from MIT to Sharetribe Community Public Licence. For 99.9% of the users of self-hosted Sharetribe Go, this doesn’t change anything: the code is still available online, and you can download the code for free and run it on your servers to power your own marketplace business. You can also modify the code the way you wish while doing so. You can also make money offering setup or customization services on top of this code. The only practical change is that it’s no longer allowed to provide the Sharetribe Go codebase as a SaaS offering.

This limitation in the license means that Sharetribe Go is no longer open-source according to the official definition. Instead, the new license turns Sharetribe Go into what is nowadays commonly called source-available software.

In this post, I outline the reasons behind this decision and what it means in practice.