RC

Substrate is now open source

By Richard Crowley

In my previous article, I shared that Source & Binary has ceased operations. There’s much more to say about how we got here but I want to take this article to lay out where Substrate is going: Substrate is now open source under the three-clause BSD license.

This doesn’t, to be blunt, excite me. I didn’t set out to make open-source software. But the inescapable fact is that I made software that provided less value than I chose to charge for it. This is becoming something of a pattern for me, a pattern I’ll perhaps examine in more detail in a future article.

Anyway, just because the business of selling Substrate couldn’t grow doesn’t mean Substrate itself has to die. In fact, when we announced to customers we were going to wind down the business, some of them expressed interest in forming a consortium to maintain it. And, as a legal matter, they could’ve done so with nothing more than an email from us introducing them to each other. That didn’t seem like enough, though.

While Substrate’s proprietary license served its purpose while Source & Binary operated, it stopped making sense after we closed up shop. For Substrate to live on, it couldn’t have a weird license with no commercial entity around to explain it and back it up. So: Which license do we choose?

In this context, we’re trying to remove restrictions. There’s nothing left to protect! So all the source-available licenses, the GPL, and the AGPL don’t really make sense.

That leaves the Apache, BSD, and MIT licenses. Travis and I both live on the west coast. So we chose the BSD license. I’m sure this stupid reasoning will make someone mad.

Given we’re closing Source & Binary and turning maintenance over to a consortium of former customers, the third clause of the BSD license seems important:

  1. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

These folks are just trying to use AWS properly. I don’t want to make it any harder on them.

So, there it is: Substrate is open source. You can find it now at https://github.com/substrate-maintainers/substrate.

This article is part of a series on Source & Binary, my company that operated from 2020 through 2024.