The first three vertical posts in this series sorted projects by freshness . PagerDuty alts at 3-of-3 not-alive, Linktree at 2-of-3 not-alive, Datadog at 3-of-3 alive. Useful, but freshness is one axis. This post adds a second: license-dead . The code is shipping, the maintainers are paid, the repo looks healthy in our pill — but the license under it stopped being open-source somewhere along the way, and the self-host story changed shape even though the freshness signal didn't blink.

Four subjects, in chronological order.

The four

SaaS Apache → ? When What it broke

MongoDB Apache-2.0 → SSPL Oct 2018 Distros dropped it; "managed Mongo" is no longer freely redistributable

Sentry Apache-2.0 → BSL → FSL Sept 2019 (BSL), late 2023 (FSL) OSI-approval gone; competing with Sentry-as-a-service forbidden

Elasticsearch Apache-2.0 → SSPL/ELv2 (then +AGPL in 2024) Jan 2021 AWS forked the last Apache release as OpenSearch

Redis BSD-3 → RSAL/SSPL Mar 2024 Linux Foundation forked Valkey in three weeks

How the spine…