> /v1/glossary/relicensing · CONCEPT
Relicensing
Changing the license of a software project — sometimes from open source to source-available.
Relicensing is the act of changing the license under which a software project is distributed. For permissively-licensed code, this is usually straightforward: copyright holders can release new versions under whatever license they want.
Recent high-profile relicensings — Elastic (Apache → SSPL/ELv2 in 2021), MongoDB (AGPL → SSPL in 2018), Redis (BSD → BSL/SSPL in 2024), HashiCorp (MPL → BSL in 2023), Sentry (Apache → BSL in 2019, then FSL in 2024) — have moved from open source to source-available, citing competitive pressure from cloud providers.
Practical effect: code released under the OLD license stays under that license — anyone with a copy can keep using and forking it. New versions ship under the new license. The community often forks the last version under the old license: AWS forked Elasticsearch into OpenSearch, the community forked Redis into Valkey.
For users: relicensing breaks no existing deployments but raises questions about future upgrades. Open Source Startups monitors all 800+ projects in our directory for license-change events nightly — see our /alerts feed.
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