Article

Update on Airbyte’s license

Michel Tricot

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June 30, 2023

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3 min read

Summarize this article with:

Dear Airbyte community,

Since our inception, we've believed in the power of open source and the global community that contributes to it. That’s why Airbyte was born and continues to thrive as an open-source project. Today, we're making an update on the open-source license.

Before we start digging into the what’s and the why’s, 99.99% of our user community is likely not impacted by that change.

Expanding ELv2

A couple of years ago, we changed the platform code to use the ELv2 license. We picked that license because it is a very permissive one that gives almost all the freedom and also allows us to build a successful company and products.

To better support the efforts of our team and ensure a unified focus on the most important needs of our users, we are expanding the Elastic License v2 (ELv2) to cover some strategic API, database and data warehouse source connectors that Airbyte actively maintains, and some destination warehouse connectors, specifically:

Database sources:

Oracle DB
PostgreSQL
Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)
MongoDB
MySQL

File Sources

Amazon S3
Google GCS

API Sources

Facebook Marketing
Google Ads
Google Analytics 4
Google Search Console
Google Sheets
HubSpot
Marketo
Salesforce
Shopify
Stripe
Zendesk Support

Destination connectors

BigQuery
Google Cloud Storage
Redshift
S3
Snowflake

We want to clarify that this change in licensing will not impact the connectors that our community contributes to and maintains themselves. These will continue to remain under the license that they selected (mostly MIT).

What impact is there for you?

If you are not building a hosted data integration service using those connectors, or exposing Airbyte’s UI, API or CLI - as is the case for 99.9% of our community - you are not impacted in any way.

If you are building such a service, this change prevents you from offering those connectors to your users, in addition to what was already covered by the license ELv2, i.e. Airbyte Core.

If you want to know more about the ELv2 license, please check out our FAQ.

Why the license change?

The reasons behind this decision are two-fold:

Protection Against Hosted ETL Services: Our team's primary objective is to address the needs and challenges of our vast user community. The ELv2 license is very permissive for 99.9% of our users. It only adds restrictions for those who wish to create a hosted ETL service taking what is freely available and charging our users. Expanding the ELv2 license to strategic connectors will help prevent that, which protects our users while enabling our team to remain focused on serving the vast majority of our community, i.e. you.
Maintaining Community Focus: There is nothing worse than having a community splintered while trying to solve a complex problem. By implementing this change, we're helping ensure that the attention of our community and team are not divided between serving the community's needs and competing with derivative services.

What is next?

We understand that this change may raise questions, and we are here to address them. We're committed to maintaining transparency and open communication with our user community, so if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us directly in Slack or via email to license@airbyte.io.

Our journey thus far has been incredible, thanks in no small part to our dedicated community of users and contributors. This change will allow us to continue to grow and innovate, always with the goal of commoditizing data integration.

Thank you for your understanding and your continued support.

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