TL;DR in v4.5.3 we relicensed our core from MIT to the Functional Source License (FSL). If you’re just using Sourcebot as a developer tool, your right to use, modify, and redistribute the tool doesn’t change. However, if you’re using Sourcebot’s code for a product that competes with us, you will no longer have the right to do so moving forward.

Have a question about this change? Feel free to reach out to us at license@sourcebot.dev

How it started

We started building Sourcebot because we’re passionate about great developer tools. We love enabling developers to build software in a way that brings them joy.

We believe a big part of what makes a developer tool successful is having a vibrant community behind it, with the maintainers and users actively engaged openly and transparently. We also believe that developers want the freedom to submit issues, open PRs, and modify and deploy the tool in a way that fits their workflow. This is why releasing Sourcebot onto GitHub under the MIT license was a no brainer.

Since then, Sourcebot has been installed over 50,000 times and is used by teams ranging from 20 engineer startups to large enterprises with hundreds of engineers using it daily. We committed to working on Sourcebot full time, which allowed us to drastically expand its capabilities. Our 2 person team has shipped: code navigation, a built-in file explorer, authentication, search contexts, a code review agent, share links, a MCP server, analytics dashboards, audit logging, as well as supporting enterprise scale codebases. Not to mention all of the QOL, performance improvements and VCS platform support we’ve shipped with the help of our community contributors!

Moving forward

Our mission throughout this whole process has been to build tools to help developers understand their codebase. Good code search tooling is a critical part of that, and with the advent of powerful reasoning models we believe the ability for tools to help with this will change dramatically. That’s why, for the past 2 months, our main focus has been to expand Sourcebot into more than just a code search tool (more info coming very soon).

All this to say, we’re more committed than ever to continue building Sourcebot. Our goal is to build the best developer tool possible, and we believe the best way of doing that is through a sustainable business model. One that allows us to generate revenue from the software we’re building to be able to grow our team, while maintaining the core tenants that made us interested in building developer tools in the first place.

This is where the topic of our license came up. The unfortunate reality of the space we’re about to enter is that it’s extremely competitive, and has shown to be hostile to open source projects. We felt that in order to confidently commit to continue building Sourcebot, we needed a mechanism to protect ourselves from this in the future.

What do we do?

We didn’t want to go closed source, since that would go against the principles we have around great developer tools. We love the ability to build in the open and engage directly with developers. However, the unfortunate reality of open source licenses is that there’s no way to protect from adversarial actors by definition. We studied several different approaches to solve this problem, and discovered Fair Source:

Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS):

1. is publicly available to read;

2. allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and

3. undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).

We felt that these principles greatly aligned with ours. It would allow us to continue to build in the open and provide a tool that developers love in a way that doesn’t risk our ability to build a sustainable business. As a result, we’ve decided to join this movement and officially relicense our core from MIT to the Functional Source License.

What’s changing?

In plain english, this means you’re not able to use Sourcebot’s code in a product that competes with us. We think this is fair, since 99.999% of developers just want to use Sourcebot to help them understand their codebase. The license’s DOSP clause also means that the entire core will convert to Apache 2.0 after two years, ensuring the code eventually makes it’s way into the open source community. Please refer to the license for the specific legal language (it’s pretty short and easy to understand).

One side affect of this is that Sourcebot’s core is no longer under an OSI approved Open Source license. To avoid any ambiguity, we will be using the term “Fair Source” moving forward. We’re in this for the long haul, and we deeply care about earning the trust and respect of the developer community. We’re building Sourcebot for you guys after all!

As always, a huge thank you for all those who’ve been with us throughout this journey. We’re only just getting started.

The Sourcebot Team (Michael & Brendan)