[stevenmih]

Disclaimer: Cofounder/CEO of Ahana here, which provides a managed service of open source PrestoDB for fast, reliable SQL Lakehouses and analytics.

I wanted to add nuance to the conversation: While most open source projects these days are licensed with Apache 2.0, there are two categories that projects fall into: community-controlled and vendor-controlled. The difference is the control. If a project is governed by a gold-standard hosting organization like the Linux Foundation and have organizationally diverse committers, then it's community controlled and open forever. However if the project is mostly owned by one company then it's easy to move to a non-compete license. For example, Linux Foundation hosts Presto and the license cannot be changed to a non-compete. This is guaranteed by the Linux Foundation charter. The fork of Presto (named Trino) however, turned into a company controlled open source project. In my experience, the distinctions between open forever vs. possibly more closed with a non-competitive license tends to be overlooked in choosing which to use.

I commend Sid on his efforts to keep open source, open forever. Donating your project to Linux Foundation like Facebook/Meta did with Presto is one path to achieving that, this new approach is another. Bravo!