Licenses

This page documents which licenses are usable at Sourcegraph. For questions, please contact #legal in Slack.

Licensing Sourcegraph code

All Sourcegraph code should generally be licensed under either:

Which one to choose is a decision that your team, manager, and product/leadership should agree on.

Open Source philosophy

Sourcegraph has an open core business model: it develops Sourcegraph OSS as well as Sourcegraph Enterprise. Like any open core company, we balance the need to serve a strong community, with the need to build a sustainable business that can continuously invest in its products. We are open and transparent, so we strive to clearly communicate our decisions to make a feature open source or not.

In general core value adds should be enterprise-licensed, while utilities, support libraries, etc. that are unlikely to benefit potential competitors should be Apache licensed.

We intend Sourcegraph OSS to:

  • allow any developer to build Sourcegraph OSS from source and get code search, with very little obligations (Apache 2)
  • allow any developer to modify Sourcegraph OSS with very little obligations (Apache 2)

We intend Sourcegraph Enterprise to

  • be usable in production out of the box
  • be supported by our team
  • include features that enable teams and companies to use Sourcegraph
  • include features that deliver significant value beyond code search

We intend all of Sourcegraph to be source available so that anyone can view our code.

Using open source code

Allowed licenses: Permissive Licenses

You may use any code licensed under any permissive license, such as Apache, MIT, BSD. If you aren’t sure whether a license is permissive, see the permissive license list compiled by Blue Oak Council.

Not allowed licenses: Copyleft Licenses

We avoid using code and libraries under copyleft licenses. If you can’t find an alternative, reach out to the legal team. Below are the most common copyleft licenses:

  • AGPL
  • GPL (ok for internal use)
  • LGPL (ok for internal use)
  • CCDL (ok for internal use)
  • Eclipse Public License (ok for internal use)
  • Mozilla Public License (ok for internal use)
  • Anything else not on the permissive license list

If it’s for internal use only and not for distribution to users/customers, then tell the legal team and the licenses marked “ok for internal use” above will likely be approved.