Relicensing: When Your Open Source Tool Turns to the Dark Side
2022-03-17 , Stage 1

Imagine waking up one morning to find out that your beloved open source database, which lies at the heart of your system, is being relicensed. What does that mean? Can you still use it as before? Could the new license be infectious and require you to open source your own business logic?

This doom’s day nightmare scenario isn’t hypothetical. It is, in fact, very real, for databases and other OSS, with several examples over the past year alone.

On this talk Dotan will review some of the less known risks of open source, and share his lessons learned from Elasticsearch’s recent relicensing move. If you’re using OSS, you’ll learn to identify smells that will help you determine if it’s at risk of being relicensed so you can take proactive measures to protect your business. If you’re in the process of evaluating a new OSS, you’ll learn to look beyond the license and consider additional criteria.

Dotan lives at the intersection of technology, product and innovation. With over 20 years in the hi-tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud computing, big data solutions, DevOps practices and more.
Dotan is an avid advocate of open source software, open standards and communities. Dotan is an advocate of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), he organizes the CNCF Tel-Aviv meetup group, and runs the OpenObservability Talks podcast, among others.
Currently working as a developer advocate at Logz.io, Dotan evangelizes on Observability in IT systems using popular open source projects such as ELK stack, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry.