Baserow

Details

The project is provided under a license which is a mix of MIT Expat, CC BY-SA 4, and custom non-FOSS premium & enterprise licenses. The non-FOSS licenses set limitations on use, modification and distribution, and they cover certain directories of the source code which are for various specific features.

Reliance upon the non-FOSS code could be found in the FOSS code (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) although this did appear to be limited to just tests.

The project widely advertises itself as open source, including in its repository description, project readme, and 5 mentions on the project website homepage. The project homepage also advertises non-FOSS features, while there’s no mention of the variations in licensing involved for those features. The project does provide a comparison of the FOSS version to its other variations on its pricing page.

The project’s use of “Open Source” in marketing has been raised on their forums, with some official response indicating intent to clarify things, but the project still broadly labels itself as open source three years beyond that thread.

Following the self-hosting link on the homepage for docker, the baserow/baserow:1.35.1 docker image advised by the guidance includes the non-FOSS code. The project provides a BASEROW_OSS_ONLY environment option, which the documentation advises will only start the MIT open source version when it’s set to a non-empty value, but this looks to default to an empty string (inactive by default).

As part of marketing the project has shared its own directory of Open-source software. Many of the included project are not actually under open source licenses, thus propagating open source misrepresentation. This has been queried when the directory has been used for marketing on Reddit, without official response (1, 2).

The project appears to have raised at least $5m in funding from investors which include Inkef, Firstminute Capital, Seedcamp, Frontline, Job van der Voort, Martin Henk and Shannon Williams. The project also appears to gain revenue from selling cloud & self-hosted variations of its software, some of which are provided with support services.