The Sourcegraph project, which develops an engine for navigating source texts, refactoring, and code search, has rejected development under the Apache 2.0 license starting with version 5.1 in favor of a proprietary license that prohibits reproduction and sale but permits copying and modification during development and testing.
Initially, the release note for Sourcegraph 5.1 stated that the open edition of Sourcegraph was removed and migrated to the Sourcegraph Enterprise license. Later, the text was changed to indicate that separate parts of the Sourcegraph product were removed, and components related to search functionality were re-licensed. Meanwhile, components such as the plugins integrated with development environments and the AI assistant Cody were left in the repository under the Apache 2.0 license, with their development continuing under an open license within the main repository of the project with proprietary code.
Sourcegraph has also promised to publish a note in its blog explaining the reasons for the license change, and until publication, referred to a response from its employee in the bug tracking system. It is claimed that the licensing model of Sourcegraph continues to focus on selling the product to companies while providing open tools for individual developers. The open community edition of Sourcegraph did not gain sufficient distribution among developers, and in 99.9% of cases, users applied various versions of Sourcegraph Enterprise.
Simultaneously supporting two closely related products, one of which is not in demand, has been deemed impractical and a waste of developers' resources. After the re-licensing, the code remained publicly accessible (but under a proprietary license), as did the development process. Sourcegraph developers will also continue to participate in the development of the open search engine Zoekt and keep returning changes to this project. As before, individual developers can access free versions of Sourcegraph Enterprise: the cloud service sourcegraph.com can be used for free with open projects, and Sourcegraph Enterprise can be installed for working with closed code server, using the free pricing plan.
The Community edition of the AI assistant Cody, which has been requested by the community, will remain under the Apache 2.0 license. Currently, the Cody code remains in the main Sourcegraph repository, but it will soon be moved to a separate repository. This change can also be seen as a separation of Sourcegraph into two distinct products: a proprietary code search engine and an open intelligent assistant for writing and working with code (Cody).
The Sourcegraph engine can be used as a platform for reviewing and navigating source code hosted in Git repositories. It offers the ability to analyze arbitrary function calls and navigate to their definitions, view other calls to these functions in the code, track changes related to function discussions, documentation, and error messages. Sourcegraph also provides flexible link searching tools and pop-up hints for using different objects.
Source: opennet.ru
