Directus, co-founded by Ben Haynes and Rijk van Zanten, is transitioning to a new licensing model to ensure the sustainability of its open-source project, which has been funded mainly through GitHub Sponsors. With only about 1% of necessary funding coming from this source, Directus is adopting the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 with permissive usage grants, allowing the platform to remain mostly free and open-source. This change primarily affects entities with annual finances exceeding $5 million, requiring them to obtain a paid commercial license for production use, while non-production use remains free for all. The BSL ensures that larger corporations and governments contribute financially to the project's growth, allowing maintainers to focus on core platform improvements. This model has been successfully implemented by other open-source projects and aims to balance financial sustainability with community values.