Earthly, a company focused on build automation, initially adopted the Business Source License (BSL) to balance financial viability with open-source principles, allowing free access to its code while preventing the creation of competing commercial offerings. Under BSL, Earthly's code would become fully open-source after three years. The company aimed to establish a sustainable business model based on an open-core approach, where core software is free but additional features are monetized, similar to models used by companies like Confluent and Elastic. The shift to a source-available license was intended to protect Earthly from tech giants potentially leveraging its open-source code to offer competing services, thereby ensuring continued innovation and support for the community. However, Earthly later decided to return to a pure open-source model, reflecting an evolution in its approach to align with community interests and the broader industry trend towards open-source software.