‍Why did we make this decision?

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For a long time we deployed Kurtosis under a proprietary license, just to early customers. This allowed us to build without worrying about which features would be critical for the longevity of our business and which would be critical for the longevity of our community. Now, we have reached a point where we are confident that we can release a large portion of our product to the world for free. The license we’re using is the source-available BSL1.1 license by MariaDB, which allows you to do anything with Kurtosis except for reselling to third-parties as a cloud offering, either directly or as a commercial derivative. Our goal is for Kurtosis to make it easier for backend engineers to quickly test their code by reducing the maintenance burden of setting up test environments, so that they can ship good software, faster.

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Now that it’s free and source-available - should I use Kurtosis?

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Kurtosis would be a good fit for you if you need to write tests over applications that run in containers, and have to either:

• Pass dynamically generated values between containers during the set-up phase or
• Programmatically seed test data into your test environment.

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What is Kurtosis?

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Kurtosis is a composable build system for multi-container test environments, enabling developers to:

• Define dynamic dependencies between services
• Programmatically inject test data, and
• Parameterize their environments so they’re easily reusable in other tests

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To check out Kurtosis, visit our Github repo at https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis. 

To get started building composable containerized environments, see the quickstart at https://docs.kurtosis.com/quickstart.

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Where can I read more about this source-available BSL1.1?

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Check out these helpful links, which we also referenced when making this decision:

• MariaDB’s BSL FAQ: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/‍
• Source-available license overview: https://www.ifross.org/?q=node/1668‍
• Couchbase’s announcement: https://www.couchbase.com/blog/couchbase-adopts-bsl-license/
• Making BSL License Open-Source compliant: https://itsfoss.com/making-the-business-source-license-open-source-compliant/