At Budibase, we believe that powerful, accessible software should be available to the organizations that run our societies. Recently, we’ve been in deep conversations with government bodies across Europe who love our platform and want to use it to modernize their public services.
However, we kept hitting the same roadblock. While the Budibase Core product has always been open-source (GPLv3), our Enterprise repository - which houses features essential for large-scale government deployments - was closed-source. For the European Public Sector, relying on a closed-source enterprise product creates unacceptable risks around vendor lock-in and violates strict digital sovereignty and procurement standards.
We realized that to truly support the public sector, we needed to make a radical change.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are opening the Budibase Enterprise repository. We are transitioning our Enterprise features from closed-source to a Business Source License (BSL), with a custom-written exemption designed specifically to empower European governments.
Here is what this means for the EU Public Sector, and what it means for the rest of our community.
For the EU Public Sector: Budibase is Effectively 100% Open-Source
Our primary goal with this licensing change was to eliminate every piece of friction for European government organizations.
We have written a specific, permanent exemption into our new BSL license text: Public Sector Organizations located within Europe are granted full Production Use rights regardless of modifications to license verification or feature gating logic..
Whilst the BSL is not an offical Open-Source license, this exemption provides all the same benefits to European public sector organizations.
In plain English:
- Total Code Sovereignty: You now have full access to 100% of the Budibase codebase, including all Enterprise features.
- No Vendor Lock-in: You can build, modify, and deploy the entirety of Budibase in your own environments without relying on our cloud or a proprietary black box.
- Complete Freedom: Under this exemption, you are legally permitted to bypass or modify any license-key requirements for your production deployments.
For the EU Public Sector, this effectively makes the entirety of Budibase an open-source platform. You get the security auditability, the long-term safety, and the flexibility you require to build critical public infrastructure.
Additionally, each version of the enterprise code will automatically be relicensed as GPLv3 after 4-years.
For Our Broader Community: A Transparent Hybrid Model
While empowering the public sector was the catalyst for this change, this transition is a win for our entire community. We are officially adopting a hybrid licensing model:
1. Budibase Core Remains GPLv3: The core platform you use every day is not changing. It remains 100% open-source under the GPLv3 license.
2. Budibase Enterprise is Now BSL: Our previously hidden Enterprise code is now public. By adopting the BSL (a license used by companies like HashiCorp, Sentry, and CockroachDB), we can make our enterprise code transparent while keeping our business sustainable.
- Inspect and Audit: Everyone can now read, learn from, and audit our Enterprise source code.
- The Rule: For commercial entities, you are free to use this code in production, provided you do not modify it to bypass our license key or billing mechanisms.
- The 4-Year Guarantee: To ensure long-term community health, the BSL is time-delayed. Four years after a specific version of Budibase Enterprise is released, that code will automatically convert to the open-source GPLv3 license.
Building for the Future
We want Budibase to be the foundation for the next generation of internal tools and public sector applications. By opening our Enterprise codebase and introducing this European Public Sector exemption, we are aligning our licensing with our deepest values: transparency, security, and accessibility.
We are incredibly excited to see what governments, agencies, and our global community will build with total access to the Budibase ecosystem.