As the CEO of dotCMS, I want to directly address why we decided to make this licensing change.
dotCMS has always been an open-source company at heart – our content management platform (a visual headless CMS) has been built on open standards and we’ve fostered a developer community for years. We firmly believe in the advantages of open source discussed above: flexibility in deployment, transparency, security, and community-driven innovation. That’s not changing at all.
In fact, by moving to BSL, we’re doubling down on those values while taking steps to ensure we can continue to grow and support our product for the long term.
Here are the key benefits and strengths we see with dotCMS under BSL:
All Features Open to the Community
Under our previous model, some advanced features were limited to paying enterprise customers. Now every feature of dotCMS is available for everyone to use or evaluate out-of-the-box. No more “enterprise edition” silos – the core product is unified. This is huge for developers: you can build and test with the full capabilities of dotCMS without needing a special license. The result is that smaller organizations and developers worldwide have free access to a powerful platform that previously might have been out of reach. We expect this open access to spur greater adoption, more community contributions, and a richer ecosystem of extensions and integrations around dotCMS.
Flexible Deployment
You can run it as a SaaS on our cloud, or deploy it on your own servers, in any cloud, or on-premises. With BSL, this doesn’t change – in fact, it’s reinforced. Since you have the source code, you can deploy dotCMS in whatever environment suits your needs, with full transparency. If you’re an enterprise with strict security or compliance requirements, you can self-host and even inspect the code line-by-line to vet it. If you’re a startup, you can start developing locally or in a small cloud instance for free, then scale up as you grow. BSL licensing puts practically no limit on this kind of flexibility for the vast majority of users. Only when you reach a certain business scale (we define it by total financing) would you need to talk to us about a commercial license. Until then, we’re effectively offering an honor-system community edition that’s fully featured. And remember, even if you do need a paid license for production, the code is still the same – there’s no closed “enterprise-only” fork. This means less fragmentation and a better experience for all developers using dotCMS.
High Security and Transparency
In the CMS world, security is paramount – these systems often power public websites or critical intranets. With dotCMS’s source available, our customers and community can audit the code for vulnerabilities, build custom security patches if needed, and trust what’s running in their stack. We adhere to “security through transparency” (the opposite of “security through obscurity”). Plus, being able to self-host means you’re not forced to send your content or user data to a third-party SaaS if you don’t want to. Many large enterprises and government users choose dotCMS for exactly this reason – they can keep everything in-house, behind their firewall, with full control. The open nature of our codebase gives them confidence.
Community Growth and Global Adoption
Our mission is to bring dotCMS’s benefits to a global audience of developers and businesses. By removing barriers (no feature paywalls, free use until you’re quite large, etc.), we anticipate a big influx of new users and contributors. It’s exciting to think of more startups, digital agencies, and independent devs adopting dotCMS because they can access everything freely. We’re already seeing increased interest since the BSL announcement – a lot of “hey, I can do X now without buying enterprise, awesome!” kind of reactions. This wider adoption creates a virtuous cycle: more users → more feedback, more plugins and integrations contributed back → a better product → even more users. As a company, that broader adoption is hugely valuable to us (even if not all those users immediately convert to paying customers). It increases our influence and market share in the headless CMS space. Over time, some of those growing users will become commercial customers when it makes sense, which helps fund further development. It’s a win-win scenario: developers get a free, powerful CMS; businesses get flexibility and lower TCO; and we get growth in community and ultimately more opportunities to provide value-added services.
Sustainability for dotCMS
The BSL license is very clear that if an organization is deriving significant commercial value from dotCMS (for example, a Fortune 500 company using it to run their global web presence), they should obtain a commercial license. It’s a way for those who get major benefits to support the product’s development financially, while those who are just getting started or operating at a smaller scale can use it for free. By adopting this model, we align our business interests with our open-source users’ interests. We don’t have to hold back features to force an upgrade; we give it all out, knowing that the more people use it, the more likely we’ll gain some paying customers at the top end. This strategy has been validated by other companies we discussed. It means we can keep investing heavily in R&D, security updates, and community support, because there’s a clear value proposition for larger customers to fund those efforts.
Conclusion
Choosing BSL is our way of embracing the future – a future where open source rules, but also where open-source companies thrive and aren’t cannibalized by the very ecosystems they enable.
We’re incredibly excited about this direction. With open source leading the software revolution (from AI to cloud to CMS and beyond), and with thoughtful licensing models like BSL supporting sustainable innovation, we see a world of opportunity ahead.
At dotCMS, our goal is to deliver the best of both worlds: the freedom, flexibility, and community-driven innovation of open source and the reliability, accountability, and longevity of a well-resourced commercial software vendor.
We believe BSL is the right choice to achieve that balance.
To our developer community and customers: we thank you for joining us on this journey.
The future is open – and we’re building it together.