Snowplow is no longer Open Source.

On January 8th, 2024, Snowplow announced it is changing its core components license to Snowplow Limited Use License Agreement (SLULA); this marks the end of Snowplow as open-source software as we know it.

Effectively, any user of Snowplow Open Source who wishes to run the latest components in a production environment must purchase a license from Snowplow Ltd. ??

A Snowplow Journey

First, let me publicly express my admiration for the Snowplow founders Yali Sassoon and Alexander Dean and what they've built. Snowplow is a remarkable event pipeline. It has proven to be stable, reliable, and cost-effective and is responsible for collecting and processing billions of events daily, from websites to mobile phones and servers.

I've been working with Snowplow pipelines for ten years, and since I first saw raw event data, it has changed how I look at event data forever.

In 2020, witnessing the continuous democratization of the data stack, I started?SnowcatCloud, and we introduced the ability for smaller companies to use Snowplow through our?cloud-hosted Snowplow?pipeline service. Today, we service small and enterprise customers across five continents with infrastructure in three AWS regions.

Although I empathize with Snowplow Ltd., I think this license change is not in the long-term best interest of Snowplow Ltd, the product, or its users.

Without open source, Snowplow loses its primary and most important differentiator against competitors.

Today, Snowplow Ltd continues developing ways to lock customers in by developing new components like Snowbridge, dbt models, and streamlit visualizations.

These new components are often sub-par compared with existing cloud products and services, creating a monolith, the opposite principle of a composable data stack.

Our goal is to integrate with the existing best-in-class cloud services/SaaS rather than try rebuild the wheel.

OpenSnowcat - Open Source Fork of Snowplow

The divergence of future vision and the license change led us to?OpenSnowcat, a fork of the Snowplow pipeline core components. At SnowcatCloud, we have a different vision for this event pipeline and are happy to take the driver's seat.

Our goals:

• Free and Open-Source Forever?- Provide existing and new users with a widely-accepted license that companies can trust, and that won't suddenly change in the future.
• Integrated & Cost-Efficient?- Integrate with cloud services that simplify managing the platform and running cost-efficiently and reliably at scale.
• Stable, Compatible, & Portable?- Stable over time, compatible with Snowplow and other SDKs so that existing implementation can continue to drive value and seamless portability from and to Snowplow.

We're committed to sustaining this event pipeline for the many businesses dependent on the rights granted by the original Apache v2.0 License.