Meanings
- not comparablecomputingWhose source code can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but which itself is not necessarily open-source.
The BSL is a ‘Source Available’ license that freely allows using the code for development and other non-production work such as testing. Production use of the software requires a commercial license from Lightbend.
2022 September 8, Paul Kunert, quoting Jonas Bonér, “Open source biz sick of FOSS community exploitation overhauls software rights”, in The Register1 more example
MongoDB is licensed as a source-available, distributed, document database and a community edition can be freely downloaded for multiple operating systems. It is well-suited to large-scale, database-driven application development.
2022, Catherine M. Ricardo, Susan Urban, Karen Davis, chapter 14, in Databases Illuminated, 4th edition, Jones & Bartlett Learning, →ISBN, page 546
Origin
First attested in the early 2010s.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
source-available. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/source-available
“source-available.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/source-available. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “source-available,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/source-available.
Source: source-available on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.