Navigating Software Licenses and Pricing Models
Software licenses and pricing structures pose a challenge for organizations of all sizes. Licenses contain precise legal terminology, and small variations can have dramatically distinct interpretations. The Open Source Initiative, a highly trusted nonprofit involved in establishing standards and best-practices around open-source development, provides requirements for licenses to meet their definition of open source as well as a list of licenses that meet these requirements. While this simplifies the interpretation of licenses, free and open source software warrants special consideration. Users of open source software accept a total responsibility for security and stability of their products. For small organizations, the tension between this responsibility and paid, pre-hardened platforms can be challenging to balance. This post reviews a few case studies exemplifying this tension and the necessary considerations when decision making.
Cilium CNI and Managed Cloud Solutions
Security is a primary motivator when selecting managed solutions over self-managed or hand-rolled solutions. For example, Cilium, a Container Network Interface for Kubernetes used by both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, currently has 65 vulnerabilities relating to its latest helm chart. Sixteen are reported as high severity! In order to use this chart safely for anything other than development, a dedicated effort to adjust dependencies is absolutely essential. If such an effort cannot be made, Amazon EKS, Google GKE, and Microsoft AKS offer pre-hardened managed Kubernetes solutions. They can ease operational burdens, but vendor lock-in and price remain concerns. There is no one-size fits all answer, but you can trust MenuLogik to guide you to the solution that is best for your organization.
Bitnami
Bitnami, is an organization that hardens and packages open-source software. Much like the managed Kubernetes services above, its selling points are reduced operational burdens, high trust, and high security. In their words, Bitnami Secure Images are validated and secured for mission-critical projects and production environments. At $72,000 a year in the AWS marketplace, this is reasonable for established enterprise environments with consistent needs.
This pricing structure was adopted after VMWare, and by extension Bitnami, was acquired by Broadcom. Broadcom announced the release of Bitnami Secure Images in July of 2025, with all existing images and tags moving to unversioned legacy repositories in August. For the organizations which had depended on free Bitnami images for years, this rapid shift left little time for decision making. This left the organizations dependent on Bitnami, including open source applications and for-profit initiatives of all sizes, with a choice: adjust budgets to include a nearly six figure expense, or temporarily shift to the legacy images and migrate away from Bitnami.
Rather than treating Bitnami as an exception, organizations must recognize the ever-changing nature of technology licensing and pricing structures. With few guarantees of longevity from even the most established solutions, development teams must for flexibility and adaptability. Organizations must have clear understandings of the licenses they operate under, and be prepared for changes at a moment's notice.
Redis & Valkey
Licenses and pricing structures warrant careful consideration by both users and producers of managed services. Redis, one of the forefront caching solutions, demonstrated last year why consistency is so important. It had previously operated under the BSD 3-Clause license, a license supported by the Open Source Initiative as compatible with its definition of open source. In March of 2024, Redis moved to dual RSALv2 and SSPLv1 licenses, which are unsupported by the Open Source Initiative. This was a defensive move, intended to prohibit managed offerings by hyperscalers like AWS and Azure without licensing agreements. In doing so, they prompted a fork of Redis, Valkey. Valkey is open-source, was immediately supported by the Linux Foundation, and is a direct competitor to redis. It has been increasingly adopted, with Intuit, Tubi, OfferUp, and others adopting it through AWS Elasticache. Through a singular license adjustment Redis was able to reduce free-riding by cloud providers but also irreparably fragmented its userbase and contributors by creating a direct competitor.
Deploying modern products is a technically complex challenge, requiring an interconnected network of services and solutions. On top of this, ensuring security and stability when licenses and pricing structures are constantly evolving and changing requires a deep understanding of the tech ecosystem. Whether you are planning a new venture or seeking support for an existing product, the experts at MenuLogik can provide you with the support you need to navigate effectively.