lakeFS

license

BSL-1.1(non-OSI: production use only of the unmodified release and only for internal use, no hosting for third parties

source

public

core features withheld

yes — RBAC, SSO, SCIM, auditing, lakeFS Mount and the Iceberg REST Catalog ship only in lakeFS Enterprise

lakeFS moved from Apache-2.0 to the Business Source License 1.1 with v1.87.0, and a delayed-conversion license is scored on its terms today. Its Additional Use Grant allows production use only of the unmodified release, only for an organization's internal purposes, and never as something offered to a third party, so the full published source can be read and built but not freely run. lakeFS Enterprise also carries RBAC, SSO, SCIM and auditing that the Community edition does not. Releases before v1.87.0 stay under Apache-2.0.

• https://api.github.com/repos/treeverse/lakeFS recorded 2026-09-24

  Repo metadata - license spdx_id NOASSERTION, private false, archived false, default branch master - for treeverse/lakeFS.

• https://docs.lakefs.io/editions/ recorded 2026-09-24

  Editions page lists "lakeFS Enterprise, self-managed" with "Enterprise features, including RBAC, SSO, SCIM, auditing" and describes lakeFS Community as "the source-available distribution, free to use under the" Business Source License.

• https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS/blob/master/LICENSE recorded 2026-09-24

  LICENSE is the Business Source License 1.1 with Licensed Work "lakeFS 1.87.0", an Additional Use Grant limiting production use to the "Unmodified Licensed Work" and to "the internal business purposes of Your organization", and Change License "Apache License, Version 2.0" four years after each version is first made publicly available.

• https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS/blob/master/README.md recorded 2026-09-24

  README now calls lakeFS "a source-available tool" and says it "is licensed under the [Business Source License 1.1](LICENSE) (BUSL-1.1)", with free production use limited to "the unmodified software for your organization's internal business purposes".

• https://lakefs.io/blog/lakefs-business-source-license recorded 2026-09-24

  Treeverse announcement dated September 22, 2026: "Starting with lakeFS v1.87.0, the lakeFS open source project (the lakeFS Community edition) moves from Apache 2.0 to the" Business Source License, and "Every release published before that stays under Apache 2.0, permanently."

lakeFS's adoption reading uses GitHub stars, since Treeverse publishes no server deployment figure. The `lakefs` package on PyPI is a Python SDK wrapper around the server's API rather than the server itself, so its downloads measure client use, and a star does not confirm production use either.

• https://api.github.com/repos/treeverse/lakeFS recorded 2026-08-18

  Repo metadata - stargazers_count = 5,490 - for treeverse/lakeFS.

lakeFS provides zero-copy branching, committing and merging over three object stores behind an S3-compatible API, with hooks and garbage collection. It versions storage it does not itself provide and does no indexing or retrieval, which is why it covers much less of the persist-index-retrieve path than Vespa does.

• https://docs.lakefs.io/ recorded 2026-09-30

  Docs home says lakeFS provides "version control over the data lake, using Git-like semantics to create and access data versions", and lists Garbage Collection and Webhooks.

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/treeverse/lakeFS/master/README.md recorded 2026-09-30

  README says lakeFS "transforms your object storage into a Git-like repository" and lists "AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage" as underlying storage, "API compatible with S3" and working with Spark and Hive.

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/treeverse/lakeFS/master/README.md recorded 2026-09-30

  README says "you can create hooks that make sure that only data that passed these tests will become part of production." Searched the body for vector, index and search as retrieval features: none.