Is Open Source Software Free Forever?

"Free forever" has two meanings and you need to separate them before this question makes sense. Free as in price and free as in freedom. Both are decided by the license, and the license is what determines how long "forever" actually lasts.

Take price first. Open source software costs nothing to download and use, and once a version is released under an open source license, that license is effectively irrevocable. MIT, Apache, GPL, they all grant permanent rights for the code as published. If you are running version 2.1 of a library, no future decision by the company that built it can take that version away from you. You have the code, the license covers it, and no one is coming to delete it. That part really is forever.

What can change is everything published after that version. Companies exercise this right regularly. Elastic moved Elasticsearch from Apache 2.0 to a source-available license in 2021, mainly so large cloud providers could not resell it as a service. Redis did something similar in 2024, leaving BSD for a dual license that restricts how cloud vendors can offer it. HashiCorp changed Terraform from MPL to the Business Source License in 2023, and the community forked the last open version into OpenTofu. In every one of these cases the old releases stayed usable under their original terms. Nobody lost code they already had. What people lost was the ability to get new features under the old license.

The "open core" model softens this further. GitLab, Supabase, Mattermost, and plenty of Indian startups publish a genuinely free core and sell premium features around it. The core stays free indefinitely, but the product as a whole does not. That is not a bait and switch, it is the business model, and it works because the free core is genuinely useful on its own.

The second meaning, free as in freedom, comes from the Free Software Foundation. Freedom means the right to study, modify, and redistribute the software. That freedom is also permanent for the version you hold, but it only covers what the author actually released. You cannot redistribute a future version under terms the author never granted you, and you cannot expect a relicensed future version to honor the old license.

Where most people get burned is hosted services, not licenses. A SaaS product built on open source software is not free forever for you, the customer. The underlying code's license may be permanent, but your access to the hosted instance depends on the vendor's pricing and terms. If a company doubles its subscription price, the open source license does not protect you. Your protection is that you can self-host the open source version instead. That is exactly what many Indian startups do when a cloud vendor's pricing turns hostile; they take the open source code, deploy it on their own servers, and keep paying only for infrastructure.

So the honest answer: free forever is guaranteed for the code you already have, not for future versions and not for hosted services. Treat an open source dependency as a permanent asset and treat the vendor's roadmap as a forecast. If you are building on software whose license could change, you can hedge by pinning a version you are happy with, contributing to the project so you have some leverage, or simply being ready to fork. For a deeper breakdown of what each license allows, see our licensing explainer.