Hey there! This is Jaron, the lead developer behind MistServer and one of its founding members. Today is a very special day: we released MistServer 3.0 under a new license (Public Domain instead of aGPLv3) and decided to include all the features previously exclusive to the "Pro" edition of MistServer as well. That means there is now only one remaining version of MistServer: the free and open source version.

You may be wondering why we decided to do this, so I figured I'd write a blog post about it.

First some history! The MistServer project first started almost fifteen years ago, with a gaming-focused live streaming project that was intended to be a rival to the service that would later become known as Twitch. At the time, we relied on third-party technology to make this happen, and internet streaming was still in its infancy in general. Needless to say, that project failed pretty badly.

During a post-mortem meeting for that failed project, the live streaming tech we relied on came up as one of the factors that caused the project to fail. In particular how this software acted like a black box, and made it very tricky to integrate something innovative with it. The question came up if we could have done better, ourselves. We figured we probably could, and decided to try it. After all, how hard could it be to write live streaming server software, right..?

What we thought would be a short and fun project, quickly turned into something much bigger. The further we got, the more we discovered that video tech was - back then especially - a very closed off industry that is hard to get into. As we worked on the software, we came up with the idea that we wanted to change this. Open it up to newcomers, like we ourselves had tried, and make it possible for anyone with a good idea to make a successful online media service. There were several popular free and open source web server software packages, like Apache and Nginx - but all the media server software was closed (and usually quite expensive, as well). We wanted to do the same thing for media server software: create something open, free, and easy to use for developers of all backgrounds to enable creativity to flourish.

However, we also had people working on this software full-time that most definitely needed to be paid for their efforts. So while the first version of MistServer was already partially open source, we made a few hard decisions: we kept the most valuable features closed source, and the parts that were open were licensed under the aGPLv3. That license is an "infectious" open source license: it requires anyone communicating over a network with the software to get the full source code of the whole project. That would make it almost impossible to use in a commercial environment - both because of the missing features as well as the aggressive license.

That allowed us to then sell custom licensing and support contracts, while staying true to the ideas behind open source. Our plan was to eventually - as we had built up enough customer base and could afford to make this decision - release the whole software package as open source and solely sell support and similar services contracts. As we were funded by income from license sales, our growth was fairly restricted and thus slow and organic. We built up a good reputation, but were nowhere near being able to proceed with the plan we made at the start.

Over the years, we slowly did release some of the closed parts as open, but we had to be careful not to "give away" too much. To non-commercial users, we made available a very cheap version of the license without support. Our license and support contracts over time evolved to be mostly about support, and licensing itself more of an excuse to start discussing support terms. From my own interactions with our customers it has become clear that they stay with us because of the support we offer, and consider that the most valuable part of their contracts with us. However, the constrained growth did mean we were not able to fully commit to a business model that did not involve selling licenses.

Until, last October, Livepeer came along. They have a similar goal and mindset as the MistServer team did and does, which meant they not only understood our long-term plan, but believed that with the increased funding flow they brought to us, it could now finally be executed!

So, it may seem like a sudden change of course for us to release the full software as open source today, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's something we've believed in and have been wanting to do right from the start of the project. Words are lacking to describe how it feels to finally be able to come full circle and complete a plan that has been so long in the making. It's an extremely exciting moment for us, and I speak for the whole team when I say we're looking forward to continuing to improve and share MistServer with the world.