Singlepass Relicensing

As Wasmer transitions from a runtime-focused product to a product-oriented offering (via Wasmer Edge and many other products), we realized that we need to keep each of our software offerings aligned with our business vision.

Singlepass development has relied on sponsorships from our Open Source program since inception, and today we are announcing a new LICENSE that will help sustain Singlepass long term.

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Singlepass is the engine behind more than $30B in assets in smart contracts. Although we are very grateful for our generous good-will sponsors, the sponsorship has proven to provide less value than the effort that took Wasmer to develop it.

To put it clearly: development of the Singlepass compiler cost Wasmer much more than Wasmer received from Sponsorships through time. Because of this, Singlepass will be adopting a new new license that will assure a proper development moving forward.

While Cranelift and LLVM are used internally in our Edge offering, Singlepass is not used anywhere internally at Wasmer. Is a product that is made solely for the advantage of Blockchains, to help them gain address a market that assured secure and sandboxed smart contracts everywhere.

To date, we wanted to make many improvements on Singlepass, but we have fallen short:

• On supporting latest things of the WebAssembly spec (such as reference types, exceptions, multivalue, …)
• To support more chipsets instructions

To this effect, we are going to do a change of license in Singlepass for Wasmer 6.0 to allow providing a robust support and exciting timeline for it moving forward.

While we understand this can make an impact in blockchain projects that are using Singlepass for running their smart contracts, we hope that the community will also deduce that is the only thing that we can do to assure a responsible development for Singlepass moving forward.

This change of license only affects the Singlepass product in Wasmer. All other libraries and products are keeping the same MIT license, and we do not plan any changes on them.

BUSL

After analyzing a lot of the alternatives for licensing, we realized that the Business Source License is the best one that could fit our needs.

For two main reasons:

• It open-source the code after 4 years automatically
• It allows us to assure a proper development of new features moving forward

Of course, we realize that there might be some product offerings that are relaying on the Singlepass backend for production cases, where they get no revenue from it. We will be more than happy to make sure this products have a perpetual license over Singlepass for their needs.

Moving forward

We have done the change of license from MIT to BUSL-1.1 for Wasmer Singlepass 6.0. We are hoping that this will bring enough revenue to push for the following features in Singlepass:

• RISC-V development and testing
• Implementation of new features
  • MultiValue
  • Reference Types
  • Exceptions
• Cross runnable middleware
• Deterministic Stack
• Thorough testing

I hope you remain as excited about we are about the opportunities that a new license model will bring for the development and evolution of Singlepass.