That’s not quite right. You can very much use the bsl code in production without a license and many, many companies do. The BSL contains a space for additional use grants. In crdb’s license, you can use the product for anything except building a hosted database as a service product. The definition of what that is is a little bit vague but it more or less means that the users of the product you sell shouldn’t be able to cause schema changes. This is all just protection against cloud providers taking the product and reselling it. I believe also the terms of this bsl are that it becomes Apache 3 years after the code has been released.