dbt Labs' source-available bet pays off at Snowflake

Welcome to Runtime! Today: dbt Labs' decision to go with a source-available license for its new Fusion product gets a vote of confidence from Snowflake, Windsurf faces a headwind, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Doing business together

SAN FRANCISCO — Buried within the parade of announcements this week at Snowflake Summit was Snowflake's embrace of dbt Fusion, the new data-pipeline technology built by dbt Labs. It's a deal that showcases the continuing evolution of a generation of companies built around open-source projects toward a less-pure but more pragmatic way of distributing software that doesn't get any less expensive to produce every year.

At some point in the near-ish future Snowflake customers will be able to build data pipelines using dbt Fusion, which was announced last week and was designed to handle modern data-management requirements that didn't exist when the original open-source dbt Core project was released in 2016, said Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, in an interview with Runtime. Fusion is based on technology dbt Labs acquired from SDF Labs earlier this year, and alongside the launch of this new product dbt Labs also joined the ranks of companies that have embraced "source-available" licenses, a departure from its previous strategy.

SDF Labs developed a way to author data pipelines with full understanding of SQL commands that was much faster and more capable than dbt's existing technology, and that code was the base for the Fusion launch, Handy said.
dbt Core was, and remains, an open-source project available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, but Fusion is governed by the Elastic license, which allows users to inspect the code but prohibits anyone from using it to build a commercial service that competes with dbt Labs.
Source-available licenses have been quite controversial in the open-source world given they have mostly been used to restrict the use of code once available under more permissive licenses, but Handy sees this situation a little differently.
"We actually bought a piece of proprietary technology and then open sourced, or source availabled, a big chunk of it," he said, perhaps coining a new turn of phrase.

Around the same time dbt Labs was finalizing the acquisition of SDF Labs in late 2024, Snowflake executive vice president Christian Kleinerman reached out to Handy about working more closely together. Snowflake customers were already using dbt to create data pipelines, but wanted an easier way to use it directly within Snowflake, said Chris Child, vice president of product, in an interview with Runtime.

Snowflake was originally interested in working with the open-source dbt Core project, but once it realized that Fusion was in the works under the Elastic license it agreed to some sort of commercial arrangement (neither Handy nor Child would discuss the particulars) to launch dbt Projects within Snowflake this week.
As Snowflake grows, it's traveling a similar trail blazed by the cloud infrastructure providers, who quickly realized that customers needed and wanted their vendors to help them use open-source tools they were already using in their own data centers.
But unlike the cloud providers — namely AWS, which pissed off a generation of open-source companies by (legally) building cloud services around open-source projects without contributing anything back — Snowflake was looking for more of a partnership, Handy said.
"There are real strategic implications for a company to take a dependency on the technology that is produced by another company," he said.

Data infrastructure is quickly becoming an essential part of enterprise tech strategies, much the same way businesses realized they needed to have at least some presence in the cloud a decade ago. Handy is hoping that deals like the one with Snowflake will allow more developers to encounter dbt's tools and eventually decide to pay his company — which has raised just over $400 million in funding — for higher-level tools and services they can't get through the basic service offered by Snowflake.

"We have a huge overlap of the community between us and Snowflake, and we want those folks to be able to use Fusion," he said.
And while dreaming up possible mergers and acquisitions is usually something tech media outlets save for months when nothing is happening, like August, it's not hard to see a lot of overlap between dbt Labs, currently valued at around $4.2 billion, and Snowflake, which is still trading below its opening-day price but growing at a solid clip.

Winds of change

It's been almost a month since Bloomberg reported that OpenAI had reached a deal to buy Windsurf, one of the startups quickly changing the market for software-development tools with its AI assistant, for $3 billion. But an official announcement has yet to materialize, and that's causing a lot of problems for Windsurf's relationship with OpenAI rival Anthropic.

When Anthropic dropped its latest coding-oriented AI model two weeks ago, Windsurf was left out of the early access program. On Thursday, Anthropic's Jared Kaplan confirmed that the model provider blacklisted Windsurf: "We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future," he told TechCrunch.

The dispute leaves Windsurf in a bad position: Windsurf will be less useful, and therefore less valuable, without access to Anthropic's Claude models, and each day that passes without a confirmation or denial of a deal makes the situation worse. And after Anysphere announced Thursday that it just raised $900 million to continue developing Cursor, any company trying to make a decision about which coding assistant to use internally has a lot of incentive to pick the tool that will work with all model providers.

Enterprise moves

Rania Succar is the new CEO of Kaseya, joining the security company after nine years at Intuit.

Howard Greenfield is the new president and chief revenue officer at Silverfort, joining the identity security company after similar roles at Axis Security and Sailpoint.

Pete Angstadt is the new president for go-to-market (who decided this was a better term for "sales") at Securiti AI, following similar roles at Ping Identity and Forgerock.

Adam Seligman is the new chief technology officer at Workato, joining the integration platform company after leading developer relations for AWS.

Amy Herzog is the new chief information security officer at AWS, following two years in a similar role on the Amazon side of the house.

Garth Fort is the new chief product officer at LogicMonitor, following product leadership roles at Splunk and AWS.

The Runtime roundup

MongoDB's stock rose nearly 13% Thursday after reporting earnings that beat Wall Street estimates and raising its guidance on Wednesday.

IBM Cloud suffered two major outages in the past week, according to Network World, which must have been a huge problem for all seven of its customers.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!