License Flip Audit - BUSL/SSPL/AGPL in your deps

Four dependencies in one 40-line docker-compose file had changed licence since the day they were pinned, and the platform engineer at a UK fintech filling in a customer security questionnaire that morning could not see any of them. Nothing in the file looked wrong. Nothing in npm ls or pip list looked wrong. The file said this:

services:
  tf:     { image: hashicorp/terraform:1.9.0 }
  cache:  { image: redis:7.4 }
  search: { image: elasticsearch:8.15.0 }
  db:     { image: bitnami/postgresql:16 }

Every one of those four lines carries a licence that is not the licence the internet remembers for it.

Terraform was MPL-2.0 until 1.5.7. From 1.6.0, released on 10 August 2023, it is BUSL-1.1. Redis was BSD-3-Clause through 7.2.x; 7.4 through 7.8 is dual RSALv2/SSPLv1, and Redis 8.0 (May 2025) added AGPLv3 as a third option, so "Redis is open source" is now true, false, or a choice you have to make, depending only on the tag. Elasticsearch left Apache-2.0 at 7.11 in February 2021 and added AGPLv3 at 8.16 in September 2024. And on 28 August 2025 Broadcom moved every versioned Bitnami tag to docker.io/bitnamilegacy, unmaintained, keeping only a limited set of hardened latest tags in bitnami/ behind a Bitnami Secure subscription reported at $50,000 to $72,000 a year.

None of that is hidden. All of it is public. It is simply not in the file, and it is not in the tool you would reach for.

Why the tools you already have do not catch this

license-checker, pip-licenses and the SPDX field in a package manifest all report the licence of the version you installed, as that version declares it. They answer "what is this?" They cannot answer the question a licence flip actually raises, which is "at which version did it change, and is my pin on the safe side of that line?" A container image tag carries no licence metadata at all. And a general-purpose AI assistant is worse than useless here, because a licence flip is exactly the kind of dated fact a model states with total confidence from whatever was true when it was trained: ask one about Terraform's licence and you will get MPL-2.0.

The bump itself is usually not a human decision either. Renovate or Dependabot opens the pull request, CI is green, someone approves it, and the licence boundary is crossed by a bot on a Tuesday. The cost lands months later, in a procurement review, a due-diligence checklist, or an acquirer's OSS audit.

What License Flip Audit does

It is a VS Code extension that reads the manifest you already have open - package.json, requirements.txt, go.mod, a Dockerfile, a compose file, a pom.xml - and checks each line against 30 recorded flips, each with its version boundary and its date:

3: Terraform 1.6+ is BUSL-1.1, not MPL-2.0 (relicensed 2023-08-10;
   1.5.7 was the last MPL release)...
4: Redis 7.4 through 7.8 is dual RSALv2 / SSPLv1 - source-available,
   not open source. Redis 7.2.x and earlier are BSD-3-Clause.

Pin hashicorp/terraform:1.5.7 and the file is clean. Change one digit and it is not. That is the whole product: the boundary, not the vibe.

The free version finishes one open file completely - every line, all 30 rules, no truncated count, no watermark, no trial. The paid version changes scope, not depth: every manifest in the workspace at once, an exportable CSV/JSON/HTML report for the security questionnaire, a re-check on every save so a bot bump is caught in your working tree, and a JSON file CI can fail a pull request on. $29 once, 7-day full refund.

There is also a free web version - paste a manifest, get the same findings from the same rule set, no install.