I almost standardized on Dockhand for my homelab. Then its license moved the goalposts.

Dockhand had been on my shortlist as a Portainer alternative — a single-container Docker/Compose manager with built-in vulnerability scanning, picking up adoption specifically because Portainer's roadmap has been drifting toward a Kubernetes-focused 3.0 that a lot of homelab and small-shop users don't actually need. Then a community post on r/selfhosted (3 October 2026) flagged a license change that's worth understanding in detail, because the pattern is one any self-hoster evaluating a BSL-licensed tool should know to check for.

What actually changed

Per the writeup that followed the Reddit thread, Dockhand's original Business Source License 1.1 terms promised conversion to Apache 2.0 on a fixed date: 1 January 2029. That fixed date is gone. The license now states that each version of Dockhand becomes Apache 2.0 four years after its own individual release date. That sounds almost reasonable phrased that way — "each release eventually becomes open" — until you notice what it actually means in practice: a version released in October 2026 converts in October 2030, not 2029. If the project keeps shipping new releases, as any actively maintained project does, the open-source conversion for whatever version you're actually running never gets meaningfully closer. It's not a broken promise in the sense of being reversed outright — it's a promise restructured so that staying on the license's terms is now a permanent, moving condition rather than a fixed date everyone could plan around.

Commercial-use terms tightened alongside it: businesses running Dockhand in production generally now need a paid license, with exemptions carved out for personal homelabs, qualifying nonprofits and educational organizations, and solo operators running their own infrastructure. Development, testing, and evaluation stay free. That's not an unreasonable business model on its own — plenty of legitimate BSL projects fund themselves this way — but it's a materially different deal than what people adopted the tool under.

Why this is the actual lesson, not "Dockhand bad"

The uncomfortable part of this story is the context it happened in: people were moving to Dockhand specifically because they'd gotten burned, or felt roadmap risk, from Portainer's licensing and direction changes. The lesson isn't "pick tool B instead of tool A" — it's that BSL 1.1's "eventually open source" promise is only as solid as the specific conversion terms in the license text, and marketing copy describing a project as "source available, eventually open" doesn't tell you whether that eventually is a fixed date or a rolling one that effectively never arrives. The actual diligence step is reading the license file itself before standardizing infrastructure around a tool, not trusting the framing on the project's landing page.

What I'm actually doing

I'm not migrating anything onto Dockhand. Between this and the Komodo architecture I already wrote about — GPL-3.0, no paid tier gating features, no conversion-date game to track — Komodo is the one I'm actually standing up on my own hosts. Arcane (BSD-3-Clause, free OIDC/SSO) is the other option people in that Reddit thread were pivoting to, for anyone who wants a true permissive license with zero of this ambiguity rather than a source-available license with a promise that has to be re-read every time the vendor updates it.