What is the relationship between DuckDB and DuckDB Labs?

DuckDB is the open-source project and codebase itself, freely available under the MIT license, developed as a community and academically-rooted project originating from CWI in Amsterdam. DuckDB Labs is a commercial company, founded by DuckDB's original creators, that provides professional support, consulting, and funds a meaningful share of DuckDB's ongoing core development.

This is a common pattern for successful open-source database projects: the core software remains fully open and free to use, while a commercial entity closely tied to the original creators sustains long-term development and offers paid services (support contracts, custom feature development, consulting) for organizations that need them, without gating the open-source project's core functionality behind any commercial license.

DuckDB Labs is also the organization credited with creating DuckLake, the lakehouse table format described earlier, which, consistent with this pattern, is itself released as an open, MIT-licensed specification rather than a proprietary product exclusive to any paid offering.