8 ms·

What if another company takes open-source Sentry and start offering hosted versions of it, competing with Sentry.io and in the end putting Sentry.io out of the

by fiatjaf 10y ago

What if another company takes open-source Sentry and start offering hosted versions of it, competing with Sentry.io and in the end putting Sentry.io out of the market? Would that make you regret making your software open-source? I guess this is probably not an issue for Sentry as it is now, but imagine some small company with a new software-as-a-service, super useful and loved everywhere, but without a well-established "name" in the market yet. Does the same answer still apply?

zeeg 10y ago
There's only two things we really consider as protection of our product and brand: 1. It's a big project, we are the experts (and the only real committers to the service). We also control commit access, so unless you want to maintain a complicated fork it's just not in your best interests. 2. We own the trademarks. This doesn't always help, for example this is literally a copy paste of our previous homepage: http://getsentry.cn/welcome http://getsentry.cn/welcome That said, there are companies out there who absolutely violate the 'spirit of open source' and use our code for other commercial entities. While we're not preventing them from doing that, I promise you we (and many of our users) absolutely look at that in a negative light. In a lot of ways, we're trusting that the fact that our advocates, who are developers, are also willing to do the right thing. As you mentioned, this isn't really a threat to Sentry these days, but it was a fair concern two years ago. I think you really do have to put trust in the fact that most people aren't evil.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  I see that copy-pasting and using Sentry's name is, but if a competitor credits you, but still offers the hosted service, would you consider it evil? I have the impression that someone doing it would have a better image even with people loyal to Sentry: "well, these competitors here are not bad guys, just Sentry users like us, the only difference is that they are offering hosted Sentry for lower prices!". (I'm not talking about the legal stuff, I'm completely ignoring it)
  - zeeg 10y ago
    Unless you want to maintain a fork we could very easily make life difficult ;) I don't have a concrete answer, but if it happens you just gotta work around it. Not much different than having a dozen competitors trying to do the same thing as you. I think it's very easy to see you, as a commercial business, wouldn't want to put all of your livelihood on a project that has 150k lines of code and you know very little about. That's obviously not true for every project, but if your project is so simple there's no reason I couldn't just reimplement it anyways.
jordigh 10y ago
> I guess this is probably not an issue for Sentry as it is now It kind of is, with Opbeat as their competitor which forked off from Sentry, but Opbeat have also kept the code that came from Sentry free.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  Opbeat forked the clients not the server. The client forks are fun because we are still credited in their licenses. Most of our competitors have their clients open source so that is not really a concern anyways.
mperham 10y ago
Generally you license the code so competitors have a disadvantage e.g. with GNU licenses, they may have to open source any changes they make. As the copyright holder, you can do things with the code that they cannot (since you don't have to follow license restrictions), i.e. create premium features.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  That's one way to do it but we (Sentry) don't do that. Our server software is BSD licensed.
- zeeg 10y ago
  Thats a common situation, but we explicitly refuse to do that. I have a strong opinion that it doesn't represent what open source should be, and thats absolutely free software. I do understand that some things are considered necessary, but we're trying to prove thats not the case. It's also something that can limit the adoption of your product. I've worked with companies in the past have either refused to use allow GPL software, or would have a significant audit process you'd have to go through to be able to use it.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    What do you think about using a license that forces freeing any changes to what you shared but doesn't affect anything linking to it dynamically or statically? As in: http://zeromq.org/area:licensing http://zeromq.org/area:licensing Additionally, patent license provisions for using the shared code seem almost mandatory given the patent trolling we're seeing of both suppliers and users of whatever they manage to get through a patent clerk. All the FOSS licenses should try to include some protection there against beneficiaries suing derivatives.
    - zeeg 10y ago
      Definitely not a license expert here. Lots of legal folk I trust would stand by "Apache and only Apache" for releasing FOSS, and I think one of the core reasons is patent protection. We may re-license Sentry at some point to Apache just because its a more understood model and as a growing business that may one day be important. It's also nice that it provides good out of the box tools that are widely supported (e.g. the CLA).

by fiatjaf 10y ago

zeeg 10y ago

There's only two things we really consider as protection of our product and brand: 1. It's a big project, we are the experts (and the only real committers to the service). We also control commit access, so unless you want to maintain a complicated fork it's just not in your best interests. 2. We own the trademarks. This doesn't always help, for example this is literally a copy paste of our previous homepage: http://getsentry.cn/welcome http://getsentry.cn/welcome That said, there are companies out there who absolutely violate the 'spirit of open source' and use our code for other commercial entities. While we're not preventing them from doing that, I promise you we (and many of our users) absolutely look at that in a negative light. In a lot of ways, we're trusting that the fact that our advocates, who are developers, are also willing to do the right thing. As you mentioned, this isn't really a threat to Sentry these days, but it was a fair concern two years ago. I think you really do have to put trust in the fact that most people aren't evil.

fiatjaf 10y ago
I see that copy-pasting and using Sentry's name is, but if a competitor credits you, but still offers the hosted service, would you consider it evil? I have the impression that someone doing it would have a better image even with people loyal to Sentry: "well, these competitors here are not bad guys, just Sentry users like us, the only difference is that they are offering hosted Sentry for lower prices!". (I'm not talking about the legal stuff, I'm completely ignoring it)
- zeeg 10y ago
  Unless you want to maintain a fork we could very easily make life difficult ;) I don't have a concrete answer, but if it happens you just gotta work around it. Not much different than having a dozen competitors trying to do the same thing as you. I think it's very easy to see you, as a commercial business, wouldn't want to put all of your livelihood on a project that has 150k lines of code and you know very little about. That's obviously not true for every project, but if your project is so simple there's no reason I couldn't just reimplement it anyways.

jordigh 10y ago

> I guess this is probably not an issue for Sentry as it is now It kind of is, with Opbeat as their competitor which forked off from Sentry, but Opbeat have also kept the code that came from Sentry free.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Opbeat forked the clients not the server. The client forks are fun because we are still credited in their licenses. Most of our competitors have their clients open source so that is not really a concern anyways.

mperham 10y ago

Generally you license the code so competitors have a disadvantage e.g. with GNU licenses, they may have to open source any changes they make. As the copyright holder, you can do things with the code that they cannot (since you don't have to follow license restrictions), i.e. create premium features.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
That's one way to do it but we (Sentry) don't do that. Our server software is BSD licensed.
zeeg 10y ago
Thats a common situation, but we explicitly refuse to do that. I have a strong opinion that it doesn't represent what open source should be, and thats absolutely free software. I do understand that some things are considered necessary, but we're trying to prove thats not the case. It's also something that can limit the adoption of your product. I've worked with companies in the past have either refused to use allow GPL software, or would have a significant audit process you'd have to go through to be able to use it.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  What do you think about using a license that forces freeing any changes to what you shared but doesn't affect anything linking to it dynamically or statically? As in: http://zeromq.org/area:licensing http://zeromq.org/area:licensing Additionally, patent license provisions for using the shared code seem almost mandatory given the patent trolling we're seeing of both suppliers and users of whatever they manage to get through a patent clerk. All the FOSS licenses should try to include some protection there against beneficiaries suing derivatives.
  - zeeg 10y ago
    Definitely not a license expert here. Lots of legal folk I trust would stand by "Apache and only Apache" for releasing FOSS, and I think one of the core reasons is patent protection. We may re-license Sentry at some point to Apache just because its a more understood model and as a growing business that may one day be important. It's also nice that it provides good out of the box tools that are widely supported (e.g. the CLA).