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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 t
by 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 agoI 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 agoUnless 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.