18 ms·

Re-Licensing Sentry

348 points by troydavis 7y ago

atonse 7y ago
Wishing you guys well. Over time we're seeing there needed to be this sort-of middle ground license for companies, which is essentially, "anyone can use it as a dependency, but you can't use this product, slap a different label on it and then compete directly with us" and it seems that this and related licenses are going to accomplish that.
machbio 7y ago
Elasticsearch and MongoDB has really started an interesting debate on Open Source Licensing..More Power to Opensource Software Providers that need to reap the benefits of their work.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  They haven't started a debate. The debate of "should we be open or not" has been going on for as long as Open Source has existed. And we've had licenses that attempt to sound open without being open for a long time as well, under names like "shared source".
tedivm 7y ago
Yet another company that uses the open source community to grow and then rips the rug out from under them. This corporate take over and redefinition of open source needs to stop. The "Business Source License" is not an open source license, and lying to the community about it is nothing short of gaslighting. This decision is bad for the community, and no amount of marketing speak and lying from sentry is going to change that.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Is that what open source is?
  - tedivm 7y ago
    Creating open source software is a choice. No one is required to do it. That choice has both benefits and potential negative consequences if your goal is to commercialize. The benefits include things like volunteer labor, more alpha testers, and community goodwill. The negative is that you have less control over how your software is used. I don't have an answer to how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software. I do know that redefining open source is not the way to handle it though.
    - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
      > how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software AWS has more than enough resources to re-implement (or fork/maintain) your software. So if you write a license that pisses off your own community and prevents AWS from using it, then that's probably what they're going to do, and now you have no users. The answer to AWS running a hosted version of your software is, encourage it and ask for patches and contributions back.
    - dorfsmay 7y ago
      Exactly, and they made the choice to no longer do it. Feel free to fork it and maintain their effort.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        Which if fine. They're allowed to do it. The community of people who use and contribute to the project also get to be mad about it. Look, if Sentry wants to make money selling their software they should have just been proprietary from the beginning.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - rstupek 7y ago
    Yes it actually does mean that is what open source is.
  - 7y ago
- tommoor 7y ago
  Could you elaborate on how the BSL is "bad for the community"?
  - mirekrusin 7y ago
    Agency creating systems for clients, contributes to sentry - bug reports/prs etc, can they use it now? Can they deploy system for their client integrated with self-hosted sentry?
  - ensignavenger 7y ago
    It does not offer essential freedoms as defined in the Open Source Definition. This includes the ability to fork the software, make alterations, and sell use the result however one wants to (within the rights of the open source license), including selling it or creating a commercial service based on it. This license restricts the ability of the community to collaborate on the software by placing the community at a lower status than a single commercial sponsor.
    - tosser199 7y ago
      You are confusing free software and open source. Free software is the one about freedom.
      - ensignavenger 7y ago
        I'm not confusing anything: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
      - eindiran 7y ago
        You are confusing "source-available" software with "open source" software. Open source software is defined by the definition given here: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd This license (BSL) is source-available, but it is clearly not compliant with the terms of the Open Source Definition, which Sentry acknowledges. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_sof...
- PuerkitoBio 7y ago
  > The "Business Source License" is not an open source license, and lying to the community about it is nothing short of gaslighting. They do state that it is not an open source license in the article: > Although we’ve come to refer to the BSL as eventually open-source since it converts to an OSI-approved license at the conversion date, due to the grant restriction, it is formally not an open-source license.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- thothamon 7y ago
  I feel like they're being very honest. If you (or anyone else) feels strongly, you can always fork the code now and develop it. You and I have no right to the _future code_ that Sentry might write and license under different terms.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    This is equivalent to Oracle (possibly the worst bad actor in open source history) killing OpenSolaris. They're sending a giant Fuck You to anyone who contributed their time and effort to the project. It's a completely unethical thing to do. I have no problem with someone using one of these horrible licenses, if they use it from the start. But to adopt it after the fact is blatant exploitation.
- benatkin 7y ago
  Exactly. Those developers they paid millions of dollars could have been paid similar amounts by other companies, and may have cared that they were contributing to a bona fide open source project.
- kevin_b_er 7y ago
  It seems to be either that or have amazon rip the rug out from under them AND the open source community at once.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  To be fair, the open source community "used" them as well. No shame in one party deciding to just walk away.
- dang 7y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines by name-calling and failing to assume good faith. I'm sure you can make your substantive points without doing either of those things. Please do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- burtonator 7y ago
  If you're right, why doesn't the community fork it? I hear lots of people complaining about this. That it's some sort of theft. Yet, I've rarely seen people actually use the OSS license and decide to take it their own direction. I think this really ends up reaffirming what Sentry is saying in the first place. It's hard to build a OSS project and you get too many freeloaders. You're basically a freeloader and now you're upset that there's no longer a free ride. BTW. Not trying to be insulting by using this term 'freeloader'. I wasn't trying to be derisive just saying you were getting value for free.
softwaredoug 7y ago
> Protection from other companies selling our work I'm not against these sorts of licenses. But we should all be aware that companies like this (and Mongo, Elastic, etc) are a step away from the OSI model of "open source". Which is more about many orgs collaborating on a shared solution so we don't need a vendor, rather than what this is - a vendor opening up code and allowing contributions.
troydavis 7y ago
> The BSL lets us hit our goals in a clean and low-impact way: it won’t change anyone’s ability to run Sentry at their company, but it will ensure that we are protected from our work being used in an anti-competitive fashion I don't think this is accurate. It will ensure that Sentry is protected from its work being used in a competitive fashion. While the issues pointed out in the blog post are real, competing isn't "anti-competitive." The intent and the effect here is to reduce competition, not increase it.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  But they're not competing. They're not trying to do something similar in a more efficient way. They're parasites - genuinely, even literally. They're taking away the energy sentry needs to run themselves but, if they succeed too well, they will destroy their own capacity to run. Two people can compete. Tomatoes and people are complementary - it's nice to have both. Tapeworms and people are playing a game in which, if the people win, the tapeworms lose, and if the people lose, the tapeworms lose to.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  This ignores the nuance. It is to level the playing field. Sentry would not be able to compete against Amazon hosting their service and reaping the financial benefits, and nor should they have to (and to do so with Amazon's resources available to them would be a Herculean task). If you're not a fan of the model, roll your own codebase.
  - troydavis 7y ago
    > Sentry would not be able to compete against Amazon hosting their service, and nor should they have to. If that's Sentry's opinion (and it seems like it is), that's fine, but that's not what "anti-competitive" means. The word for that is "competitive." (The specifics depend on the jurisdiction, but the behavior described by the FTC is what's widely considered "anti-competitive": https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices)
JoshTriplett 7y ago
So, Sentry is no longer Open Source at all, though people might potentially be able to collaborate on three-year-old versions (or, hopefully, use whatever unified fork pops up from the last Open Source release). That's disappointing. Unfortunately, the more companies use such licenses, the more others see it as "safety in numbers" for them to do the same.
- scj 7y ago
  I somewhat suspect companies that apply "creative" licenses like this haven't been under a corporate legal department before. Using a standard license is great. Using a custom license that is extremely similar to an existing license is not as good, but is usually workable... Showing legal how to use Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    > Showing legal how to use Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best. A conversation made far less pleasant by the ability to feed arbitrary dates into a Git repo's commit history: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti I'm sure there's a way to find the actual time a push happened; hopefully it doesn't involve subpoenaing GitHub (or Microsoft, I guess) for logs.
    - ilammy 7y ago
      If you're that paranoid for your software, you can vendor the source, sign the tag with publicly-verifiable GPG key, and include some cryptographic timestamp in the description (e.g., hash of the current Bitcoin block or something) Also, print all of that, get the legal to seal the pages, and put them into a safe.
  - cma 7y ago
    > Showing legal how to use Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best. Wouldn't that be: > Showing legal how to use [Microsoft] Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them [Microsoft] Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best. Seems that 'Microsoft' prefix might get a bit more clout.
nathancahill 7y ago
We're huge fans of Sentry and have it deeply integrated in our products. The fully open source nature has helped us a ton with these advanced integrations, being able to look at the code to see exactly what is happening instead of relying on docs (which are great as well, not faulting them). At the same time, I remember seeing a new startup that had completely ripped off Sentry + docs and had just done a find and replace for the company name. I thought I had read about it on HN but I can't find the link. It's clear we need a license that allows software to be developed in the open but prevents this type abuse. I don't know if this license is the solution. It clearly isn't open source and should not be construed as such (they are very clear about this in the post), but I haven't seen other better proposals either. Armchair criticism is easy, and this seems like a reasonable middle-ground. We'll keep using Sentry and continue to be customers. Outside of their Sentry.io product, they have released and contributed to a ton of other Open Source libraries. As I understand it, that will continue. For me, this passes the sniff test.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > It's clear we need a license that allows software to be developed in the open but prevents this type abuse. The ability to fork is the point of open source, because it assures continuity. The price of this is the non-zero probability of hostile forks (which I would not classify as 'abuse'). I think there's a section of technologist who license their software for pragmatic (traction, fixing bugs) and not ideological reasons and get surprised when someone forks the project in a way they don't like.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - simplyinfinity 7y ago
    You can fork it, you can mod it. But you cannot sell forked sentry as a service to companies. If companies want sentry they can host it themselves and you can provide customization/support services for that.
    - 7y ago
rectang 7y ago
> But if we move to an “open core” model that better protects our IP, in our eyes, that means we’re no longer an open-source company. "Open core" products have an open source core. Sentry won't any more. > Enter The Business Source License (BSL) This license is NOT open source. Don't call it that. Actual open source advocates like me will keep hectoring you until you stop.
- troydavis 7y ago
  > This license is NOT open source. Don't call it that. The blog post says this: "due to the grant restriction, it is formally not an open-source license."
  - DSMan195276 7y ago
    "formally". They're using weasel words to pretend it's still 'open-source', but that they just can't technically call it that. And later-on in the article they say this: > It’s a brave new world, but we believe this licensing change will best ensure the future of Sentry and that protections-oriented OSS licenses like the BSL will become increasingly common as time goes on. "protections-oriented OSS licenses like the BSL" - I guess they can't call it an "Open-Source license", but calling it an "Open-Source Software license" is ok? Are they supposed to mean different things?
    - MFLoon 7y ago
      I don't think it's weasel words. They're just acknowledging that the OSI doesn't recognize the BSL as an Open-Source license, but the source is still open in the literal sense. Not only that, but most of the things associated with code being open source are still true: you can inspect, modify and use the code as you can with any OSS, the only things you can't do is commercialize or redistribute it.
      - ryan_lane 7y ago
        It's definitely weasel words. Open Source has a definition. The source may be publicly viewable, but that isn't "open". It's still closed, and it being viewable is actively harmful, as it'll lead to copyright violations sneaking into other projects.
naringas 7y ago
the issue with all these (mongodb, elasticsearch, sentry, redis, etc...) is that software doesn't work with zero marginal costs, software's creation and distribution costs are different, the same goes to anything digital. Selling 1 is the same as selling 2, is the same as 200. If anything, distribution the costs will go up due to bandwidth (unless the distribution becomes decentralized). The problem is that we live in a world economy desgined by and for material products with (in many cases) marginal costs. Making a single paperclip is expensive, making one thousand makes every paperclip cheaper, making more makes them even cheaper. If paperclips were software, the moment anybody makes a single paperclip, anybody can have one. Software is (or rather, digital things are) different. The best model of ownership over software does not get along with the way ownership works in the market.
stingraycharles 7y ago
This seems fairly reasonable. It’s understandable that you don’t want others to offer commercial offerings of Sentry. I’m happy as a Sentry user, and while we’re using the cloud offering right now in our early stages, it’s good to know that if we would crumble under the costs, we can always host our own instance. (Which of course is unlikely to happen, what I expect to be a part of the strategy)
gregwebs 7y ago
Its interesting to see them reason that the BSL is more open source than open core. Do others think that? It is certainly more free as in beer for most users.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Having a sustainable funding model for open source isn’t necessarily a bad thing IMHO. The potential upside here is that Sentry will be able to invest more into large improvements to the code knowing that their funding is sustainable. This is to the benefit of everyone who wants to use this software in the purest sense of open source, which is running the code on your own systems.
  - tedivm 7y ago
    This isn't a sustainable open source model though as the code is not open source.
    - mythz 7y ago
      As they state in their article it's eventually OSS (after 3yrs it converts to OSS) and you're basically unaffected you're reselling a competing hosted version, you still have full access to the source code and can continue to run your own/modified version in house. Given that Sentry is primarily the sole contributor behind improving and advancing their own product, making it more sustainable directly translates in being able to have more resources into making a better product whereas having their efforts stolen and repurposed by a competitive AWS/Azure hosted solution would directly make it worse. They'd be pouring their millions into competing against themselves whilst the cloud providers can use their marketing + monopoly network effects to reap all the commercial efforts off Sentry's investments. The only losers here are the cloud oligopolies and Sentry's hosted competitors, Sentry ends up with a more sustainable business model they can invest in making a better product, which benefits their product and all their customers.
- syrrim 7y ago
  One ideal is the open development model, where anyone can come along and submit patches, where multiple companies can conspire to create a project, and so on. Open core, where you have a central project that is open source, then a number of plugins that are less open source, is the better model towards this goal. The worry is that members of the community will begin recreating features that have already been added to the paid version, and releasing them as open source. Under the BSL, you have a tension here because the paid version will become part of the free version in a few years. Under open core, you'd ask the community members to release the feature as a plugin, and the two separate plugins can coexist. The other ideal is the principle of free software being like software I would write myself. MIT and the unlicense are strong versions of this, where I can use them in (nearly) any way I would use software I had written from scratch. The BSL is the better model for this, because it entails paying for software that, in a few years, you will own in this strong sense. Open core entails no such guarantee, and if the company producing it went under, there is no guarantee that they would release the source code under a permissive license. I think the impetus behind their decision is that they didn't observe a strong open development community, so they didn't feel they would impact that too strongly by using the BSL. The really interesting license would be a combination of both, that is having a truly open core, then licensing everything else under the BSL or equivalent. This is probably avoided for the complexity factor, but would probably entail the best of both worlds.
vortico 7y ago
Why not GPLv3+? Under that license, it's possible for someone to offer a commercial fork, but it requires that the source is released under the same license, which makes third-party commercial forks 1) not a good business plan and 2) not contain code that the original author can't merge to the original branch, which are both aspects desired by the author. The GPL is a free/open-source license as defined by FSF/OSI. If additional permissions are needed, they can be added as allowed by section 7 of the GPLv3. In my opinion, the GPL fosters the best free software community because contributers can be certain that their code is not used in "anti-free-software" ways. EDIT: s/GPL/AGPL
- tracker1 7y ago
  Amazon, Azure and GCP could burry Sentry as a company with that option. It's actually happened a few times at this point.
  - vortico 7y ago
    Can you give an example? Is what you're referring to what the AGPL is designed to fix?
    - jamie_ca 7y ago
      If AWS decides to "adopt" your platform, and autoscale it, and undercut your sustainable pricing model because they have economy of scale, does it even matter that the source is available? If you want a concrete example, take Redis. (and it was longer ago, but I think I recall something similar with mongodb) Redis Labs offers a hosted cloud offering, Redis Cloud Pro. They literally run off of AWS, as near as I can tell just selling managed EC2 instances, with replication etc. Then Amazon launches ElasticCache, which is running apparently unmodified Redis code, with AWS-developed management software on top. Redis changed their licensing following that launch, for mainly the same reasoning as Sentry mentioned - Open-source company sells managed hosting, uses that money to further development of the open-source software. AWS (or Azure, or Google) launches a competing service, contributes nothing back to the open-source software. It's not healthy for the long-term prospects of the community (but it's great for AWS investors bottom lines).
alrs 7y ago
This is the old Aladdin Ghostscript model, where the software is proprietary for one year after release and is then reverts to GPL. I think Ghostscript ditched this scheme 10-15 years ago. https://books.google.com/books?id=xBANKuFJWtUC&pg=PA306&lpg=PA306&dq=aladdin+ghostscript+one+year&source=bl&ots=_sbDEU6GB5&sig=ACfU3U3EWBanfpdRKtHZQuwo21ijs76ebQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrz8acwtblAhXqFTQIHbwfDW0Q6AEwFXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=aladdin%20ghostscript%20one%20year&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=xBANKuFJWtUC&pg=PA306&lpg=...
I_am_tiberius 7y ago
Armin Ronacher's blog post concerning this topic: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/11/4/open-source-and-saas/ http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/11/4/open-source-and-saas/
- tedivm 7y ago
  I find the distinction between libraries and applications to be rather self serving. It's basically saying "I want to use these open source libraries to bootstrap my business, but I don't believe others should be able to use my code in an open source way because apps should have profit". Now, I'm not disagreeing that one of the goals many people have for building code is to make money. But this line between apps and libraries is completely artificial and seems to exist for no reason other than justifying their closing a previously open source project.
  - the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
    > I find the distinction between libraries and applications to be rather self serving. It's basically saying "I want to use these open source libraries to bootstrap my business, but I don't believe others should be able to use my code in an open source way because apps should have profit". I generally believe that people should get a reward for the work they do. For me personally the rewards I got for my work on Flask, Jinja and many of my Open Source libraries was non monetary but awesome on many other levels. I got to travel to many countries, speak at conference, and I got a lot of experience and exposure through it. I am content. However I know from many people that they wish they could also make a living from Open Source libraries and I do not have an answer to that — yet? I believe the BSL is an answer for applications, I don't think it works for libraries because of the reasons mentioned. I wish I had an answer however for people that want to live off their Open Source work. The line might be arbitrary for some, but it's not arbitrary for me.
    - UncleEntity 7y ago
      I see it as the same as the art school graduates who really, really want to make a living out of making art and finding in the real world a really, really small minority of artists can live off the art they produce. Then they get a job teaching art to the next generation of people who really, really want to live off of making art.
mesozoic 7y ago
Eventually open source LUL I'm sure they'll eventually let you into the open source conference.
dzonga 7y ago
people's labor should be well compensated. this is a good move from Sentry, Mongodb and others that will follow. yeah, you've people with freeware or fsf idealism i.e Stallman ideas.That Sentry and the others betrayed their ideas. But simply, FU - let them get paid. Sentry is an amazing product. & the people who work on it should be able to put food on the table & sleep well, without worrying about Amazon n parasites. I think the greatest misconception is between open source and open core. & we should start labeling a bunch of software on Github as such. Now the parasitic cloud providers such as AWS won't profit via someone's work. when they hardly contribute to open core | source
- rstupek 7y ago
  Sentry, mongodb, et al. all got as big as they did by promising to be open source. Do you think they'd be where they are today had they not been open sourced? I personally do not.
  - stock_toaster 7y ago
    > Sentry, mongodb, et al. all got as big as they did by promising to be open source. Do you have any proof to back this assertion? > It’s important to remember that Sentry “the project” has been developed almost exclusively by employees of Sentry “the company”; millions of dollars have paid the salaries of engineers, designers, and product people to produce the software we know and love today. I don't have any skin in this game, but they claim that most of the code contributions were by employees paid for by Sentry. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
gridspy 7y ago
Seems a fair compromise. Almost all users of Sentry.io benefit from the sort of freedom that FOSS is built on. They can control and modify the source that they are working with - sentry.io doesn't take away their rights. At the same time, sentry.io does not have to compete against clones which are using sentry's own R&D against them. I much prefer this over more restrictive alternatives.
api 7y ago
We recently adopted the BSL too. Here's a blog post that goes into detail about our rationale. https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/ https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/
- comex 7y ago
  That post states that GPL or AGPL would be adequate for your protection needs but you opted for BSL instead due to “GPL-phobia”. So why not dual license under BSL and (A)GPL? That way open source purists (including me) would have a license they considered acceptable, without it compromising your goals.
  - nickpsecurity 7y ago
    It's an interesting idea. The BSL seems like a safer choice given the wording straight-up blocks SaaS's. They're the real threat to ZeroTier. On a side note, most people contributing to F/OSS don't like AGPL either. They'd instead by griping about that. Folks be irritated one way or another. His profit and their jobs are safer with people griping about BSL, though.
- theobeers 7y ago
  This was a great read!
dkhenry 7y ago
I was at an open source event hosted by a16z ( a blog post about it is here https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ ), and one of the things that was abundantly clear is there is no reason you can't have open source and a viable business model. Companies moving to BSL are effectively saying they can't actually compete so they are trying to shore up their business by using a license change. At the end of the day the better product will win out, and companies moving to BSL are tacitly admitting they don't have the better product so they want to lock in market share before they get out competed.
- davidu 7y ago
  Correct. And the reality is, this is a reaction to a hypothetical threat (though certainly an obnoxious threat) -- name one company Amazon launching a hosted version of their open source code has killed? I believe the current number is ZERO.
- ElKrist 7y ago
  Imagine I create a fantastic new beer: a new taste that most people love. My recipe is open source. I have put a lot of time/money perfecting the recipe/brand . I started selling it to local businesses and have been expanding slowly but steadily. I don't have big production scales yet so I can sell a bottle for $3. Now come Big Beer Co., #1 on the beer market world wide. They take my recipe and can sell it for $1 thanks to their economies of scale. I keep making my beer better and better whiel Big Beer Co. keeps the original recipe they "forked". I start losing customers: yes I keep improving on the recipe but it does not justify paying $3 instead of $1. Eventually, I die and Big Beer Co. are the only one remaining selling my recipe. Is it because they made a better product? Nope.
  - dkhenry 7y ago
    Thats a great example, because there is no beer out there that is "closed source". Meaning you can duplicate almost any beer you taste given enough time and effort. However what has happened in the market is the exact opposite of what you just described. The micro breweries are selling beer for $3 that the big companies could make for $1. So why hasn't the big brewery put all the small players out business? It turns out that even if you can make beer really cheap there are so many variables in the brewing process that there is no way you would be able to do all of them at a very high quality at the same time, and even if you could under the covers the big beer companies operate at a scale that isn't cost effective in small batches. So the big beer company pretty much makes all their money off that one style beer that is fairly popular, and even though they could make other styles there is so much nuance in the brewing process that it wouldn't be a broad success. The real problem you have is lets say you are that craft brewer and you are doing really well with your $3 a bottle beer, so well in fact you want to expand so you can prep for your big IPO. Well it turns out brewing beer at a large scale is fairly hard, but lets say you figure that out because your an awesome brewer. Its even harder to run a national distribution network, and you have no clue how to do that. You will quickly learn that the reason Big Beer Company is doing so well has very little to do with the taste of their beer. Yes they do a lot to make sure their product is great, but mostly its to make sure the product is uniform, and reliable. The real magic is the business side, they have suppliers, an distributors who can get their product into every store in America. Their product isn't beer their product is beer distribution, you can't compete with that, because your a craft brewer not a logistics expert. This is the same thing going on with the big cloud providers, if your product is just a logging system you will loose to the company who can deliver that service to users at scale. The product is the service not the software.
draw_down 7y ago
Seems reasonable. Easy to be a purist, hard to reconcile that purism with the need to run a business (and let's not forget, pay engineers and other employees with the proceeds of that business).
ensignavenger 7y ago
This is a very disappointing development. I was hoping to implement Sentry for a side project I have been working on, now I will have to find an alternative or use an old version, as I refuse to rely on closed-source software.
- gyrgtyn 7y ago
  You wanted to run a sentry as a service side project?
  - ensignavenger 7y ago
    I have two main side projects I am working on right now- one would be a SaaS product in which I would just be using Sentry as a tool- that would still be allowed under the BSL- however, I am leary of using non-open source code like the BSL because the BSL does not grant the community the freedom to fork it and use that fork as an open source project (Any fork of Sentry going forward would either need to start from old code or be under the BSL license and the new community would be at a disadvantage as no one could use the new product to offer an APM service. This removes the primary motivation for the maintainer (in this case Sentry the company) to remain benevolent. My other side project is a PaaS which I hope to release as Open Source, which relies on several open source products itself. I also hope to offer a hosted version of this product. It is still a very young idea, with some code written for it, trying to get a proof of concept done. I had considered using Sentry for an APM tool in this product- but now if I go that route I will have to fork the pre-BSL version of the Sentry code and maintain it myself... If my PaaS is successful, I do plan to contribute back to the open source tools it will be based on, both in terms of development and financially, as well as promoting them prominently! I am not looking to cut anyone out by providing a low value-add service and keeping all the profits for myself!
    - zeeg 7y ago
      In this case you could request an additional use grant from us (Sentry). It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it just means you’d need permission.
niftylettuce 7y ago
I built Cabin as an alternative to Sentry. https://cabinjs.com https://cabinjs.com Less bloat, no vendor lock-in, works with any logger.
peterwwillis 7y ago
If you're wondering "why don't they just close-source the whole thing, and then they don't have to worry about competitors?", there's two reasons. One, open source is a good marketing tool to acquire trend-following customers, gain industry rep, and better hires. Two, if an open-source clone emerges, it could become a threat to their product, so they need to keep people using some version of their own product. This is what it means when a business says open source is a "strategic advantage". All these "formally-open-source companies" are learning the same lessons we learned in the early 2000s: competing on software alone only works if you're licensing a proprietary product, or you're giving it away as a lock-in tool for a platform you control. The alternative is to compete on service and support, which works until you compete against a platform. A big player with a platform will just take ten million dollars and a year and a half and write their own version of it, and their customers will use it because it integrates with the platform's products better.
mcescalante 7y ago
I have run the self-hosted version of Sentry for a couple years at my job now and it has worked fantastically, and I also use the SaaS product during freelance. The self-hosted releases take time to appear after launching on SaaS, but this is understandable as it takes time to coordinate things making it downstream to the public repo from internal stuff. And the self-hosted version is rock-solid once running, I never worry about it. Of course it would be great if everything could remain truly open source, but I can understand the IP concerns as Sentry grows, and I am appreciative of the communication and commitment to offering the same product for self-hosting as your SaaS product. I'll be continuing to use and support Sentry and am interested to see how the BSL model goes here compared to something like open-core.
tus88 7y ago
> Minimal limitations on usage of code; as free as possible Wait what?
inputmice 7y ago
Have you considered that SaaS is just a terrible business model?
- comex 7y ago
  Tell that to Amazon, who seem to be making it into an extremely successful business model.
Aeolun 7y ago
On the whole, while sad that it happened (it feels like a loss somehow), I think this is probably one of the better licenses they could have gone with. As far as I understand there’s still nothing preventing me from forking their code, just from selling it for 3 years.
grumpydba 7y ago
Also, please make it clear that this is a proprietary license aimed at making VCs happy and keep the cash flowing, while being hostile to the tinkerer who wants to learn and reuse parts of your code.
- jsmeaton 7y ago
  That's not clear at all. It's not hostile to tinkerers. It's hostile to entities that may want to take others open source work and provide a business around that work. You can still run the software, for free, in your business. You can still change the software, for free, and run that in your business. You can still fork the software, from today, and do what you want with it. The vast majority of work done on the software is funded by sentry. This hurts literally no one who is legitimate.
  - grumpydba 7y ago
    > You can still run the software, for free, in your business. You can still change the software, for free, and run that in your business. You can still fork the software, from today, and do what you want with it. You cannot reuse and publish. Matter of fact, even reading it and taking inspiration from it is risky. Words from an IP lawyer I know. It's a proprietary license. There is no shame in that. So don't try to act like you are still an open source company. One has to make a good living. That's not what I was criticizing. > It's hostile to entities that may want to take others open source work and provide a business around that work. Consider yourself happy Torvalds didn't think this way. Or Guido. What's your dev environment?
    - kbenson 7y ago
      I think a lot of this revolves around what you think a "tinkerer" should be able to do. You clearly state "learn and reuse parts of your code", but depending on what you mean, people may or may not think "reuse parts of your code" falls under "tinkering". I imagine people might be split on that point, but I think "reuse and publish" is asking for much more. That's not tinkering, that's making a business, or at a minimum providing a service (even if uncharged and the service is software access).
musicale 7y ago
> Previous licensing models – the “open core” model, GPL, and permissive licenses like BSD and Apache-2.0 – are not sufficient for the way OSS is distributed and used today. I think what they meant to say was "open source licenses (including GPL, BSD, and Apache-2.0) are not sufficient to prevent Google or Amazon from competing with our hosted service business."
notatoad 7y ago
content of the blog post aside, this is just completely obnoxious and distracting: https://gfycat.com/sphericalfrailalligatorgar https://gfycat.com/sphericalfrailalligatorgar
- nathancahill 7y ago
  Yes, but at least you can submit a PR to fix it.
  - tedivm 7y ago
    You say that like it's a good thing, rather than being a way for corporations to extract value from free labor to line their own pockets.
awinder 7y ago
“Previous licensing models – the “open core” model, GPL, and permissive licenses like BSD and Apache-2.0 – are not sufficient for the way OSS is distributed and used today.” This line _really_ bugged me. These licenses are still a perfect fit and more than sufficient for how OSS is distributed & used today. What they’re maybe not perfect for is starting an open source, VC funded business, but they never have been. And the companies that face “existential threat” are a small minority of the total activity going on under these licenses, so maybe, ya know, the problem is the small collection of companies trying to operate this way and not the license.
errantspark 7y ago
I'm really confused at the vitriol in the comments, does this license not become a true OSS license after the change period? IANAL but that seems to be the case to me. It's so confusing what part of this is frustrating? I think keeping a 36 month buffer of features to maintain an a commercially viable edge to fund work on a project is extremely reasonable. It seems like a really good and virtuous model. Patents and Copyrights are more than an order of magnitude more temporally restrictive. This is great stuff, I hope it proves to be commercially viable and sees broader adoption.
- heyoni 7y ago
  It’s a “vocal minority”. Seriously, it’s just a handful of people replying to every single comment. Sentry is being perfectly reasonable here.
MFLoon 7y ago
I think this is great; if I ever start a SaaS business I'll happily follow Sentry's example and use the BSL if I want to develop in the open. To the open source fundamentalists expressing disdain: why is the ability to commercialize a piece of code such an important part of the OSS ethos to you? Why are proprietary protections, even when the code itself is still freely visible, usable and modifiable, such a step backwards? What about the very real threat of a business 1000x your size just deciding to fork your code and eat your lunch? Are businesses with open source products supposed to just accept that risk in the name of being good OSS citizens? I'd still much rather see a business with source available code, which will still benefit their users and the community at large - would you rather it be OSI approved open source or nothing?
greggman2 7y ago
I expect to see a lot more of this with GitHub Sponsors coming online. As it is now you can take any BSD, MIT, ISC, GPL open source project and start collecting money from it, not using it in another project, just by asking for money period. The licenses above all allow this. It's only going to take a few bad actors for the actual devs to start wanting a new license that somehow keeps the project open source but only let's them collect the donations. I have no idea how that will work but it seems a likely outcome. I don't mind when my open source library is one tiny part in a larger project that is commercial and making money. But I'd be upset if someone forked my library, changed the name (or not), and started trying to collect donations. Even if they changed the library I don't know at how much they'd have to change it before I'd not feel taken advantage of.
gregimba 7y ago
When will there be a 10.0 Open Source Release? It's harder for me to support this when I saw open source pull requests denied that in hindsight would have let more users run their own hosted sentry with features such as OpenID Support.
the_common_man 7y ago
What does this mean for people who have already contributed? Do you have to get permission of everyone who made a PR merged? Did they have some sort of CLA that allows them to re-license? Just curious how this works.
- smitop 7y ago
  It doesn't appear they have a CLA. The old license was BSD 3-clause, which states: > 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. > 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. And nowhere is that list to be found. So it appears Sentry is violating the license for external contributions.
martey 7y ago
I think it's interesting that one of the reasons Sentry gives for re-licensing their code (most/all of the major contributors work for Sentry) is also one of the reasons they gave 3 years ago on this site when asked why copycat services did not concern them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800539
ryan_lane 7y ago
The BSL is a "have your cake and eat it too" license. It allows a company to accept contributions from third parties, without those third parties being able to use the changes commercially. It's immoral. The moral equivalent of the BSL is to close-source the software, and to offer free-for-use licenses of the closed-source version. They can continue having a fully open-source release, but the release would be changes from 3 years ago. Sentry isn't doing this because they want the contributions. They want the benefits of open source, without any of the costs associated with it.
- gyrgtyn 7y ago
  Alternatively, third parties can volunteer their time to AWS by contributing to open source software!
- jsmeaton 7y ago
  I don't understand the practical difference of your suggestion.
  - ryan_lane 7y ago
    If they close off the source, they can't accept contributions from 3rd parties. Also, the closed-source code not being viewable makes it more likely that folks won't accidentally introduce copyright violations into their code, which frequently happens when proprietary code is put into github. In either case, the code is closed-source, but BSL allows them to accept free code from volunteers without providing it back to them for 3 years.
    - jsmeaton 7y ago
      It also allows users to modify the source and run it on their own systems. You're suggesting a strictly worse outcome for the majority of people (users, and sentry) in the name of purity.
- bradrydzewski 7y ago
  I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that this is immoral. Sentry is granting you a license, for free, to do anything you want with the software except provide a commercial competitor to their hosted service. People using the software for free may still decide to contribute code. This is not a one-sided relationship here. Both parties are getting something of value.
bbanyc 7y ago
I don't blame Sentry. FOSS is a fine ideal for hobby and academic projects, but it doesn't pay the bills. 36 years on and the most successful business model for FOSS is to convince someone rich to lose money on it. (Cf. Gilmore at Cygnus, Shuttleworth at Canonical.) I do wish more companies would use these kinds of "Doom clauses" and contribute old software to the commons once it's no longer commercially viable.
- tedivm 7y ago
  That's the only business model as long as you ignore Automattic, Chef, CloudBees, Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, DataStax, Gradle, Hashicorp, nginx, Puppet, RedHat, and many others.
  - pnako 7y ago
    Some of those companies make money by selling proprietary software. They are thus proprietary software companies, and bad examples of open source software business models.
    - moritzplassnig 7y ago
      What are good examples?
      - pnako 7y ago
        Red Hat. They work with the community upstream, and they open source all their stuff.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
A little off topic from the actual post, but I wish that there was an actual service or program that was a "re-licensing sentry". That is, given some list of open source projects, it would email me if any of the projects changed their license. Many dependency managers just grab the latest release of an open source project, and you as a software developer may not be aware that one of your open source dependencies has changed their license in a way that affects what you can do with your project. It seems a lot of projects are starting out as true open source projects and then once they have built up a user base, are changing their license to something else. It would be nice for me to have a better way to monitor this for my dependencies than just checking the front page of Hacker News.
jmull 7y ago
BSL seems pretty decent... it becomes open in a simple, easy-to-understand way. But it’s troublesome that they road the open source movement for years to grow and are now closing the license. Perhaps it’s a business reality. I wonder if there are any supporters or users or other stakeholders who thought open meant continuing to be open. They’re getting a slap in the face today.
abrookewood 7y ago
I can't help but feel that if companies like Amazon, Google etc had been fairer in their dealings with open source projects (by either contributing more code or by paying the authors) that we wouldn't be in this situation.

348 points by troydavis 7y ago

Wishing you guys well. Over time we're seeing there needed to be this sort-of middle ground license for companies, which is essentially, "anyone can use it as a dependency, but you can't use this product, slap a different label on it and then compete directly with us" and it seems that this and related licenses are going to accomplish that.

machbio 7y ago

Elasticsearch and MongoDB has really started an interesting debate on Open Source Licensing..More Power to Opensource Software Providers that need to reap the benefits of their work.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
They haven't started a debate. The debate of "should we be open or not" has been going on for as long as Open Source has existed. And we've had licenses that attempt to sound open without being open for a long time as well, under names like "shared source".

tedivm 7y ago

Yet another company that uses the open source community to grow and then rips the rug out from under them. This corporate take over and redefinition of open source needs to stop. The "Business Source License" is not an open source license, and lying to the community about it is nothing short of gaslighting. This decision is bad for the community, and no amount of marketing speak and lying from sentry is going to change that.

brianwawok 7y ago
How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Is that what open source is?
- tedivm 7y ago
  Creating open source software is a choice. No one is required to do it. That choice has both benefits and potential negative consequences if your goal is to commercialize. The benefits include things like volunteer labor, more alpha testers, and community goodwill. The negative is that you have less control over how your software is used. I don't have an answer to how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software. I do know that redefining open source is not the way to handle it though.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    > how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software AWS has more than enough resources to re-implement (or fork/maintain) your software. So if you write a license that pisses off your own community and prevents AWS from using it, then that's probably what they're going to do, and now you have no users. The answer to AWS running a hosted version of your software is, encourage it and ask for patches and contributions back.
  - dorfsmay 7y ago
    Exactly, and they made the choice to no longer do it. Feel free to fork it and maintain their effort.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Which if fine. They're allowed to do it. The community of people who use and contribute to the project also get to be mad about it. Look, if Sentry wants to make money selling their software they should have just been proprietary from the beginning.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rstupek 7y ago
  Yes it actually does mean that is what open source is.
- 7y ago
tommoor 7y ago
Could you elaborate on how the BSL is "bad for the community"?
- mirekrusin 7y ago
  Agency creating systems for clients, contributes to sentry - bug reports/prs etc, can they use it now? Can they deploy system for their client integrated with self-hosted sentry?
- ensignavenger 7y ago
  It does not offer essential freedoms as defined in the Open Source Definition. This includes the ability to fork the software, make alterations, and sell use the result however one wants to (within the rights of the open source license), including selling it or creating a commercial service based on it. This license restricts the ability of the community to collaborate on the software by placing the community at a lower status than a single commercial sponsor.
  - tosser199 7y ago
    You are confusing free software and open source. Free software is the one about freedom.
    - ensignavenger 7y ago
      I'm not confusing anything: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
    - eindiran 7y ago
      You are confusing "source-available" software with "open source" software. Open source software is defined by the definition given here: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd This license (BSL) is source-available, but it is clearly not compliant with the terms of the Open Source Definition, which Sentry acknowledges. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_sof...
PuerkitoBio 7y ago
> The "Business Source License" is not an open source license, and lying to the community about it is nothing short of gaslighting. They do state that it is not an open source license in the article: > Although we’ve come to refer to the BSL as eventually open-source since it converts to an OSI-approved license at the conversion date, due to the grant restriction, it is formally not an open-source license.
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thothamon 7y ago
I feel like they're being very honest. If you (or anyone else) feels strongly, you can always fork the code now and develop it. You and I have no right to the _future code_ that Sentry might write and license under different terms.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  This is equivalent to Oracle (possibly the worst bad actor in open source history) killing OpenSolaris. They're sending a giant Fuck You to anyone who contributed their time and effort to the project. It's a completely unethical thing to do. I have no problem with someone using one of these horrible licenses, if they use it from the start. But to adopt it after the fact is blatant exploitation.
benatkin 7y ago
Exactly. Those developers they paid millions of dollars could have been paid similar amounts by other companies, and may have cared that they were contributing to a bona fide open source project.
kevin_b_er 7y ago
It seems to be either that or have amazon rip the rug out from under them AND the open source community at once.
paulddraper 7y ago
To be fair, the open source community "used" them as well. No shame in one party deciding to just walk away.
dang 7y ago
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by name-calling and failing to assume good faith. I'm sure you can make your substantive points without doing either of those things. Please do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
burtonator 7y ago
If you're right, why doesn't the community fork it? I hear lots of people complaining about this. That it's some sort of theft. Yet, I've rarely seen people actually use the OSS license and decide to take it their own direction. I think this really ends up reaffirming what Sentry is saying in the first place. It's hard to build a OSS project and you get too many freeloaders. You're basically a freeloader and now you're upset that there's no longer a free ride. BTW. Not trying to be insulting by using this term 'freeloader'. I wasn't trying to be derisive just saying you were getting value for free.

softwaredoug 7y ago

> Protection from other companies selling our work I'm not against these sorts of licenses. But we should all be aware that companies like this (and Mongo, Elastic, etc) are a step away from the OSI model of "open source". Which is more about many orgs collaborating on a shared solution so we don't need a vendor, rather than what this is - a vendor opening up code and allowing contributions.

troydavis 7y ago

> The BSL lets us hit our goals in a clean and low-impact way: it won’t change anyone’s ability to run Sentry at their company, but it will ensure that we are protected from our work being used in an anti-competitive fashion I don't think this is accurate. It will ensure that Sentry is protected from its work being used in a competitive fashion. While the issues pointed out in the blog post are real, competing isn't "anti-competitive." The intent and the effect here is to reduce competition, not increase it.

squiggleblaz 7y ago
But they're not competing. They're not trying to do something similar in a more efficient way. They're parasites - genuinely, even literally. They're taking away the energy sentry needs to run themselves but, if they succeed too well, they will destroy their own capacity to run. Two people can compete. Tomatoes and people are complementary - it's nice to have both. Tapeworms and people are playing a game in which, if the people win, the tapeworms lose, and if the people lose, the tapeworms lose to.
toomuchtodo 7y ago
This ignores the nuance. It is to level the playing field. Sentry would not be able to compete against Amazon hosting their service and reaping the financial benefits, and nor should they have to (and to do so with Amazon's resources available to them would be a Herculean task). If you're not a fan of the model, roll your own codebase.
- troydavis 7y ago
  > Sentry would not be able to compete against Amazon hosting their service, and nor should they have to. If that's Sentry's opinion (and it seems like it is), that's fine, but that's not what "anti-competitive" means. The word for that is "competitive." (The specifics depend on the jurisdiction, but the behavior described by the FTC is what's widely considered "anti-competitive": https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices)

JoshTriplett 7y ago

So, Sentry is no longer Open Source at all, though people might potentially be able to collaborate on three-year-old versions (or, hopefully, use whatever unified fork pops up from the last Open Source release). That's disappointing. Unfortunately, the more companies use such licenses, the more others see it as "safety in numbers" for them to do the same.

scj 7y ago
I somewhat suspect companies that apply "creative" licenses like this haven't been under a corporate legal department before. Using a standard license is great. Using a custom license that is extremely similar to an existing license is not as good, but is usually workable... Showing legal how to use Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  > Showing legal how to use Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best. A conversation made far less pleasant by the ability to feed arbitrary dates into a Git repo's commit history: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti I'm sure there's a way to find the actual time a push happened; hopefully it doesn't involve subpoenaing GitHub (or Microsoft, I guess) for logs.
  - ilammy 7y ago
    If you're that paranoid for your software, you can vendor the source, sign the tag with publicly-verifiable GPG key, and include some cryptographic timestamp in the description (e.g., hash of the current Bitcoin block or something) Also, print all of that, get the legal to seal the pages, and put them into a safe.
- cma 7y ago
  > Showing legal how to use Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best. Wouldn't that be: > Showing legal how to use [Microsoft] Github so they can confirm the age of the software you're using, then convincing them [Microsoft] Github is a reputable party will likely result in an unpleasant conversation at best. Seems that 'Microsoft' prefix might get a bit more clout.

nathancahill 7y ago

We're huge fans of Sentry and have it deeply integrated in our products. The fully open source nature has helped us a ton with these advanced integrations, being able to look at the code to see exactly what is happening instead of relying on docs (which are great as well, not faulting them). At the same time, I remember seeing a new startup that had completely ripped off Sentry + docs and had just done a find and replace for the company name. I thought I had read about it on HN but I can't find the link. It's clear we need a license that allows software to be developed in the open but prevents this type abuse. I don't know if this license is the solution. It clearly isn't open source and should not be construed as such (they are very clear about this in the post), but I haven't seen other better proposals either. Armchair criticism is easy, and this seems like a reasonable middle-ground. We'll keep using Sentry and continue to be customers. Outside of their Sentry.io product, they have released and contributed to a ton of other Open Source libraries. As I understand it, that will continue. For me, this passes the sniff test.

sangnoir 7y ago
> It's clear we need a license that allows software to be developed in the open but prevents this type abuse. The ability to fork is the point of open source, because it assures continuity. The price of this is the non-zero probability of hostile forks (which I would not classify as 'abuse'). I think there's a section of technologist who license their software for pragmatic (traction, fixing bugs) and not ideological reasons and get surprised when someone forks the project in a way they don't like.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- simplyinfinity 7y ago
  You can fork it, you can mod it. But you cannot sell forked sentry as a service to companies. If companies want sentry they can host it themselves and you can provide customization/support services for that.
  - 7y ago

rectang 7y ago

> But if we move to an “open core” model that better protects our IP, in our eyes, that means we’re no longer an open-source company. "Open core" products have an open source core. Sentry won't any more. > Enter The Business Source License (BSL) This license is NOT open source. Don't call it that. Actual open source advocates like me will keep hectoring you until you stop.

troydavis 7y ago
> This license is NOT open source. Don't call it that. The blog post says this: "due to the grant restriction, it is formally not an open-source license."
- DSMan195276 7y ago
  "formally". They're using weasel words to pretend it's still 'open-source', but that they just can't technically call it that. And later-on in the article they say this: > It’s a brave new world, but we believe this licensing change will best ensure the future of Sentry and that protections-oriented OSS licenses like the BSL will become increasingly common as time goes on. "protections-oriented OSS licenses like the BSL" - I guess they can't call it an "Open-Source license", but calling it an "Open-Source Software license" is ok? Are they supposed to mean different things?
  - MFLoon 7y ago
    I don't think it's weasel words. They're just acknowledging that the OSI doesn't recognize the BSL as an Open-Source license, but the source is still open in the literal sense. Not only that, but most of the things associated with code being open source are still true: you can inspect, modify and use the code as you can with any OSS, the only things you can't do is commercialize or redistribute it.
    - ryan_lane 7y ago
      It's definitely weasel words. Open Source has a definition. The source may be publicly viewable, but that isn't "open". It's still closed, and it being viewable is actively harmful, as it'll lead to copyright violations sneaking into other projects.

naringas 7y ago

the issue with all these (mongodb, elasticsearch, sentry, redis, etc...) is that software doesn't work with zero marginal costs, software's creation and distribution costs are different, the same goes to anything digital. Selling 1 is the same as selling 2, is the same as 200. If anything, distribution the costs will go up due to bandwidth (unless the distribution becomes decentralized). The problem is that we live in a world economy desgined by and for material products with (in many cases) marginal costs. Making a single paperclip is expensive, making one thousand makes every paperclip cheaper, making more makes them even cheaper. If paperclips were software, the moment anybody makes a single paperclip, anybody can have one. Software is (or rather, digital things are) different. The best model of ownership over software does not get along with the way ownership works in the market.

stingraycharles 7y ago

This seems fairly reasonable. It’s understandable that you don’t want others to offer commercial offerings of Sentry. I’m happy as a Sentry user, and while we’re using the cloud offering right now in our early stages, it’s good to know that if we would crumble under the costs, we can always host our own instance. (Which of course is unlikely to happen, what I expect to be a part of the strategy)

gregwebs 7y ago

Its interesting to see them reason that the BSL is more open source than open core. Do others think that? It is certainly more free as in beer for most users.

sjwright 7y ago
Having a sustainable funding model for open source isn’t necessarily a bad thing IMHO. The potential upside here is that Sentry will be able to invest more into large improvements to the code knowing that their funding is sustainable. This is to the benefit of everyone who wants to use this software in the purest sense of open source, which is running the code on your own systems.
- tedivm 7y ago
  This isn't a sustainable open source model though as the code is not open source.
  - mythz 7y ago
    As they state in their article it's eventually OSS (after 3yrs it converts to OSS) and you're basically unaffected you're reselling a competing hosted version, you still have full access to the source code and can continue to run your own/modified version in house. Given that Sentry is primarily the sole contributor behind improving and advancing their own product, making it more sustainable directly translates in being able to have more resources into making a better product whereas having their efforts stolen and repurposed by a competitive AWS/Azure hosted solution would directly make it worse. They'd be pouring their millions into competing against themselves whilst the cloud providers can use their marketing + monopoly network effects to reap all the commercial efforts off Sentry's investments. The only losers here are the cloud oligopolies and Sentry's hosted competitors, Sentry ends up with a more sustainable business model they can invest in making a better product, which benefits their product and all their customers.
syrrim 7y ago
One ideal is the open development model, where anyone can come along and submit patches, where multiple companies can conspire to create a project, and so on. Open core, where you have a central project that is open source, then a number of plugins that are less open source, is the better model towards this goal. The worry is that members of the community will begin recreating features that have already been added to the paid version, and releasing them as open source. Under the BSL, you have a tension here because the paid version will become part of the free version in a few years. Under open core, you'd ask the community members to release the feature as a plugin, and the two separate plugins can coexist. The other ideal is the principle of free software being like software I would write myself. MIT and the unlicense are strong versions of this, where I can use them in (nearly) any way I would use software I had written from scratch. The BSL is the better model for this, because it entails paying for software that, in a few years, you will own in this strong sense. Open core entails no such guarantee, and if the company producing it went under, there is no guarantee that they would release the source code under a permissive license. I think the impetus behind their decision is that they didn't observe a strong open development community, so they didn't feel they would impact that too strongly by using the BSL. The really interesting license would be a combination of both, that is having a truly open core, then licensing everything else under the BSL or equivalent. This is probably avoided for the complexity factor, but would probably entail the best of both worlds.

vortico 7y ago

Why not GPLv3+? Under that license, it's possible for someone to offer a commercial fork, but it requires that the source is released under the same license, which makes third-party commercial forks 1) not a good business plan and 2) not contain code that the original author can't merge to the original branch, which are both aspects desired by the author. The GPL is a free/open-source license as defined by FSF/OSI. If additional permissions are needed, they can be added as allowed by section 7 of the GPLv3. In my opinion, the GPL fosters the best free software community because contributers can be certain that their code is not used in "anti-free-software" ways. EDIT: s/GPL/AGPL

tracker1 7y ago
Amazon, Azure and GCP could burry Sentry as a company with that option. It's actually happened a few times at this point.
- vortico 7y ago
  Can you give an example? Is what you're referring to what the AGPL is designed to fix?
  - jamie_ca 7y ago
    If AWS decides to "adopt" your platform, and autoscale it, and undercut your sustainable pricing model because they have economy of scale, does it even matter that the source is available? If you want a concrete example, take Redis. (and it was longer ago, but I think I recall something similar with mongodb) Redis Labs offers a hosted cloud offering, Redis Cloud Pro. They literally run off of AWS, as near as I can tell just selling managed EC2 instances, with replication etc. Then Amazon launches ElasticCache, which is running apparently unmodified Redis code, with AWS-developed management software on top. Redis changed their licensing following that launch, for mainly the same reasoning as Sentry mentioned - Open-source company sells managed hosting, uses that money to further development of the open-source software. AWS (or Azure, or Google) launches a competing service, contributes nothing back to the open-source software. It's not healthy for the long-term prospects of the community (but it's great for AWS investors bottom lines).

alrs 7y ago

This is the old Aladdin Ghostscript model, where the software is proprietary for one year after release and is then reverts to GPL. I think Ghostscript ditched this scheme 10-15 years ago. https://books.google.com/books?id=xBANKuFJWtUC&pg=PA306&lpg=PA306&dq=aladdin+ghostscript+one+year&source=bl&ots=_sbDEU6GB5&sig=ACfU3U3EWBanfpdRKtHZQuwo21ijs76ebQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrz8acwtblAhXqFTQIHbwfDW0Q6AEwFXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=aladdin%20ghostscript%20one%20year&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=xBANKuFJWtUC&pg=PA306&lpg=...

I_am_tiberius 7y ago

Armin Ronacher's blog post concerning this topic: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/11/4/open-source-and-saas/ http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/11/4/open-source-and-saas/

tedivm 7y ago
I find the distinction between libraries and applications to be rather self serving. It's basically saying "I want to use these open source libraries to bootstrap my business, but I don't believe others should be able to use my code in an open source way because apps should have profit". Now, I'm not disagreeing that one of the goals many people have for building code is to make money. But this line between apps and libraries is completely artificial and seems to exist for no reason other than justifying their closing a previously open source project.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  > I find the distinction between libraries and applications to be rather self serving. It's basically saying "I want to use these open source libraries to bootstrap my business, but I don't believe others should be able to use my code in an open source way because apps should have profit". I generally believe that people should get a reward for the work they do. For me personally the rewards I got for my work on Flask, Jinja and many of my Open Source libraries was non monetary but awesome on many other levels. I got to travel to many countries, speak at conference, and I got a lot of experience and exposure through it. I am content. However I know from many people that they wish they could also make a living from Open Source libraries and I do not have an answer to that — yet? I believe the BSL is an answer for applications, I don't think it works for libraries because of the reasons mentioned. I wish I had an answer however for people that want to live off their Open Source work. The line might be arbitrary for some, but it's not arbitrary for me.
  - UncleEntity 7y ago
    I see it as the same as the art school graduates who really, really want to make a living out of making art and finding in the real world a really, really small minority of artists can live off the art they produce. Then they get a job teaching art to the next generation of people who really, really want to live off of making art.

mesozoic 7y ago

Eventually open source LUL I'm sure they'll eventually let you into the open source conference.

dzonga 7y ago

people's labor should be well compensated. this is a good move from Sentry, Mongodb and others that will follow. yeah, you've people with freeware or fsf idealism i.e Stallman ideas.That Sentry and the others betrayed their ideas. But simply, FU - let them get paid. Sentry is an amazing product. & the people who work on it should be able to put food on the table & sleep well, without worrying about Amazon n parasites. I think the greatest misconception is between open source and open core. & we should start labeling a bunch of software on Github as such. Now the parasitic cloud providers such as AWS won't profit via someone's work. when they hardly contribute to open core | source

rstupek 7y ago
Sentry, mongodb, et al. all got as big as they did by promising to be open source. Do you think they'd be where they are today had they not been open sourced? I personally do not.
- stock_toaster 7y ago
  > Sentry, mongodb, et al. all got as big as they did by promising to be open source. Do you have any proof to back this assertion? > It’s important to remember that Sentry “the project” has been developed almost exclusively by employees of Sentry “the company”; millions of dollars have paid the salaries of engineers, designers, and product people to produce the software we know and love today. I don't have any skin in this game, but they claim that most of the code contributions were by employees paid for by Sentry. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

gridspy 7y ago

Seems a fair compromise. Almost all users of Sentry.io benefit from the sort of freedom that FOSS is built on. They can control and modify the source that they are working with - sentry.io doesn't take away their rights. At the same time, sentry.io does not have to compete against clones which are using sentry's own R&D against them. I much prefer this over more restrictive alternatives.

api 7y ago

We recently adopted the BSL too. Here's a blog post that goes into detail about our rationale. https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/ https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/

comex 7y ago
That post states that GPL or AGPL would be adequate for your protection needs but you opted for BSL instead due to “GPL-phobia”. So why not dual license under BSL and (A)GPL? That way open source purists (including me) would have a license they considered acceptable, without it compromising your goals.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  It's an interesting idea. The BSL seems like a safer choice given the wording straight-up blocks SaaS's. They're the real threat to ZeroTier. On a side note, most people contributing to F/OSS don't like AGPL either. They'd instead by griping about that. Folks be irritated one way or another. His profit and their jobs are safer with people griping about BSL, though.
theobeers 7y ago
This was a great read!

dkhenry 7y ago

I was at an open source event hosted by a16z ( a blog post about it is here https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ ), and one of the things that was abundantly clear is there is no reason you can't have open source and a viable business model. Companies moving to BSL are effectively saying they can't actually compete so they are trying to shore up their business by using a license change. At the end of the day the better product will win out, and companies moving to BSL are tacitly admitting they don't have the better product so they want to lock in market share before they get out competed.

davidu 7y ago
Correct. And the reality is, this is a reaction to a hypothetical threat (though certainly an obnoxious threat) -- name one company Amazon launching a hosted version of their open source code has killed? I believe the current number is ZERO.
ElKrist 7y ago
Imagine I create a fantastic new beer: a new taste that most people love. My recipe is open source. I have put a lot of time/money perfecting the recipe/brand . I started selling it to local businesses and have been expanding slowly but steadily. I don't have big production scales yet so I can sell a bottle for $3. Now come Big Beer Co., #1 on the beer market world wide. They take my recipe and can sell it for $1 thanks to their economies of scale. I keep making my beer better and better whiel Big Beer Co. keeps the original recipe they "forked". I start losing customers: yes I keep improving on the recipe but it does not justify paying $3 instead of $1. Eventually, I die and Big Beer Co. are the only one remaining selling my recipe. Is it because they made a better product? Nope.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  Thats a great example, because there is no beer out there that is "closed source". Meaning you can duplicate almost any beer you taste given enough time and effort. However what has happened in the market is the exact opposite of what you just described. The micro breweries are selling beer for $3 that the big companies could make for $1. So why hasn't the big brewery put all the small players out business? It turns out that even if you can make beer really cheap there are so many variables in the brewing process that there is no way you would be able to do all of them at a very high quality at the same time, and even if you could under the covers the big beer companies operate at a scale that isn't cost effective in small batches. So the big beer company pretty much makes all their money off that one style beer that is fairly popular, and even though they could make other styles there is so much nuance in the brewing process that it wouldn't be a broad success. The real problem you have is lets say you are that craft brewer and you are doing really well with your $3 a bottle beer, so well in fact you want to expand so you can prep for your big IPO. Well it turns out brewing beer at a large scale is fairly hard, but lets say you figure that out because your an awesome brewer. Its even harder to run a national distribution network, and you have no clue how to do that. You will quickly learn that the reason Big Beer Company is doing so well has very little to do with the taste of their beer. Yes they do a lot to make sure their product is great, but mostly its to make sure the product is uniform, and reliable. The real magic is the business side, they have suppliers, an distributors who can get their product into every store in America. Their product isn't beer their product is beer distribution, you can't compete with that, because your a craft brewer not a logistics expert. This is the same thing going on with the big cloud providers, if your product is just a logging system you will loose to the company who can deliver that service to users at scale. The product is the service not the software.

draw_down 7y ago

Seems reasonable. Easy to be a purist, hard to reconcile that purism with the need to run a business (and let's not forget, pay engineers and other employees with the proceeds of that business).

ensignavenger 7y ago

This is a very disappointing development. I was hoping to implement Sentry for a side project I have been working on, now I will have to find an alternative or use an old version, as I refuse to rely on closed-source software.

gyrgtyn 7y ago
You wanted to run a sentry as a service side project?
- ensignavenger 7y ago
  I have two main side projects I am working on right now- one would be a SaaS product in which I would just be using Sentry as a tool- that would still be allowed under the BSL- however, I am leary of using non-open source code like the BSL because the BSL does not grant the community the freedom to fork it and use that fork as an open source project (Any fork of Sentry going forward would either need to start from old code or be under the BSL license and the new community would be at a disadvantage as no one could use the new product to offer an APM service. This removes the primary motivation for the maintainer (in this case Sentry the company) to remain benevolent. My other side project is a PaaS which I hope to release as Open Source, which relies on several open source products itself. I also hope to offer a hosted version of this product. It is still a very young idea, with some code written for it, trying to get a proof of concept done. I had considered using Sentry for an APM tool in this product- but now if I go that route I will have to fork the pre-BSL version of the Sentry code and maintain it myself... If my PaaS is successful, I do plan to contribute back to the open source tools it will be based on, both in terms of development and financially, as well as promoting them prominently! I am not looking to cut anyone out by providing a low value-add service and keeping all the profits for myself!
  - zeeg 7y ago
    In this case you could request an additional use grant from us (Sentry). It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it just means you’d need permission.

niftylettuce 7y ago

I built Cabin as an alternative to Sentry. https://cabinjs.com https://cabinjs.com Less bloat, no vendor lock-in, works with any logger.

peterwwillis 7y ago

If you're wondering "why don't they just close-source the whole thing, and then they don't have to worry about competitors?", there's two reasons. One, open source is a good marketing tool to acquire trend-following customers, gain industry rep, and better hires. Two, if an open-source clone emerges, it could become a threat to their product, so they need to keep people using some version of their own product. This is what it means when a business says open source is a "strategic advantage". All these "formally-open-source companies" are learning the same lessons we learned in the early 2000s: competing on software alone only works if you're licensing a proprietary product, or you're giving it away as a lock-in tool for a platform you control. The alternative is to compete on service and support, which works until you compete against a platform. A big player with a platform will just take ten million dollars and a year and a half and write their own version of it, and their customers will use it because it integrates with the platform's products better.

mcescalante 7y ago

I have run the self-hosted version of Sentry for a couple years at my job now and it has worked fantastically, and I also use the SaaS product during freelance. The self-hosted releases take time to appear after launching on SaaS, but this is understandable as it takes time to coordinate things making it downstream to the public repo from internal stuff. And the self-hosted version is rock-solid once running, I never worry about it. Of course it would be great if everything could remain truly open source, but I can understand the IP concerns as Sentry grows, and I am appreciative of the communication and commitment to offering the same product for self-hosting as your SaaS product. I'll be continuing to use and support Sentry and am interested to see how the BSL model goes here compared to something like open-core.

tus88 7y ago

> Minimal limitations on usage of code; as free as possible Wait what?

inputmice 7y ago

Have you considered that SaaS is just a terrible business model?

comex 7y ago
Tell that to Amazon, who seem to be making it into an extremely successful business model.

Aeolun 7y ago

On the whole, while sad that it happened (it feels like a loss somehow), I think this is probably one of the better licenses they could have gone with. As far as I understand there’s still nothing preventing me from forking their code, just from selling it for 3 years.

grumpydba 7y ago

Also, please make it clear that this is a proprietary license aimed at making VCs happy and keep the cash flowing, while being hostile to the tinkerer who wants to learn and reuse parts of your code.

jsmeaton 7y ago
That's not clear at all. It's not hostile to tinkerers. It's hostile to entities that may want to take others open source work and provide a business around that work. You can still run the software, for free, in your business. You can still change the software, for free, and run that in your business. You can still fork the software, from today, and do what you want with it. The vast majority of work done on the software is funded by sentry. This hurts literally no one who is legitimate.
- grumpydba 7y ago
  > You can still run the software, for free, in your business. You can still change the software, for free, and run that in your business. You can still fork the software, from today, and do what you want with it. You cannot reuse and publish. Matter of fact, even reading it and taking inspiration from it is risky. Words from an IP lawyer I know. It's a proprietary license. There is no shame in that. So don't try to act like you are still an open source company. One has to make a good living. That's not what I was criticizing. > It's hostile to entities that may want to take others open source work and provide a business around that work. Consider yourself happy Torvalds didn't think this way. Or Guido. What's your dev environment?
  - kbenson 7y ago
    I think a lot of this revolves around what you think a "tinkerer" should be able to do. You clearly state "learn and reuse parts of your code", but depending on what you mean, people may or may not think "reuse parts of your code" falls under "tinkering". I imagine people might be split on that point, but I think "reuse and publish" is asking for much more. That's not tinkering, that's making a business, or at a minimum providing a service (even if uncharged and the service is software access).

musicale 7y ago

> Previous licensing models – the “open core” model, GPL, and permissive licenses like BSD and Apache-2.0 – are not sufficient for the way OSS is distributed and used today. I think what they meant to say was "open source licenses (including GPL, BSD, and Apache-2.0) are not sufficient to prevent Google or Amazon from competing with our hosted service business."

notatoad 7y ago

content of the blog post aside, this is just completely obnoxious and distracting: https://gfycat.com/sphericalfrailalligatorgar https://gfycat.com/sphericalfrailalligatorgar

nathancahill 7y ago
Yes, but at least you can submit a PR to fix it.
- tedivm 7y ago
  You say that like it's a good thing, rather than being a way for corporations to extract value from free labor to line their own pockets.

awinder 7y ago

“Previous licensing models – the “open core” model, GPL, and permissive licenses like BSD and Apache-2.0 – are not sufficient for the way OSS is distributed and used today.” This line _really_ bugged me. These licenses are still a perfect fit and more than sufficient for how OSS is distributed & used today. What they’re maybe not perfect for is starting an open source, VC funded business, but they never have been. And the companies that face “existential threat” are a small minority of the total activity going on under these licenses, so maybe, ya know, the problem is the small collection of companies trying to operate this way and not the license.

errantspark 7y ago

I'm really confused at the vitriol in the comments, does this license not become a true OSS license after the change period? IANAL but that seems to be the case to me. It's so confusing what part of this is frustrating? I think keeping a 36 month buffer of features to maintain an a commercially viable edge to fund work on a project is extremely reasonable. It seems like a really good and virtuous model. Patents and Copyrights are more than an order of magnitude more temporally restrictive. This is great stuff, I hope it proves to be commercially viable and sees broader adoption.

heyoni 7y ago
It’s a “vocal minority”. Seriously, it’s just a handful of people replying to every single comment. Sentry is being perfectly reasonable here.

MFLoon 7y ago

I think this is great; if I ever start a SaaS business I'll happily follow Sentry's example and use the BSL if I want to develop in the open. To the open source fundamentalists expressing disdain: why is the ability to commercialize a piece of code such an important part of the OSS ethos to you? Why are proprietary protections, even when the code itself is still freely visible, usable and modifiable, such a step backwards? What about the very real threat of a business 1000x your size just deciding to fork your code and eat your lunch? Are businesses with open source products supposed to just accept that risk in the name of being good OSS citizens? I'd still much rather see a business with source available code, which will still benefit their users and the community at large - would you rather it be OSI approved open source or nothing?

greggman2 7y ago

I expect to see a lot more of this with GitHub Sponsors coming online. As it is now you can take any BSD, MIT, ISC, GPL open source project and start collecting money from it, not using it in another project, just by asking for money period. The licenses above all allow this. It's only going to take a few bad actors for the actual devs to start wanting a new license that somehow keeps the project open source but only let's them collect the donations. I have no idea how that will work but it seems a likely outcome. I don't mind when my open source library is one tiny part in a larger project that is commercial and making money. But I'd be upset if someone forked my library, changed the name (or not), and started trying to collect donations. Even if they changed the library I don't know at how much they'd have to change it before I'd not feel taken advantage of.

gregimba 7y ago

When will there be a 10.0 Open Source Release? It's harder for me to support this when I saw open source pull requests denied that in hindsight would have let more users run their own hosted sentry with features such as OpenID Support.

the_common_man 7y ago

What does this mean for people who have already contributed? Do you have to get permission of everyone who made a PR merged? Did they have some sort of CLA that allows them to re-license? Just curious how this works.

smitop 7y ago
It doesn't appear they have a CLA. The old license was BSD 3-clause, which states: > 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. > 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. And nowhere is that list to be found. So it appears Sentry is violating the license for external contributions.

martey 7y ago

I think it's interesting that one of the reasons Sentry gives for re-licensing their code (most/all of the major contributors work for Sentry) is also one of the reasons they gave 3 years ago on this site when asked why copycat services did not concern them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800539

ryan_lane 7y ago

The BSL is a "have your cake and eat it too" license. It allows a company to accept contributions from third parties, without those third parties being able to use the changes commercially. It's immoral. The moral equivalent of the BSL is to close-source the software, and to offer free-for-use licenses of the closed-source version. They can continue having a fully open-source release, but the release would be changes from 3 years ago. Sentry isn't doing this because they want the contributions. They want the benefits of open source, without any of the costs associated with it.

gyrgtyn 7y ago
Alternatively, third parties can volunteer their time to AWS by contributing to open source software!
jsmeaton 7y ago
I don't understand the practical difference of your suggestion.
- ryan_lane 7y ago
  If they close off the source, they can't accept contributions from 3rd parties. Also, the closed-source code not being viewable makes it more likely that folks won't accidentally introduce copyright violations into their code, which frequently happens when proprietary code is put into github. In either case, the code is closed-source, but BSL allows them to accept free code from volunteers without providing it back to them for 3 years.
  - jsmeaton 7y ago
    It also allows users to modify the source and run it on their own systems. You're suggesting a strictly worse outcome for the majority of people (users, and sentry) in the name of purity.
bradrydzewski 7y ago
I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that this is immoral. Sentry is granting you a license, for free, to do anything you want with the software except provide a commercial competitor to their hosted service. People using the software for free may still decide to contribute code. This is not a one-sided relationship here. Both parties are getting something of value.

bbanyc 7y ago

I don't blame Sentry. FOSS is a fine ideal for hobby and academic projects, but it doesn't pay the bills. 36 years on and the most successful business model for FOSS is to convince someone rich to lose money on it. (Cf. Gilmore at Cygnus, Shuttleworth at Canonical.) I do wish more companies would use these kinds of "Doom clauses" and contribute old software to the commons once it's no longer commercially viable.

tedivm 7y ago
That's the only business model as long as you ignore Automattic, Chef, CloudBees, Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, DataStax, Gradle, Hashicorp, nginx, Puppet, RedHat, and many others.
- pnako 7y ago
  Some of those companies make money by selling proprietary software. They are thus proprietary software companies, and bad examples of open source software business models.
  - moritzplassnig 7y ago
    What are good examples?
    - pnako 7y ago
      Red Hat. They work with the community upstream, and they open source all their stuff.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

A little off topic from the actual post, but I wish that there was an actual service or program that was a "re-licensing sentry". That is, given some list of open source projects, it would email me if any of the projects changed their license. Many dependency managers just grab the latest release of an open source project, and you as a software developer may not be aware that one of your open source dependencies has changed their license in a way that affects what you can do with your project. It seems a lot of projects are starting out as true open source projects and then once they have built up a user base, are changing their license to something else. It would be nice for me to have a better way to monitor this for my dependencies than just checking the front page of Hacker News.

jmull 7y ago

BSL seems pretty decent... it becomes open in a simple, easy-to-understand way. But it’s troublesome that they road the open source movement for years to grow and are now closing the license. Perhaps it’s a business reality. I wonder if there are any supporters or users or other stakeholders who thought open meant continuing to be open. They’re getting a slap in the face today.

abrookewood 7y ago

I can't help but feel that if companies like Amazon, Google etc had been fairer in their dealings with open source projects (by either contributing more code or by paying the authors) that we wouldn't be in this situation.