5 ms·

Whats stopping someone from using your code and starting another cloud hosted competitor that's identical to you? Is that against your license? (Different from

Whats stopping someone from using your code and starting another cloud hosted competitor that's identical to you? Is that against your license? (Different from an entity downloading your software and self-hosting which you say is allowed)

vanilla-almond 5y ago
They have a blog post about the open source license they chose: GNU Affero General Public License V3 (AGPLv3). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses From their blog post: > If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically prevents corporations that never had any intention to contribute to open source from profiting from the open source work. > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. They won’t be able to take the code, make changes to it and sell it as a competing product without contributing those changes back to the original project. [emphasise mine] The blog post above was discussed heavily on Hacker News back in Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
- rustc 5y ago
  > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. Many projects are moving from an AGPL-like license to a proprietary license just to prevent this though. MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and just yesterday, Apollo Federation 2.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    That's not entirely correct. Elastic and Mongo weren't using AGPL in the first place, they had MIT/Apache type licenses. Generally we're seeing open core/source startups moving to AGPL or proprietary source available licenses (Grafana, Sentry to name a few more).
    - rustc 5y ago
      MongoDB was using AGPL before they created and switched to SSPL [1]. You're right about ElasticSearch, they were Apache-2.0 before creating and switching to the SSPL + Elastic License dual license [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB#Licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB#Licensing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
- charcircuit 5y ago
  The AGPL has nothing to do with contributing back.
rustc 5y ago
It seems like bug fixes and features are delayed 0-6 months in the open source version than the cloud hosted one [1]. > We have a free as in beer Plausible Analytics Self-Hosted solution. It’s exactly the same product as our Cloud solution with a less frequent release schedule (think of it as a long term support release). > Bug fixes and new features are released to the cloud version several times per week. Features are battle-tested in the cloud which allows us to fix any bugs before the general self-hosted release. Every six months we combine all the changes into a new self-hosted release. [1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics#can-plausible-analytics-be-self-hosted https://github.com/plausible/analytics#can-plausible-analyti...

vanilla-almond 5y ago

They have a blog post about the open source license they chose: GNU Affero General Public License V3 (AGPLv3). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses From their blog post: > If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically prevents corporations that never had any intention to contribute to open source from profiting from the open source work. > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. They won’t be able to take the code, make changes to it and sell it as a competing product without contributing those changes back to the original project. [emphasise mine] The blog post above was discussed heavily on Hacker News back in Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734

rustc 5y ago
> It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. Many projects are moving from an AGPL-like license to a proprietary license just to prevent this though. MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and just yesterday, Apollo Federation 2.
- sofixa 5y ago
  That's not entirely correct. Elastic and Mongo weren't using AGPL in the first place, they had MIT/Apache type licenses. Generally we're seeing open core/source startups moving to AGPL or proprietary source available licenses (Grafana, Sentry to name a few more).
  - rustc 5y ago
    MongoDB was using AGPL before they created and switched to SSPL [1]. You're right about ElasticSearch, they were Apache-2.0 before creating and switching to the SSPL + Elastic License dual license [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB#Licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB#Licensing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
charcircuit 5y ago
The AGPL has nothing to do with contributing back.

rustc 5y ago

It seems like bug fixes and features are delayed 0-6 months in the open source version than the cloud hosted one [1]. > We have a free as in beer Plausible Analytics Self-Hosted solution. It’s exactly the same product as our Cloud solution with a less frequent release schedule (think of it as a long term support release). > Bug fixes and new features are released to the cloud version several times per week. Features are battle-tested in the cloud which allows us to fix any bugs before the general self-hosted release. Every six months we combine all the changes into a new self-hosted release. [1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics#can-plausible-analytics-be-self-hosted https://github.com/plausible/analytics#can-plausible-analyti...