4 ms·

Is sentry.io no longer open source? Have not followed it as closely since its so cheap.

easton 3y ago
It's source available under the BSL: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry https://github.com/getsentry/sentry. After four years it becomes open source (probably to prevent "AWS Elastic Error Handling service(tm)" from becoming a thing) You can still run it for your company for free, if you feel like managing all of the infra it requires.
- kevincox 3y ago
  This strikes me as a poor choice (moreso than other BSL adopters) since there are many other error-handling SaaS companies available. It seems like it is better for people to be using your tool hosted by someone else than using a different tool with a different API so that migrating to your offering (hosting or support) is more difficult.
  - zeeg 3y ago
    This would a great segway for another post as theres a ton of nuance and interesting history in how Sentry has approached the competitive market. I'll add to the list and maybe at some point do one just around that. That said, almost all of our competitors plateaud in growth even _after_ we switched to the BUSL. We found folks don't care that much. They appreciate open source, but they care less about the caveats of a license and more than they can self-host, view the source. They care about the liability of the product being maintainable, and BUSL still allows you to maintain software if the company behind it went belly up. Something also not easily understood: our SaaS business grew 4x faster than Open Source right off the bat, and eventually even faster. People absolutely desire to outsource problems that arent there core strength, but that's kind of what the industries been seeing all along with the rise of cloud providers and other SaaS services.
    - js2 3y ago
      I know for a fact that your competition is using your code, even where they've built a differentiated service. e.g. Embrace is using Sentry Symbolicator. Having built my own symbolicator before yours existed, that's easily months of work that requires highly specialized knowledge. Like maybe a few dozen developers on the planet could write that. I know you get a lot of flack over BUSL, but I'm not sure folks appreciate just how much of Sentry is open source and how much you're giving away, some of it of very high value almost exclusively to your competition. I mean who but a Sentry competitor would need your symbolicator? No one. Meanwhile looking at https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator/graphs/contributors https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator/graphs/contributor... I'm not seeing what looks like too many, if any, outside contributions.
      - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
        Fun fact: we acquired a company (specto) which used our open source symbolication infrastructure (underlying library to sumbolicator). Was a nice discovery.
    - ensignavenger 3y ago
      More interesting would be what impact switching to BUSL had on your own business. Did growth accelerate after the switch? Was business declineing before the switch and did it pick back up afterwards? If there was a positive change in business growth trends, were there other thing the business did that may have accounted for the change?
      - zeeg 3y ago
        I'll touch on it when we talk about relicensing, but the tl;dr is it didn't impact our business at all. It did however succeed at its goal of removing a nuisance (a story for a future post).
ensignavenger 3y ago
They pulled a switcharoo a couple of years back, switching to the BUSL source available/eventually open license.
the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
Almost all the code is out there either as MIT or Apache2. Changes in the last 4 years have a temporary exclusivity period via the BUSL and roll over to Apache2 on a monthly basis. We have however heard loud and clear that a lot of people are dissatisifed with this, particularly with us calling ourselves an Open Source company. We're trying out best, maybe that's not the last part of the story. Combining a sustainable business and Open Source under the same hat is tricky, and maybe we haven't found the right solution yet.
- ensignavenger 3y ago
  As one who is highly critical of the BUSL and especially of companies switching from Open Source licenses to the BUSL, I want to chime in a bit on this. First of all- Thank You. Thank you to Sentry and the people there for making Sentry and making it originally Open Source. Thank you for continuing to make it eventually Open Source. Thank you for your continuing financial support of Open Source. I should have been more nuanced in my comment above, as Sentry only abandoned Open Source for their core product(s) and continue to contribute to other open source projects. I don't believe Sentry "owes" anyone continued open source license terms. I believe strongly in the value of the ability to fork. This is best for both companies and their customers. It allows both to pivot to new models. This is why I promote open source and insist on it for any core infrastructure or applications within my business. The freedom to fork has to be available to the community or any subset thereof, and viable. This is the weakness of the BUSL- because it prevents the community, or a subset thereof, from pursuing a key source of revenue to fund a fork. I also really appreciate the business challenges of running any business, and especially an open source business. I believe there are many viable avenues to doing so. Community, product quality, support, and freedom are all critical selling points that open source companies have to do a better job of promoting and leveraging. I am willing to talk to anyone at Sentry or any other company considering the BUSL about strategies to make money and to avoid "heretical" software licenses. :)
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    > The freedom to fork has to be available to the community or any subset thereof, and viable. This is the weakness of the BUSL- because it prevents the community, or a subset thereof, from pursuing a key source of revenue to fund a fork. I believe the main issue today is less the BUSL but that 3 or 4 years which are the common terms are a bloody long time. The secondary issue is that the BUSL is a huge turnoff for contributions for a potential community fork. I know people forked Sentry from the BSD source rather than the BUSL rollover versions, even though the Apache2 licensed Sentry is much newer (though still years old). We might not owe anyone anything, but we also are not particularly happy with the license choice we have at the moment. We had the hope that we can start a positive trend for combining a SaaS business with Open Source and I don't think it has quite worked out how we wanted. A lot of companies rally behind the BUSL that have very different values than we do, and that adds to the negative perception of the license.
JimDabell 3y ago
There’s a lot of discussion about Sentry’s approach to open-source here, including many comments from people who work there, including the CTO and the Head of Open-Source at Sentry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990036
- Siecje 3y ago
  I've read comments from both threads. I still don't know why Sentry moved away from open source. Why wasn't it sustainable?
  - zeeg 3y ago
    Will put on my list for potential future topics (though we're going to talk a lot about this from a corporate point of view too).

It's source available under the BSL: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry https://github.com/getsentry/sentry. After four years it becomes open source (probably to prevent "AWS Elastic Error Handling service(tm)" from becoming a thing) You can still run it for your company for free, if you feel like managing all of the infra it requires.

kevincox 3y ago
This strikes me as a poor choice (moreso than other BSL adopters) since there are many other error-handling SaaS companies available. It seems like it is better for people to be using your tool hosted by someone else than using a different tool with a different API so that migrating to your offering (hosting or support) is more difficult.
- zeeg 3y ago
  This would a great segway for another post as theres a ton of nuance and interesting history in how Sentry has approached the competitive market. I'll add to the list and maybe at some point do one just around that. That said, almost all of our competitors plateaud in growth even _after_ we switched to the BUSL. We found folks don't care that much. They appreciate open source, but they care less about the caveats of a license and more than they can self-host, view the source. They care about the liability of the product being maintainable, and BUSL still allows you to maintain software if the company behind it went belly up. Something also not easily understood: our SaaS business grew 4x faster than Open Source right off the bat, and eventually even faster. People absolutely desire to outsource problems that arent there core strength, but that's kind of what the industries been seeing all along with the rise of cloud providers and other SaaS services.
  - js2 3y ago
    I know for a fact that your competition is using your code, even where they've built a differentiated service. e.g. Embrace is using Sentry Symbolicator. Having built my own symbolicator before yours existed, that's easily months of work that requires highly specialized knowledge. Like maybe a few dozen developers on the planet could write that. I know you get a lot of flack over BUSL, but I'm not sure folks appreciate just how much of Sentry is open source and how much you're giving away, some of it of very high value almost exclusively to your competition. I mean who but a Sentry competitor would need your symbolicator? No one. Meanwhile looking at https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator/graphs/contributors https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator/graphs/contributor... I'm not seeing what looks like too many, if any, outside contributions.
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
      Fun fact: we acquired a company (specto) which used our open source symbolication infrastructure (underlying library to sumbolicator). Was a nice discovery.
  - ensignavenger 3y ago
    More interesting would be what impact switching to BUSL had on your own business. Did growth accelerate after the switch? Was business declineing before the switch and did it pick back up afterwards? If there was a positive change in business growth trends, were there other thing the business did that may have accounted for the change?
    - zeeg 3y ago
      I'll touch on it when we talk about relicensing, but the tl;dr is it didn't impact our business at all. It did however succeed at its goal of removing a nuisance (a story for a future post).

ensignavenger 3y ago

They pulled a switcharoo a couple of years back, switching to the BUSL source available/eventually open license.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

Almost all the code is out there either as MIT or Apache2. Changes in the last 4 years have a temporary exclusivity period via the BUSL and roll over to Apache2 on a monthly basis. We have however heard loud and clear that a lot of people are dissatisifed with this, particularly with us calling ourselves an Open Source company. We're trying out best, maybe that's not the last part of the story. Combining a sustainable business and Open Source under the same hat is tricky, and maybe we haven't found the right solution yet.

ensignavenger 3y ago
As one who is highly critical of the BUSL and especially of companies switching from Open Source licenses to the BUSL, I want to chime in a bit on this. First of all- Thank You. Thank you to Sentry and the people there for making Sentry and making it originally Open Source. Thank you for continuing to make it eventually Open Source. Thank you for your continuing financial support of Open Source. I should have been more nuanced in my comment above, as Sentry only abandoned Open Source for their core product(s) and continue to contribute to other open source projects. I don't believe Sentry "owes" anyone continued open source license terms. I believe strongly in the value of the ability to fork. This is best for both companies and their customers. It allows both to pivot to new models. This is why I promote open source and insist on it for any core infrastructure or applications within my business. The freedom to fork has to be available to the community or any subset thereof, and viable. This is the weakness of the BUSL- because it prevents the community, or a subset thereof, from pursuing a key source of revenue to fund a fork. I also really appreciate the business challenges of running any business, and especially an open source business. I believe there are many viable avenues to doing so. Community, product quality, support, and freedom are all critical selling points that open source companies have to do a better job of promoting and leveraging. I am willing to talk to anyone at Sentry or any other company considering the BUSL about strategies to make money and to avoid "heretical" software licenses. :)
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > The freedom to fork has to be available to the community or any subset thereof, and viable. This is the weakness of the BUSL- because it prevents the community, or a subset thereof, from pursuing a key source of revenue to fund a fork. I believe the main issue today is less the BUSL but that 3 or 4 years which are the common terms are a bloody long time. The secondary issue is that the BUSL is a huge turnoff for contributions for a potential community fork. I know people forked Sentry from the BSD source rather than the BUSL rollover versions, even though the Apache2 licensed Sentry is much newer (though still years old). We might not owe anyone anything, but we also are not particularly happy with the license choice we have at the moment. We had the hope that we can start a positive trend for combining a SaaS business with Open Source and I don't think it has quite worked out how we wanted. A lot of companies rally behind the BUSL that have very different values than we do, and that adds to the negative perception of the license.

JimDabell 3y ago

There’s a lot of discussion about Sentry’s approach to open-source here, including many comments from people who work there, including the CTO and the Head of Open-Source at Sentry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990036

Siecje 3y ago
I've read comments from both threads. I still don't know why Sentry moved away from open source. Why wasn't it sustainable?
- zeeg 3y ago
  Will put on my list for potential future topics (though we're going to talk a lot about this from a corporate point of view too).