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We are not trying to build a license with infinite options to fill out - it’s my opinion that will never lead to adoption. It’s intentional the choices we made

by zeeg 3y ago

We are not trying to build a license with infinite options to fill out - it’s my opinion that will never lead to adoption. It’s intentional the choices we made and we see Sentry leading the way here. Theres a reason we’re forceful on it being permissive. Theres a reason we chose two years over four. These choices make the ecosystem better. We don’t want a repeat of the complexity that is BUSL and that’s exactly why we shipped a static license. Theres quite a lot of companies who will happily follow a role model, and in the past some of them have chosen BUSL entirely because Sentry leverages it. We hope to inspire people to adopt a better license - better for adoption, better for developers - and help that next generation of companies by giving them more sane defaults. These defaults mean more free software. They mean easier adoption within legal departments. They mean less fuzzy use grants (albeit only for SaaS in our case). These are all net improvements if your business looks like Sentry, and a lot of companies do.

kemitchell 3y ago
I don't doubt your conviction. It's easy enough to stand up a website, but naming things and yet another public license change ain't nothing. I've guided companies to decisions on all these licensing choices. Decisions differed, and reasons did, too. Every choice to delayed-relicense open meant more open software and made the ecosystem better, insofar as more code means better. Everyone thought their choices were right---for them. There's definitely value in painting the shed red and calling that a standard, but there's no one in any position to enforce adherence. The thought I'd leave you with is that if you're worried about adoption under your restricted terms, and not just the eventual open ones, I think you could get a lot more projects reusing a "don't compete with us" license uncoupled from permissive relicensing on an aggressively short interval. "Licensed under Foundation Source v2, releases become MIT after 2 years" isn't any harder to mimic, for companies you suspect will just follow your lead. And then anyone adopting just FSLv2, or "FSLv2, releases become MPLv2 after 4 years" (Hashi?), or some other combination, could also be bouncing around through the industry, bumping into coders and legal departments, informing them one at a time that FSL exists and might be worth green-lighting. I wish you and yours the best. I'd never say this is bad, and I haven't. But I've been at this a while, and I do suspect it could be better.

by zeeg 3y ago

kemitchell 3y ago

I don't doubt your conviction. It's easy enough to stand up a website, but naming things and yet another public license change ain't nothing. I've guided companies to decisions on all these licensing choices. Decisions differed, and reasons did, too. Every choice to delayed-relicense open meant more open software and made the ecosystem better, insofar as more code means better. Everyone thought their choices were right---for them. There's definitely value in painting the shed red and calling that a standard, but there's no one in any position to enforce adherence. The thought I'd leave you with is that if you're worried about adoption under your restricted terms, and not just the eventual open ones, I think you could get a lot more projects reusing a "don't compete with us" license uncoupled from permissive relicensing on an aggressively short interval. "Licensed under Foundation Source v2, releases become MIT after 2 years" isn't any harder to mimic, for companies you suspect will just follow your lead. And then anyone adopting just FSLv2, or "FSLv2, releases become MPLv2 after 4 years" (Hashi?), or some other combination, could also be bouncing around through the industry, bumping into coders and legal departments, informing them one at a time that FSL exists and might be worth green-lighting. I wish you and yours the best. I'd never say this is bad, and I haven't. But I've been at this a while, and I do suspect it could be better.