6 ms·

I don't understand the philosophy of wanting to use open source and gain the community / benefits of it... but using a proprietary sales model. It just doesn't

I don't understand the philosophy of wanting to use open source and gain the community / benefits of it... but using a proprietary sales model. It just doesn't work, and once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" (whether or not you use that word), you've lost the whole concept of why most of us care about true open source. We can use it, we can learn from it, and for a very select few, we can even contribute to it or support the main devs monetarily or otherwise.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
> once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" Who does that? Certainly not us.
- growse 3y ago
  The entire justification of the existence of the license talks about the problem of the "harmful freeloaders".
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    > "harmful freeloaders". The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. The word we used are "free-riders" and that does not refer to our users. Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - growse 3y ago
      > The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. This is nit-picking pedantry. The term "free-riders" appears six times on this site https://fsl.software/ https://fsl.software/, but my bad for using a slightly different term that has the same meaning. From your very public announcement and linking to the text, it's pretty clear what you think of some of your users. > Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business. You're redefining the concept of "user" to suit your own ends.
      - zogrodea 3y ago
        Would you mind explaining why you have a problem with a clause stating "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us"? It sounds reasonable to me and the opposite which you are defending sounds unsustainable and harmful to the open source ecosystem. (There was a talk given at Strange Loop titled The Economic of Programming Languages by the creator of Elm about this and it sounds like he's hesitant to release something interesting he's been working on because of it. So it's a real issue in my opinion that can lead to a worse outcome for most of us.)
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        The free software movement generally believes that software exists only to solve problems for its users. The creator of a piece of software has no moral rights to profit it from it more than any other user. Richard Stallman doesn't complain that Linus Torvalds used the GNU userspace tools to outocompete HURD out of existence. It's perfectly reasonable not to subscribe to this ideology. I don't particularly think it is a very good or well motivated ideology. However, you can't pretend that you are a free software adherent while also wishing to prevent certain uses of your software. Note that Stallman has explicitly come out against IBM RedHat's similar complaints about people distributing copies of RHEL for free for this very reason.
        growse 3y ago
        In brief: "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us" doesn't define "us" (you now, or for all perpetuity? What if you get bought by a large litigious-happy database vendor?) or "compete" (same market segment? Geographical area? Product type? Specific use-case?). The clause is not written in good faith. It's designed to essentially make it enormously risky to use in any serious environment, because the actual ambition by the clause author is that no-one else uses their software.
        zogrodea 3y ago
        I don't think you're right to assert bad faith. Look at Sentry's track record allowing users to self-host, and this as a step that makes their work more permissive than what they previously had (for example, the shorter duration). I don't challenge that the license may have shortcomings, but I think better evidence is needed before bad faith can be asserted.
    - WJW 3y ago
      > in any matter they want. Then the next sentence immediately goes into ways in which it is not intended to be used. Make up your mind guys.
  - bentlegen 3y ago
    The people we're concerned about are not the hundreds of thousands of Sentry users, including those that self-host. We're concerned about people who have taken the software for the purposes of competing directly against us, that hinders our ability to monetize the work. Monetizing the work helps us continue improving the software and distribute it for free use, benefitting those aforementioned real users (e.g. https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted).
    - k__ 3y ago
      There seems some kind of dissonance for me. You create a new license to keep competitors artificially in check. Doesn't this hint to a flawed business model?
      - ferringb 3y ago
        I think folks need to take a step back from 'business model' and think about how one does large scale FOSS w/out existing on ramen for a decade or two. In the old days you could do FOSS via university gigs (IE, an institution effectively donating resources) or work for a corp that uses said FOSS as part of their products. When the FOSS you're trying to build and share isn't covered by those- when you need to self fund so you can have an actual life- that's where it's always broken down. Patreon/gofundme type stuff can fly in single dev setups, but doesn't scale when it's a large team. There are exceptions to what I'm stating, but as a general rule, this is my experience across a couple decades of FOSS. So if you want to build this thing full time and share it with others, and not subsist just on cardboard ramen and other folks coaches, what's your options here? Provide a paid service in parallel (we host it for you). What do you do when others take your development work- which has an inbuilt RD cost (development)- and try to compete with you via offering lower prices since they're just paying hosting rather than hosting + development?
      - bentlegen 3y ago
        Sentry was already using BUSL (Business Source License) for 4+ years with a non-competitive Additional Use Grant. So we had already been doing this for a long time. The new license actually allows for more competition, because it has a shorter change date to permissive OSS than the aforementioned prior license (2 years vs 3 years). So another read of this is: the business model is going great, so much so that we're comforable switching to a more progressive license vs. what we had.
CM30 3y ago
This. I'm not sure why it's so difficult for people to grasp that open source in of itself is not a business model. It can make money sure, but for the most part that's neither guaranteed or likely. If anyone can take your code and resell it as a competitor or use it for free, then by definition you're not going to be able to monetise the way traditional software businesses can. All the attempts to block large corporations from using their code, block competition using their work, etc feel like the actions of companies that went open source for the social brownie points and because it was the 'right' thing to do, then realised too late that their business isn't going to work the way they expected it to as a result. If anyone wants to work on open source/release their work as open source, the best thing to do is for them to treat it like a hobby with no expectation of a return at the end. If they want money for their software and hate the idea of infinite competition, then open source isn't the right model for them/their company.
- jen20 3y ago
  The idea of the source being available but software not being “free” is fine by me. I want the source so I can fix bugs instantly instead of trying to convince some mid-tier product manager having gone through 5 tiers of support. That is a huge benefit over source-unavailable proprietary software, or (heaven help us) SAAS.
  - WJW 3y ago
    "I could fix it myself if needed" quite often comes up on HN and other programmer forums but I honestly have to wonder how many people could actually fix deep issues in production grade software. For example, there are plenty of bugs open on the issue trackers of (say) postgres or kubernetes yet despite the source of those being available I'm willing to bet a vanishingly small amount of users would be willing or capable to dive in and fix the issue themselves.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Perhaps many would not. I regularly do.
    - 3y ago
arp242 3y ago
What Sentry objects to is people setting up "super-error-reporting.com" with an unmodified copy of the Sentry software without contributing anything back, which undercuts their SaaS business model. This is not a "user" in any common-sense definition of the term. And yes, these people are "getting a free ride" (i.e. "free riding") because they get software with zero cost to them. That's on its own is not really a bad thing – I "free ride" loads of stuff, as do we all – but the "undercuts our business model" is. I'm not a huge fan of the "free rider" phrasing because it doesn't emphasize the core problem, but it certainly means something different from what you're taking it means. Simple saying "your business model sucks then", as the previous poster did, is too easy. SaaS is the obvious business model for something like Sentry, and this benefits not just Sentry but also the users who don't want to self-host (i.e. most users). There are other ways, but they're much harder. PostgreSQL and Linux are mostly developed by organisations which use or offer PostreSQL and Linux as a service, so it's more or less the same business model but with extra steps. Ideally having the SaaS company separated from the software development like that is better, but also really really hard to do because it's a catch-22: you need to develop a community for the software, but to develop the software you need a community. PostgreSQL's and Linux's pre-cloud roots are a huge boon here.
- cxr 3y ago
  > Simple saying "your business model sucks then", as the previous poster did Their comment doesn't say that. Did they edit their post, or are you just shamelessly throwing around made up quotes?
  - arp242 3y ago
    Eh? > the "harmful freeloading" problem is not the license, it's a badly-thought-through business model.
    - cxr 3y ago
      So that's a yes.
      - deleted 3y ago
etothepii 3y ago
There's an issue about size here too. When you are a small tech company there is a very real risk you will not exist in one-year. Open source code is a much better protection for your customers than an escrow because all kinds of events can occur that don't quite trigger this escrow but which the customer could never have allowed to be risks if they'd been itemised.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

> once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" Who does that? Certainly not us.

growse 3y ago
The entire justification of the existence of the license talks about the problem of the "harmful freeloaders".
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > "harmful freeloaders". The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. The word we used are "free-riders" and that does not refer to our users. Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - growse 3y ago
    > The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. This is nit-picking pedantry. The term "free-riders" appears six times on this site https://fsl.software/ https://fsl.software/, but my bad for using a slightly different term that has the same meaning. From your very public announcement and linking to the text, it's pretty clear what you think of some of your users. > Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business. You're redefining the concept of "user" to suit your own ends.
    - zogrodea 3y ago
      Would you mind explaining why you have a problem with a clause stating "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us"? It sounds reasonable to me and the opposite which you are defending sounds unsustainable and harmful to the open source ecosystem. (There was a talk given at Strange Loop titled The Economic of Programming Languages by the creator of Elm about this and it sounds like he's hesitant to release something interesting he's been working on because of it. So it's a real issue in my opinion that can lead to a worse outcome for most of us.)
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        The free software movement generally believes that software exists only to solve problems for its users. The creator of a piece of software has no moral rights to profit it from it more than any other user. Richard Stallman doesn't complain that Linus Torvalds used the GNU userspace tools to outocompete HURD out of existence. It's perfectly reasonable not to subscribe to this ideology. I don't particularly think it is a very good or well motivated ideology. However, you can't pretend that you are a free software adherent while also wishing to prevent certain uses of your software. Note that Stallman has explicitly come out against IBM RedHat's similar complaints about people distributing copies of RHEL for free for this very reason.
      - growse 3y ago
        In brief: "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us" doesn't define "us" (you now, or for all perpetuity? What if you get bought by a large litigious-happy database vendor?) or "compete" (same market segment? Geographical area? Product type? Specific use-case?). The clause is not written in good faith. It's designed to essentially make it enormously risky to use in any serious environment, because the actual ambition by the clause author is that no-one else uses their software.
        zogrodea 3y ago
        I don't think you're right to assert bad faith. Look at Sentry's track record allowing users to self-host, and this as a step that makes their work more permissive than what they previously had (for example, the shorter duration). I don't challenge that the license may have shortcomings, but I think better evidence is needed before bad faith can be asserted.
  - WJW 3y ago
    > in any matter they want. Then the next sentence immediately goes into ways in which it is not intended to be used. Make up your mind guys.
- bentlegen 3y ago
  The people we're concerned about are not the hundreds of thousands of Sentry users, including those that self-host. We're concerned about people who have taken the software for the purposes of competing directly against us, that hinders our ability to monetize the work. Monetizing the work helps us continue improving the software and distribute it for free use, benefitting those aforementioned real users (e.g. https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted).
  - k__ 3y ago
    There seems some kind of dissonance for me. You create a new license to keep competitors artificially in check. Doesn't this hint to a flawed business model?
    - ferringb 3y ago
      I think folks need to take a step back from 'business model' and think about how one does large scale FOSS w/out existing on ramen for a decade or two. In the old days you could do FOSS via university gigs (IE, an institution effectively donating resources) or work for a corp that uses said FOSS as part of their products. When the FOSS you're trying to build and share isn't covered by those- when you need to self fund so you can have an actual life- that's where it's always broken down. Patreon/gofundme type stuff can fly in single dev setups, but doesn't scale when it's a large team. There are exceptions to what I'm stating, but as a general rule, this is my experience across a couple decades of FOSS. So if you want to build this thing full time and share it with others, and not subsist just on cardboard ramen and other folks coaches, what's your options here? Provide a paid service in parallel (we host it for you). What do you do when others take your development work- which has an inbuilt RD cost (development)- and try to compete with you via offering lower prices since they're just paying hosting rather than hosting + development?
    - bentlegen 3y ago
      Sentry was already using BUSL (Business Source License) for 4+ years with a non-competitive Additional Use Grant. So we had already been doing this for a long time. The new license actually allows for more competition, because it has a shorter change date to permissive OSS than the aforementioned prior license (2 years vs 3 years). So another read of this is: the business model is going great, so much so that we're comforable switching to a more progressive license vs. what we had.

CM30 3y ago

This. I'm not sure why it's so difficult for people to grasp that open source in of itself is not a business model. It can make money sure, but for the most part that's neither guaranteed or likely. If anyone can take your code and resell it as a competitor or use it for free, then by definition you're not going to be able to monetise the way traditional software businesses can. All the attempts to block large corporations from using their code, block competition using their work, etc feel like the actions of companies that went open source for the social brownie points and because it was the 'right' thing to do, then realised too late that their business isn't going to work the way they expected it to as a result. If anyone wants to work on open source/release their work as open source, the best thing to do is for them to treat it like a hobby with no expectation of a return at the end. If they want money for their software and hate the idea of infinite competition, then open source isn't the right model for them/their company.

jen20 3y ago
The idea of the source being available but software not being “free” is fine by me. I want the source so I can fix bugs instantly instead of trying to convince some mid-tier product manager having gone through 5 tiers of support. That is a huge benefit over source-unavailable proprietary software, or (heaven help us) SAAS.
- WJW 3y ago
  "I could fix it myself if needed" quite often comes up on HN and other programmer forums but I honestly have to wonder how many people could actually fix deep issues in production grade software. For example, there are plenty of bugs open on the issue trackers of (say) postgres or kubernetes yet despite the source of those being available I'm willing to bet a vanishingly small amount of users would be willing or capable to dive in and fix the issue themselves.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Perhaps many would not. I regularly do.
  - 3y ago

arp242 3y ago

What Sentry objects to is people setting up "super-error-reporting.com" with an unmodified copy of the Sentry software without contributing anything back, which undercuts their SaaS business model. This is not a "user" in any common-sense definition of the term. And yes, these people are "getting a free ride" (i.e. "free riding") because they get software with zero cost to them. That's on its own is not really a bad thing – I "free ride" loads of stuff, as do we all – but the "undercuts our business model" is. I'm not a huge fan of the "free rider" phrasing because it doesn't emphasize the core problem, but it certainly means something different from what you're taking it means. Simple saying "your business model sucks then", as the previous poster did, is too easy. SaaS is the obvious business model for something like Sentry, and this benefits not just Sentry but also the users who don't want to self-host (i.e. most users). There are other ways, but they're much harder. PostgreSQL and Linux are mostly developed by organisations which use or offer PostreSQL and Linux as a service, so it's more or less the same business model but with extra steps. Ideally having the SaaS company separated from the software development like that is better, but also really really hard to do because it's a catch-22: you need to develop a community for the software, but to develop the software you need a community. PostgreSQL's and Linux's pre-cloud roots are a huge boon here.

cxr 3y ago
> Simple saying "your business model sucks then", as the previous poster did Their comment doesn't say that. Did they edit their post, or are you just shamelessly throwing around made up quotes?
- arp242 3y ago
  Eh? > the "harmful freeloading" problem is not the license, it's a badly-thought-through business model.
  - cxr 3y ago
    So that's a yes.
    - deleted 3y ago

etothepii 3y ago

There's an issue about size here too. When you are a small tech company there is a very real risk you will not exist in one-year. Open source code is a much better protection for your customers than an escrow because all kinds of events can occur that don't quite trigger this escrow but which the customer could never have allowed to be risks if they'd been itemised.