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I wish the article had spelled this out a little better, but the reason many businesses have open source licenses for their software is to assuage their custome

I wish the article had spelled this out a little better, but the reason many businesses have open source licenses for their software is to assuage their customers’ concerns about lock in and permanence (will your startup be around later? Will you jack up the price? Don’t worry, it’s open source). The downside, of course, is that it’s harder to sell stuff if it’s also available for free. I believe the theory here is that this license promises to open later to fix the lock in fear, but is closed now to create scarcity. So under its logic, it’s different from simply switching to Apache later because it’s the promise that’s doing the heavy lifting. I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea, just that I think I understand the intended logic of it.

bentlegen 3y ago
I think the direction of your comment is right, with two caveats: > but is closed now to create scarcity 1. It's not about scarcity. The software has always been given away for free for non-competing use (it was licensed under BUSL for 4+ years with a non-compete Additional Use Grant before this change). Sentry's cloud offering (sentry.io) has always "competed" with its own free self-hosted users, and the new license doesn't change that. It's strictly about preventing free-riders who monetize the work without giving back. > it’s different from simply switching to Apache later because it’s the promise that’s doing the heavy lifting 2. I agree, but I want to clarify that it's not a promise (which could be broken). It's a grant that is written into the source code itself (in the LICENSE file). If you possess a copy of the code today with this LICENSE file, in two years that copy will be Apache 2.0.