8 ms·

Plausible Community Edition

125 points by saeedesmaili 2y ago

gdsdfe 2y ago
is this like a PR stunt ? genuinely curious
- HuwFulcher 2y ago
  Being cynical it looks like a way of holding features hostage for the purpose of extracting revenue. I sympathise with the problem of re-sellers abusing their hard work but they are also creating two different classes of product with this change.
  - whynotmaybe 2y ago
    Sonarqube/cloud is working the same way. Community edition with enough features for small businesses. Once you reach a certain size, you'll need the other features but you now have the money to pay for it and as you've used the community edition for some time, you know that you want this products. (and if the product is deep into your workflow, the cost of change is high that you'll rather pay than switch) As I'm currently building the stack for my startup, I'm more interested in that model than into a "full features 7 days trial" that then turns into a 19$/m/user.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  They got backlash from their community for switching licenses. They got forked and now want to appease to the forkers/fork users by offering a slightly better license... Seems like the the 101 for Startups atm.
  - detaro 2y ago
    How is this offering "a slightly better license"?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - BoredPositron 2y ago
      It's not but they present it as such, excuse my brevity.
  - ezekg 2y ago
    When did they recently try to change licenses? I must have missed that. I don't see any PRs or issues related to a license change, aside from their change from MIT to AGPL 4 years ago.
colesantiago 2y ago
I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. These new ones preach they are better than Google Analytics (also another evil tracking system) yet some how these ones still track you anyway and you're paying for analytics which is useless and you're punished for growing. It might be best to save money and not use any analytics system, it's just noise at this point. Am I missing something?
- chpatrick 2y ago
  This is for the owners of the site tracking their users (who have the logs anyway), as opposed to Google hoovering up information from the whole internet.
  - colesantiago 2y ago
    I can see that this software has a SaaS version so I was referring to all privacy tracking software in general. So except for self hosting it doesn't seem that this is any different to GA.
    - Y-bar 2y ago
      We use it for a two main reasons: - Due to how the FISA (e.g. 702) laws in the USA are incompatible with GDPR, GA4 is illegal is much of EU (and EEA). - Plausible actually collects less data on the visitor, making it more ethically sound.
    - chpatrick 2y ago
      Self hosting is the whole point of this.
- rkwz 2y ago
  > I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. Not really oxymoron if they don't track your PII like IP address, email etc. Don't know how Plausible works, but usually these systems track page views, etc without the associated visitors' data. They either anonymize the visitor metadata or just aggregate the site data like what urls are visited, etc.
FlamingMoe 2y ago
I've been a paying customer and advocate of Plausible for over 2 years, and this is not ok. Marko frequently posts on social media about Plausible's revenue growth, currently at over $1M ARR with a tiny team and little overhead. They are doing great financially. Yet in this post he tries to gain sympathy by focusing on "we only make $300/mo in donations". Frequently moving the goalpost on what it means for your product to be open source betrays a lack of integrity and will have me, and probably others, looking for an alternative.
- maccard 2y ago
  If that is your take away from this post I urge you to read it more carefully.
  - FlamingMoe 2y ago
    If you have a counterpoint I urge you to make it.
    - simonw 2y ago
      Near the start of the article: "That license change has helped us build a sustainable open source project with 8 core team members and several paid external contributors at the time of writing. We don’t have any investors, so all this is solely funded by the fees our 12,000+ subscribers pay us." Then later on while talking about the self-hosting option: "We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team." That's only misleading if you skim the article. They clearly differentiate between the 12,000 paying subscribers who fund the operation compared to the $300 in donations from self-hosters.
      - maccard 2y ago
        Thanks - this is exactly it.
      - tedivm 2y ago
jtwoodhouse 2y ago
"We want to reduce the threat from businesses such as hosting companies and other resellers who try to commercialize popular open source projects. We’ve seen our self-hosted code being used in a way it was never intended for by corporations that don’t care about us or open source." I don't understand why people think they can stop others from commercializing their open source project. You can give something to the world. You can hold onto IP to stop others from cashing in. You can't have it both ways.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  And on top of that how many open source products are they commercializing? Compilers, programming languages, operating systems, dev tools…
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  It's a growth hack. I don't believe anyone who releases their product under a FOSS license will remain FOSS unless the company goes under. It becomes a "too much money left on the table" situation.
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    It’s not even a hack these days, investors look for this as a traction metric
- ossobuco 2y ago
  > You can't have it both ways. Why shouldn't I? I created a product and I should be able to choose who do I give it to. I want it to be as open as possible while restricting some types of usage I don't like, or that would be detrimental to the continuation of the project itself. I don't see anything outlandish in my statement.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    There's nothing stopping you from doing that, but it's not FOSS and you can't use a FOSS license to drive your growth.
101008 2y ago
Out of curiosity: if the companies reselling Plausible (the ones mentioned in the post) kept the old version running, the old license applies? (I know they wouldn't get updates, security improvements, etc)
- jffry 2y ago
  Yes that is correct, they can keep using the old code under the license they were granted for the old code.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Yes, and they can fork it and maintain it themselves. Would need to change some trademark stuff, rename it to Implausible or something.
- CrazyStat 2y ago
  Yes. The old MIT-licensed version continues to be MIT-licensed, and anyone can continue to use it freely.
harshitaneja 2y ago
How does AGPL license work for such services? Would I have to distribute source code of my web application if I use Plausible CE? If not, how is it different from MinIO where as far as I understand the AGPL licensed use of the product requires distribution of entire code base?
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  > Would I have to distribute source code of my web application if I use Plausible CE No, you don't. Folks pick AGPL because of the FUD/uncertainty around it while still appearing "FOSS". In reality these companies don't have the legal teeth to back the bark, otherwise they'd go BSL and make their intention known. Before folks reply with whataboutism, no one has ever successfully proven the AGPL infectiousness to other web applications in court. Positing about it on hear is pointless.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > In reality these companies don't have the legal teeth to back the bark, otherwise they'd go BSL and make their intention known. Or alternatively, they still want to be FOSS, which AGPL is, but BSL isn't.
    - cvwright 2y ago
      The community has been trained over many years to believe that anything FOSS is immediately trustworthy, and that anything non-FOSS is immediately untrustworthy. This gets exploited all the time when companies use FOSS licenses to get traction, then pull the rug and switch to a more restrictive license once customers are locked in. On the flip side, if a company tries to be honest from the beginning by using BSL (or similar) they get endless grief from religious zealots. AGPL is the magic unicorn license that is just restrictive enough to protect you from your competitors, while still passing the FOSS religious purity test.
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        Actually that’s not true. I’ll not trust VSCode/ium or Chrome/ium with anything. We trust Free Software not because of the license, but because of the ecosystem and number of eyeballs. Go tried to pull something similar by forcing telemetry on everyone, and they were almost burning everything down. Almost. People/companies get vilified when they change licenses because of the way they do it. They don’t openly say that they need the money, did some mistake and need to change things to keep company afloat, but they also change their tone after license change and vilify the past contributors and become aggressive themselves. There are many friendly open core or closed source companies out there, and I trust them with my code, data and secrets, and pay them without any hesitation. Software ideologies are something, so the real world. While I’d love to see everything as Free Software, we’re not there yet, we might never be, and that’s OK. I’m writing Free Software and try to use Free Software as much as I can to show my colors and do my part in the thing I believe. But I’m never a mindless zealot spewing things.
embik 2y ago
I seriously wonder what HN thinks is a valid business model for writing open source software. Everyone here seems to insinuate that people want to create a business and use open source as a growth hack. But how do you differentiate those from people who want to write open source (because they believe in it) and have to have a business to support their livelihood? This is a team of eight people that tried to do everything „right“ by changing to a FOSS license (which happened four years ago) and the changes announced here sound very reasonable (changing branding and removing undocumented APIs). But all comments are dunking on them as if they haven’t even read the article.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  From my experience, people here like permissive licenses because they can grab the source and don't think about it further (and don't forget to give credit if their coffee was good that day), because it's building on top of other people's work without any effort. I don't think it's bad intentions though. Just grab the pieces you need, assemble, add the missing parts and start a project, and earn money. xGPL (which I strongly support) prevents this building model by forcing license inheritance, release of changes and limiting license interoperability, preventing creation of technical secret sauces, and many people think that all secret sauces are technical. OTOH, the harder (but better in the long run) way to create value with FOSS and Free Software particular to have stellar support and reliability. i.e.: Your code can be deployed, compiled, or built upon, but you're the best source to get the software in the first place. Your presence, human relations and knowledge about the product is the secret sauce you have, but this needs more effort, is a more of a soft skill and grows like a sequoia (i.e. roots first for a decade, then start to get taller). This is not a quick buck, but an old school proper business building, but many people don't have time for that, and since everyone wants to build fast and consume fast, this more healthier mode of making business is frowned upon. Sometimes you need to move slow and break(through) things, but as the meme says "ain't nobody have time for dat!", which is shortsightedness in my perspective.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    > OTOH, the harder (but better in the long run) way to create value with FOSS and Free Software particular to have stellar support and reliability. i.e.: Your code can be deployed, compiled, or built upon, but you're the best source to get the software in the first place. ...It's not obvious to me that the person who originally wrote the software is necessarily better positioned to support the software. Everyone has the current source code, so from that standpoint it's a level playing field. Another party could come in and build a business as the premier support consultants without most of the original developer's startup costs. Now, I'm not sure if this has ever actually happened. If it hasn't, maybe I'm wrong. I would like to be wrong.
steviedotboston 2y ago
I've been very pleased with Plausible as a Google Analytics alternative. I don't really care about the privacy and open source stuff, but the integration is simple and if you just want to know "how many people are looking at my site, where are they coming from, etc" it's fantastic. GA4 is really too complex for most people.
- leros 2y ago
  I've been using Plausible for a while and been pretty happy with it. I agree that GA4 is too complex. I do sometimes worry that Plausible's more relaxed session tracking is making it harder for me to understand my true user count.
nickorlow 2y ago
Sounds similar to the issues FUTO [1] is having and why they made their "Source First" license[2]. Plausible definitely took a different approach though. Interested to see how it works out. [1] https://futo.org https://futo.org [2] https://sourcefirst.com https://sourcefirst.com
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Any particular reason for the submission OP? Related discussion just two days ago: Plausible Analytics: GDPR Compliance w/o Cookie Consent Banner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909006
thayne 2y ago
> The code for all these features is still available to the public so it can be reviewed and inspected, but these features will not be a part of Plausible CE and they’ll have a different license. Will the code for these features be in the same repo, or be kept separate? If the former, is it easy to remove them to create a fork that is fully open source? Or does the community edition actually contain proprietary code that is disabled? > if you want to contribute to our codebase in the future as an external contributor, you’ll need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) What are the terms of this CLA? Does it mean that Plausible could change the license to something that isn't FOSS in the future?
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > Does it mean that Plausible could change the license to something that isn't FOSS in the future? Sadly, yes. Edit: However, they might also need this to integrate the contributions back to the managed version, which is not AGPL licensed to begin with.
  - thayne 2y ago
    There could probably be a way to word the agreement to ensure the open part remains under the AGPL, such as one of the following: - include in the terms of the CLA that Plausible will never change the license of any part currently licensed as AGPL to another license without the consent of all contributors, or make the CLA conditional on the code modified continuing to be available under the AGPL - limit the license rights of Plausible to very specific uses which wouldn't allow relicensing the entire repo - have the contributor agree to dual license their contribution with a license like the MPL to Plausible, which would allow combining with separate enterprise code, but wouldn't allow them to relicense the source files modified by the contributor. I think the GPL would also work for that, unless Plausible starts distibuting an enterprise self hosted version.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tobeagram 2y ago
We've been using Plausible for over four years at our startup. Always reliable, simple, and fast metrics. Open source is tricky to scale and maintain while also ensuring a consistent income. Happy to hear they're making this change to protect their brand, IP, and ensure a sustainable future for the team.
pentagrama 2y ago
The treats and risks from "corporations" described can be true, but if you are a small site using the self hosted version, this isn't good news. The product will not be fully featured as the managed version, and the feature gap may be bigger and bigger on the long term. CE is like a "free basic plan" that you host, they now have a better reason to up-sell the users of the self hosted product to the managed "premium" version.
replete 2y ago
This is good news, I set this up once and then realized it was a 30-day self-hosted trial and abandoned it as it was for a tiny site with no budget for SaaS
bongobingo1 2y ago
> Our license doesn’t prevent these corporations from using the Plausible Analytics name and logo either, as these are a part of our self-hosted code Don't licences normally explicitly bar this? Tough over-sight for Plausible unless there is an actual reason for letting other businesses pretend to be you. Perhaps they figured it would act as a bit of marketing?

125 points by saeedesmaili 2y ago

gdsdfe 2y ago

is this like a PR stunt ? genuinely curious

HuwFulcher 2y ago
Being cynical it looks like a way of holding features hostage for the purpose of extracting revenue. I sympathise with the problem of re-sellers abusing their hard work but they are also creating two different classes of product with this change.
- whynotmaybe 2y ago
  Sonarqube/cloud is working the same way. Community edition with enough features for small businesses. Once you reach a certain size, you'll need the other features but you now have the money to pay for it and as you've used the community edition for some time, you know that you want this products. (and if the product is deep into your workflow, the cost of change is high that you'll rather pay than switch) As I'm currently building the stack for my startup, I'm more interested in that model than into a "full features 7 days trial" that then turns into a 19$/m/user.
BoredPositron 2y ago
They got backlash from their community for switching licenses. They got forked and now want to appease to the forkers/fork users by offering a slightly better license... Seems like the the 101 for Startups atm.
- detaro 2y ago
  How is this offering "a slightly better license"?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    It's not but they present it as such, excuse my brevity.
- ezekg 2y ago
  When did they recently try to change licenses? I must have missed that. I don't see any PRs or issues related to a license change, aside from their change from MIT to AGPL 4 years ago.

colesantiago 2y ago

I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. These new ones preach they are better than Google Analytics (also another evil tracking system) yet some how these ones still track you anyway and you're paying for analytics which is useless and you're punished for growing. It might be best to save money and not use any analytics system, it's just noise at this point. Am I missing something?

chpatrick 2y ago
This is for the owners of the site tracking their users (who have the logs anyway), as opposed to Google hoovering up information from the whole internet.
- colesantiago 2y ago
  I can see that this software has a SaaS version so I was referring to all privacy tracking software in general. So except for self hosting it doesn't seem that this is any different to GA.
  - Y-bar 2y ago
    We use it for a two main reasons: - Due to how the FISA (e.g. 702) laws in the USA are incompatible with GDPR, GA4 is illegal is much of EU (and EEA). - Plausible actually collects less data on the visitor, making it more ethically sound.
  - chpatrick 2y ago
    Self hosting is the whole point of this.
rkwz 2y ago
> I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. Not really oxymoron if they don't track your PII like IP address, email etc. Don't know how Plausible works, but usually these systems track page views, etc without the associated visitors' data. They either anonymize the visitor metadata or just aggregate the site data like what urls are visited, etc.

FlamingMoe 2y ago

I've been a paying customer and advocate of Plausible for over 2 years, and this is not ok. Marko frequently posts on social media about Plausible's revenue growth, currently at over $1M ARR with a tiny team and little overhead. They are doing great financially. Yet in this post he tries to gain sympathy by focusing on "we only make $300/mo in donations". Frequently moving the goalpost on what it means for your product to be open source betrays a lack of integrity and will have me, and probably others, looking for an alternative.

maccard 2y ago
If that is your take away from this post I urge you to read it more carefully.
- FlamingMoe 2y ago
  If you have a counterpoint I urge you to make it.
  - simonw 2y ago
    Near the start of the article: "That license change has helped us build a sustainable open source project with 8 core team members and several paid external contributors at the time of writing. We don’t have any investors, so all this is solely funded by the fees our 12,000+ subscribers pay us." Then later on while talking about the self-hosting option: "We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team." That's only misleading if you skim the article. They clearly differentiate between the 12,000 paying subscribers who fund the operation compared to the $300 in donations from self-hosters.
    - maccard 2y ago
      Thanks - this is exactly it.
    - tedivm 2y ago

jtwoodhouse 2y ago

"We want to reduce the threat from businesses such as hosting companies and other resellers who try to commercialize popular open source projects. We’ve seen our self-hosted code being used in a way it was never intended for by corporations that don’t care about us or open source." I don't understand why people think they can stop others from commercializing their open source project. You can give something to the world. You can hold onto IP to stop others from cashing in. You can't have it both ways.

colechristensen 2y ago
And on top of that how many open source products are they commercializing? Compilers, programming languages, operating systems, dev tools…
candiddevmike 2y ago
It's a growth hack. I don't believe anyone who releases their product under a FOSS license will remain FOSS unless the company goes under. It becomes a "too much money left on the table" situation.
- zarathustreal 2y ago
  It’s not even a hack these days, investors look for this as a traction metric
ossobuco 2y ago
> You can't have it both ways. Why shouldn't I? I created a product and I should be able to choose who do I give it to. I want it to be as open as possible while restricting some types of usage I don't like, or that would be detrimental to the continuation of the project itself. I don't see anything outlandish in my statement.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  There's nothing stopping you from doing that, but it's not FOSS and you can't use a FOSS license to drive your growth.

101008 2y ago

Out of curiosity: if the companies reselling Plausible (the ones mentioned in the post) kept the old version running, the old license applies? (I know they wouldn't get updates, security improvements, etc)

jffry 2y ago
Yes that is correct, they can keep using the old code under the license they were granted for the old code.
candiddevmike 2y ago
Yes, and they can fork it and maintain it themselves. Would need to change some trademark stuff, rename it to Implausible or something.
CrazyStat 2y ago
Yes. The old MIT-licensed version continues to be MIT-licensed, and anyone can continue to use it freely.

harshitaneja 2y ago

How does AGPL license work for such services? Would I have to distribute source code of my web application if I use Plausible CE? If not, how is it different from MinIO where as far as I understand the AGPL licensed use of the product requires distribution of entire code base?

candiddevmike 2y ago
> Would I have to distribute source code of my web application if I use Plausible CE No, you don't. Folks pick AGPL because of the FUD/uncertainty around it while still appearing "FOSS". In reality these companies don't have the legal teeth to back the bark, otherwise they'd go BSL and make their intention known. Before folks reply with whataboutism, no one has ever successfully proven the AGPL infectiousness to other web applications in court. Positing about it on hear is pointless.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > In reality these companies don't have the legal teeth to back the bark, otherwise they'd go BSL and make their intention known. Or alternatively, they still want to be FOSS, which AGPL is, but BSL isn't.
  - cvwright 2y ago
    The community has been trained over many years to believe that anything FOSS is immediately trustworthy, and that anything non-FOSS is immediately untrustworthy. This gets exploited all the time when companies use FOSS licenses to get traction, then pull the rug and switch to a more restrictive license once customers are locked in. On the flip side, if a company tries to be honest from the beginning by using BSL (or similar) they get endless grief from religious zealots. AGPL is the magic unicorn license that is just restrictive enough to protect you from your competitors, while still passing the FOSS religious purity test.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Actually that’s not true. I’ll not trust VSCode/ium or Chrome/ium with anything. We trust Free Software not because of the license, but because of the ecosystem and number of eyeballs. Go tried to pull something similar by forcing telemetry on everyone, and they were almost burning everything down. Almost. People/companies get vilified when they change licenses because of the way they do it. They don’t openly say that they need the money, did some mistake and need to change things to keep company afloat, but they also change their tone after license change and vilify the past contributors and become aggressive themselves. There are many friendly open core or closed source companies out there, and I trust them with my code, data and secrets, and pay them without any hesitation. Software ideologies are something, so the real world. While I’d love to see everything as Free Software, we’re not there yet, we might never be, and that’s OK. I’m writing Free Software and try to use Free Software as much as I can to show my colors and do my part in the thing I believe. But I’m never a mindless zealot spewing things.

embik 2y ago

I seriously wonder what HN thinks is a valid business model for writing open source software. Everyone here seems to insinuate that people want to create a business and use open source as a growth hack. But how do you differentiate those from people who want to write open source (because they believe in it) and have to have a business to support their livelihood? This is a team of eight people that tried to do everything „right“ by changing to a FOSS license (which happened four years ago) and the changes announced here sound very reasonable (changing branding and removing undocumented APIs). But all comments are dunking on them as if they haven’t even read the article.

bayindirh 2y ago
From my experience, people here like permissive licenses because they can grab the source and don't think about it further (and don't forget to give credit if their coffee was good that day), because it's building on top of other people's work without any effort. I don't think it's bad intentions though. Just grab the pieces you need, assemble, add the missing parts and start a project, and earn money. xGPL (which I strongly support) prevents this building model by forcing license inheritance, release of changes and limiting license interoperability, preventing creation of technical secret sauces, and many people think that all secret sauces are technical. OTOH, the harder (but better in the long run) way to create value with FOSS and Free Software particular to have stellar support and reliability. i.e.: Your code can be deployed, compiled, or built upon, but you're the best source to get the software in the first place. Your presence, human relations and knowledge about the product is the secret sauce you have, but this needs more effort, is a more of a soft skill and grows like a sequoia (i.e. roots first for a decade, then start to get taller). This is not a quick buck, but an old school proper business building, but many people don't have time for that, and since everyone wants to build fast and consume fast, this more healthier mode of making business is frowned upon. Sometimes you need to move slow and break(through) things, but as the meme says "ain't nobody have time for dat!", which is shortsightedness in my perspective.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  > OTOH, the harder (but better in the long run) way to create value with FOSS and Free Software particular to have stellar support and reliability. i.e.: Your code can be deployed, compiled, or built upon, but you're the best source to get the software in the first place. ...It's not obvious to me that the person who originally wrote the software is necessarily better positioned to support the software. Everyone has the current source code, so from that standpoint it's a level playing field. Another party could come in and build a business as the premier support consultants without most of the original developer's startup costs. Now, I'm not sure if this has ever actually happened. If it hasn't, maybe I'm wrong. I would like to be wrong.

steviedotboston 2y ago

I've been very pleased with Plausible as a Google Analytics alternative. I don't really care about the privacy and open source stuff, but the integration is simple and if you just want to know "how many people are looking at my site, where are they coming from, etc" it's fantastic. GA4 is really too complex for most people.

leros 2y ago
I've been using Plausible for a while and been pretty happy with it. I agree that GA4 is too complex. I do sometimes worry that Plausible's more relaxed session tracking is making it harder for me to understand my true user count.

nickorlow 2y ago

Sounds similar to the issues FUTO [1] is having and why they made their "Source First" license[2]. Plausible definitely took a different approach though. Interested to see how it works out. [1] https://futo.org https://futo.org [2] https://sourcefirst.com https://sourcefirst.com

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Any particular reason for the submission OP? Related discussion just two days ago: Plausible Analytics: GDPR Compliance w/o Cookie Consent Banner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909006

thayne 2y ago

> The code for all these features is still available to the public so it can be reviewed and inspected, but these features will not be a part of Plausible CE and they’ll have a different license. Will the code for these features be in the same repo, or be kept separate? If the former, is it easy to remove them to create a fork that is fully open source? Or does the community edition actually contain proprietary code that is disabled? > if you want to contribute to our codebase in the future as an external contributor, you’ll need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) What are the terms of this CLA? Does it mean that Plausible could change the license to something that isn't FOSS in the future?

bayindirh 2y ago
> Does it mean that Plausible could change the license to something that isn't FOSS in the future? Sadly, yes. Edit: However, they might also need this to integrate the contributions back to the managed version, which is not AGPL licensed to begin with.
- thayne 2y ago
  There could probably be a way to word the agreement to ensure the open part remains under the AGPL, such as one of the following: - include in the terms of the CLA that Plausible will never change the license of any part currently licensed as AGPL to another license without the consent of all contributors, or make the CLA conditional on the code modified continuing to be available under the AGPL - limit the license rights of Plausible to very specific uses which wouldn't allow relicensing the entire repo - have the contributor agree to dual license their contribution with a license like the MPL to Plausible, which would allow combining with separate enterprise code, but wouldn't allow them to relicense the source files modified by the contributor. I think the GPL would also work for that, unless Plausible starts distibuting an enterprise self hosted version.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tobeagram 2y ago

We've been using Plausible for over four years at our startup. Always reliable, simple, and fast metrics. Open source is tricky to scale and maintain while also ensuring a consistent income. Happy to hear they're making this change to protect their brand, IP, and ensure a sustainable future for the team.

pentagrama 2y ago

The treats and risks from "corporations" described can be true, but if you are a small site using the self hosted version, this isn't good news. The product will not be fully featured as the managed version, and the feature gap may be bigger and bigger on the long term. CE is like a "free basic plan" that you host, they now have a better reason to up-sell the users of the self hosted product to the managed "premium" version.

replete 2y ago

This is good news, I set this up once and then realized it was a 30-day self-hosted trial and abandoned it as it was for a tiny site with no budget for SaaS

bongobingo1 2y ago

> Our license doesn’t prevent these corporations from using the Plausible Analytics name and logo either, as these are a part of our self-hosted code Don't licences normally explicitly bar this? Tough over-sight for Plausible unless there is an actual reason for letting other businesses pretend to be you. Perhaps they figured it would act as a bit of marketing?