4 ms·

Per previous discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877059 (sentry FSL relicense) - in particu

by vetrom 2y ago

Per previous discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877059 (sentry FSL relicense) - in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312686 (rugpull licensing still possible on future versions/contributions) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38046537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38046537 (an aside about AGPL vs BUSL vs similar license schemes) - Sentry's first relicense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466967 Looking back to the first relicense in particular, the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors, and the trend of companies trying to pretend they aren't doing exactly that sours me on basically any 'opencore'/required CLA project. I make rare exceptions for non-profits, but only those that are mature, well established, and not the sort of non-profit that puts most of their operation under a for-profit entity. As woodruffw mentions, these implied-value-judgement labelings are really marketing terms designed to muddle the value and importance of what it means to be an open source product. If it doesn't work for your business, fine, don't use an OSS license. But don't expect us to slurp up your peddling when you want to pretend its an OSS license, and don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors. *EDIT*: I misspoke, my brain had thought that old Sentry licenses were GPL, they were more MITish as seen in the LICENSE file in older releases of Sentry. My mistake :\ FWIW, if Sentry had stayed MIT or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.) My position in 2019 was that much these decisions are being driven by the VC money, and I believe that is still true today. If it weren't, they could have chosen options that served the wider community better. (I also think that wider community and the accessibility of such is what got sentry much of its initial draw, but TBH im not sure how much that bears out in reality. I haven't studied deeply enough to have a good idea of the numbers there.)

whit537 2y ago
[disclaimer: Sentry employee] > don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors This is ill-informed, for what it's worth. Our relicensing had essentially no effect on the ratio of commits from outside the company: it went from 3.5% to 3.4%. I wrote about this when OSI published the DOSP paper that we underwrote. https://blog.sentry.io/nows-the-time-for-delayed-open-source/ https://blog.sentry.io/nows-the-time-for-delayed-open-source... > the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors Since Sentry has always been built by Sentry, our relicensing wasn't a rugpull. I wrote about this when Redis relicensed most recently: https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/relicensing-and-rug-pulls/ https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/relicensing-and-rug-p...
- vetrom 2y ago
  I see your point about commit ratio, and that I admit is a correct view of the tangible contributions, but I also dont think those are what got Sentry its traction. I will then ask, do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? How do you value the various libraries of user interaction, issue submission, and other market intangibles? For a product developer, that is an external cost/value to you (the theoretical 'you', in this case), insomuch as there's no contractual obligations there and its not exactly clearly recorded in valuations and balance sheets, I believe. That openness and availability over time builds up a body of goodwill that I believe is critical to the success of a longterm opensource product. As for Redis, enough people cared about the license change that valkey (https://valkey.io/blog/hello-world/ https://valkey.io/blog/hello-world/) got stood up essentially immediately, which also got significant amount of developer traction. I notice that you dont mention them at all in your writing about Redis. Why is that?
  - whit537 2y ago
    > do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? No. > How do you value the various libraries of user interaction, issue submission, and other market intangibles? Highly. Dirk Riehle has a post from 2009 where he talks about the business benefits of Open Source community. I quote from it in the Fair Source FAQ: > Fair Source provides many of the same benefits for companies as Open Source, by helping to foster an engaged developer community around your software products. https://fair.io/faq/ https://fair.io/faq/ > I notice that you dont mention them at all in your writing about Redis. Why is that? Because my blog post predates Valkey by a week. I've added an update.
  - maccard 2y ago
    I'm not OP, and not currently a sentry user (but I am a sentry fan. That said, my feelings here are the same for other MIT-like to BSL/Fair-source like transitions). > I will then ask, do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? I agree no they wouldn't, but I also think it's not realistic to look at the 2012 ecosystem from the lens of 2024. I'd wager that you'd find it very hard to get VC funding if you had an MIT licensed SAAS in 2024 that could be "jeff'ed". The reality is that Sentry's model worked for the first 6-7 years of it's life, and whether or not it would have survived the competition is something we'll never know.
zeeg 2y ago
> FWIW, if Sentry had stayed GPL or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.) We never were once GPL, or remotely copyleft. Is this an AI generated comment?
- vetrom 2y ago
  Not one bit, I misspoke from memory there, sorry. FWIW I spent multiple years running Sentry for some fairly large orgs in the eras prior to Sentry's first relicensing. A large part of what got our teams interested in the product were the quality of engineering and the low risk of adoption. In particular, not having to worry about some others' business model changing and increasing the risk of using the product, as well as the experience with Sentry being portable across many different companies and verticals. When a midsize company drops what was previously an open source product, and turns it into something that shifts to an enterprise sales model, the value of that experience drops drastically. IMO that drop is the reduction of utility and value of that previous experience. It also creates a gap that is a real problem in making open source software sustainable at scale -- if no company can afford to take a successful OSS product and graduate it to a more structured and contractual environment, that creates a ceiling on how successful OSS software can be. I appreciate that Sentry is (i think?) trying to create a real solution to that, but I think their basis for it is wrong. I have some of my own ideas on what a solution there would look like, but its something I'd really have to study more deeply as well I think.
- cwillu 2y ago
  > Is this an AI generated comment? “Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like.” --hn guidelines
LewisJEllis 2y ago
> FWIW, if Sentry had stayed GPL Sentry has never been GPL. https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/ https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/ > pretending it's an OSS license They are not pretending it's an OSS license. The article states: > “Just don’t call it Open Source.” Point taken. Fair Source is our new term.
- vetrom 2y ago
  > Sentry has never been GPL. That was my mistake, my brain remembering wrong. https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/9.1.2/LICENSE https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/9.1.2/LICENSE was its last open source license, MITish, right? As for calling it "*source" and saying "oh we're not pretending its open source"? This is a point of opinion, but I think that's disingenuous marketing, at best.
  - whit537 2y ago
    2008 - unlicensed 2009 - BSD-3 2019 - BUSL-1.1 2023 - FSL-1.0 2024 - FSL-1.1 Details: https://blog.sentry.io/sentrys-open-source-values/#our-history https://blog.sentry.io/sentrys-open-source-values/#our-histo... and https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-license-freedom-without-free-riding/ https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...
  - xigoi 2y ago
    The word “source” has a meaning, it’s not exclusive to the phrase “open source”.
zeeg 2y ago
I have written quite a lot on my personal blog about our decisions and been very transparent. In particular, the decision on switching to BUSL orgininally I talk about here: https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor Its worth remembering that licenses are just part of the packaging of a product - part of the distribution model. Sentry is successful because we quickly found product market fit, continued to iterate, and made an affordable and well crafted product. Our distribution model - and in general our approach to affordability - is key to that, but the freedoms of open source software are less so. For clarity, VC has never had anything to do with it, but we are certainly ambitious. Our singular goal from a product point of view is adoption, and we ensure that via accessibility and affordability. From a competitor point of view I personally think we've done better than most could dream of wrt marketshare. Companies like SigNoz don't compete with us today, and projects like GlitchTip don't even register on the market. Our competition these days is the fuzzy areas of the APM venn diagram like Datadog, New Relic, etc.

by vetrom 2y ago

whit537 2y ago

[disclaimer: Sentry employee] > don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors This is ill-informed, for what it's worth. Our relicensing had essentially no effect on the ratio of commits from outside the company: it went from 3.5% to 3.4%. I wrote about this when OSI published the DOSP paper that we underwrote. https://blog.sentry.io/nows-the-time-for-delayed-open-source/ https://blog.sentry.io/nows-the-time-for-delayed-open-source... > the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors Since Sentry has always been built by Sentry, our relicensing wasn't a rugpull. I wrote about this when Redis relicensed most recently: https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/relicensing-and-rug-pulls/ https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/relicensing-and-rug-p...

vetrom 2y ago
I see your point about commit ratio, and that I admit is a correct view of the tangible contributions, but I also dont think those are what got Sentry its traction. I will then ask, do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? How do you value the various libraries of user interaction, issue submission, and other market intangibles? For a product developer, that is an external cost/value to you (the theoretical 'you', in this case), insomuch as there's no contractual obligations there and its not exactly clearly recorded in valuations and balance sheets, I believe. That openness and availability over time builds up a body of goodwill that I believe is critical to the success of a longterm opensource product. As for Redis, enough people cared about the license change that valkey (https://valkey.io/blog/hello-world/ https://valkey.io/blog/hello-world/) got stood up essentially immediately, which also got significant amount of developer traction. I notice that you dont mention them at all in your writing about Redis. Why is that?
- whit537 2y ago
  > do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? No. > How do you value the various libraries of user interaction, issue submission, and other market intangibles? Highly. Dirk Riehle has a post from 2009 where he talks about the business benefits of Open Source community. I quote from it in the Fair Source FAQ: > Fair Source provides many of the same benefits for companies as Open Source, by helping to foster an engaged developer community around your software products. https://fair.io/faq/ https://fair.io/faq/ > I notice that you dont mention them at all in your writing about Redis. Why is that? Because my blog post predates Valkey by a week. I've added an update.
- maccard 2y ago
  I'm not OP, and not currently a sentry user (but I am a sentry fan. That said, my feelings here are the same for other MIT-like to BSL/Fair-source like transitions). > I will then ask, do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? I agree no they wouldn't, but I also think it's not realistic to look at the 2012 ecosystem from the lens of 2024. I'd wager that you'd find it very hard to get VC funding if you had an MIT licensed SAAS in 2024 that could be "jeff'ed". The reality is that Sentry's model worked for the first 6-7 years of it's life, and whether or not it would have survived the competition is something we'll never know.

zeeg 2y ago

> FWIW, if Sentry had stayed GPL or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.) We never were once GPL, or remotely copyleft. Is this an AI generated comment?

vetrom 2y ago
Not one bit, I misspoke from memory there, sorry. FWIW I spent multiple years running Sentry for some fairly large orgs in the eras prior to Sentry's first relicensing. A large part of what got our teams interested in the product were the quality of engineering and the low risk of adoption. In particular, not having to worry about some others' business model changing and increasing the risk of using the product, as well as the experience with Sentry being portable across many different companies and verticals. When a midsize company drops what was previously an open source product, and turns it into something that shifts to an enterprise sales model, the value of that experience drops drastically. IMO that drop is the reduction of utility and value of that previous experience. It also creates a gap that is a real problem in making open source software sustainable at scale -- if no company can afford to take a successful OSS product and graduate it to a more structured and contractual environment, that creates a ceiling on how successful OSS software can be. I appreciate that Sentry is (i think?) trying to create a real solution to that, but I think their basis for it is wrong. I have some of my own ideas on what a solution there would look like, but its something I'd really have to study more deeply as well I think.
cwillu 2y ago
> Is this an AI generated comment? “Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like.” --hn guidelines

LewisJEllis 2y ago

> FWIW, if Sentry had stayed GPL Sentry has never been GPL. https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/ https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/ > pretending it's an OSS license They are not pretending it's an OSS license. The article states: > “Just don’t call it Open Source.” Point taken. Fair Source is our new term.

vetrom 2y ago
> Sentry has never been GPL. That was my mistake, my brain remembering wrong. https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/9.1.2/LICENSE https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/9.1.2/LICENSE was its last open source license, MITish, right? As for calling it "*source" and saying "oh we're not pretending its open source"? This is a point of opinion, but I think that's disingenuous marketing, at best.
- whit537 2y ago
  2008 - unlicensed 2009 - BSD-3 2019 - BUSL-1.1 2023 - FSL-1.0 2024 - FSL-1.1 Details: https://blog.sentry.io/sentrys-open-source-values/#our-history https://blog.sentry.io/sentrys-open-source-values/#our-histo... and https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-license-freedom-without-free-riding/ https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...
- xigoi 2y ago
  The word “source” has a meaning, it’s not exclusive to the phrase “open source”.

zeeg 2y ago

I have written quite a lot on my personal blog about our decisions and been very transparent. In particular, the decision on switching to BUSL orgininally I talk about here: https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor Its worth remembering that licenses are just part of the packaging of a product - part of the distribution model. Sentry is successful because we quickly found product market fit, continued to iterate, and made an affordable and well crafted product. Our distribution model - and in general our approach to affordability - is key to that, but the freedoms of open source software are less so. For clarity, VC has never had anything to do with it, but we are certainly ambitious. Our singular goal from a product point of view is adoption, and we ensure that via accessibility and affordability. From a competitor point of view I personally think we've done better than most could dream of wrt marketshare. Companies like SigNoz don't compete with us today, and projects like GlitchTip don't even register on the market. Our competition these days is the fuzzy areas of the APM venn diagram like Datadog, New Relic, etc.