6 ms·

seems cool, but weird non-oss license ahead warning.

by Keyframe 2y ago

yladiz 2y ago
It’s free for individuals and organizations that make less than $5 million in revenue. Seems fine and not weird to me?
- speedgoose 2y ago
  If a fair offer, but it’s not open source compatible.
  - yladiz 2y ago
    Sure, but am I missing something and it says it’s open source?
    - claytongulick 2y ago
      They used to be open source, and actively advertised themselves as such. Around two years ago they changed their license. I used to be a big champion, and used it at a Healthcare organization I was the CTO of. After the license change, I moved on to other solutions. Not because of the cost, but because I couldn't justify the risk of building systems on top of a non-open platform. I've seen too many vendor relationships sour over the years. Also, IIRC, the 5 million threshold isn't just for revenue, it includes funding (or at least it used to, not sure if it still does).
      - include 2y ago
        "I moved on to other solutions (...)", which ? kthx
        cbnotfromthere 2y ago
        [dead]
        claytongulick 2y ago
        Supabase is pretty nice, strapi is great if you mainly need a headless CMS. Node Red is really interesting is you need more of a workflow style thing. Honestly though, I've mostly just fallen back to good 'ole express. With a well architected set of middleware, you can have declarative auth and all the bells and whistles directus offers, but at 100x the performance and trivial debugging. It used to be a bit more work, but with Claude these days, spitting out high quality restful routes is a matter of minutes...
      - lol768 2y ago
        > I used to be a big champion, and used it at a Healthcare organization I was the CTO of. Same, it was a real shame to see it change in this way. I'm also not impressed with how they've gone about doing it; no transparency on pricing for the self-hosted solution, you have to be subjected to a sales call to even get a quote. They're clear that they use "total finances" for trying to determine how much to charge you, which has its own issues with some business models. The money also seems to be going towards lots of activities that have very little to do with actually .. building the core of the CMS. This whilst there's still fairly fundamental missing validation logic, even in the now-paid SaaS product [1]. How much of the now-$500 a month plan for 10 users goes towards the "Directus TV" (with content such as "Live scenes from our team with ambient music to help you get into the flow when you're coding") nonsense? It was enough to put me off. [1] https://github.com/directus/directus/discussions/2993 https://github.com/directus/directus/discussions/2993
        dankwizard 2y ago
        "Directus TV" (with content such as "Live scenes from our team with ambient music to help you get into the flow when you're coding") - They really did it. FSaaS (Flow State as a Service) Sign me up
        rijkvanzanten 2y ago
        haha (hopefully) obviously not something we're spending any real time on ^^ Just a bit of fun~
    - rustc 2y ago
      > From indie devs to enterprise teams, our growing community is building faster with an open source backend built from the ground-up for developers. From https://directus.io https://directus.io.
- luke-stanley 2y ago
  It's not a normal license. It's not worth the hassle.
  - pan69 2y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what is "a normal licence"?
    - luke-stanley 2y ago
      GitHub's recent report has this breakdown of the top licenses: https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/#breakdown-of-license-usage https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on... MIT: 44% GPLv2: 12.9% Apache: 11% GPLv3 8.8% BSD: ~6% Unlicense: 1.8% LGPLv3: 1%
      - pan69 2y ago
        The change licence in Directus simply seems to be GPL3: https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/directus/license https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/directus/lice... The only provision they have added is that if a business uses it in production and that business has >5 revenue/funding then they have to obtain a commercial licence.
        rijkvanzanten 2y ago
        Yup! It's a delayed-open-source license that auto-converts the code to GPL-3 (a "normal" license) after 3 years. It's free to use for non-production, and free to use for companies / individuals with <5mm in finances. It allows us to make the project sustainable, without punishing the folks who've historically contributed the most I wrote a more in-depth how/what/why in the thread above~
        luke-stanley 2y ago
        A sustainable project income can be hard, I get that, but an auto-converting license sounds like some kind of trick weapon, not like a real GPL-3 license. I suspect that weird versions of "open-source" licenses are rarely good for any party involved.
- rustc 2y ago
  And the price is "Contact our sales team" [1] for self hosting for those with > $5 million revenue. Seems like not a good idea if you think you're ever going to reach that number. They also considerably increased their cloud hosted pricing from $25/month unlimited to $500/month for 10 user + 250k rows + 1 million API requests. Old pricing: https://web.archive.org/web/20220619075129/https://directus.io/pricing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220619075129/https://directus.... [1]: https://directus.io/pricing/self-hosted https://directus.io/pricing/self-hosted
- zephyreon 2y ago
  They’re subjective with how that’s enforced. We used it in a higher ed institution in a small department and they reached out to us demanding we fork over (a lot of) cash to continue use. They considered the entire institution’s budget as the deciding factor. Yes, that aligns with the license, but I’ve found most companies will negotiate in good faith when the use is limited within an organization. This felt very Oracle-like.
  - rijkvanzanten 2y ago
    The cost is based on usage, not on company size. The threshold is just to check _if_ you're required to get a license. If the use is limited, so will the price. Education is a tough industry wrt pricing / budgeting, _especially_ in the USA. Oftentimes individual teams have a $0 budget even if the school makes (massive) profit. I've seen this first-hand as well! I am a part-time professor at Parsons, and it's a similar story there. Our program / faculty team has a near-$0 budget for things like software / guest-speakers etc, meanwhile tuition is tens of thousands per semester per student, and the school makes millions in profits every year. Make it make sense! That of course doesn't apply to every school, and certainly not elsewhere on the planet, which is why we rely on a sales team to adjust contracts accordingly rather than have a (higher) flat fee for everybody.
the_real_cher 2y ago
I think like me you saw the cloud section and thought it was a paid product for a minute.
lol768 2y ago
It used to be actual FOSS but then they went down the route of making it nonfree. I sort of get why, but not really a fan of how they went about doing it (and arbitrary "revenue-based" thresholds really don't work for businesses that operate on a commission/agent basis - you can have a massive turnover but huge cost-of-sales - it's a very blunt instrument). For that reason I've kept self-hosting the older, actual-FOSS versions and they're just sat behind auth. I've not looked at alternatives yet but would be interested in any suggestions
- rijkvanzanten 2y ago
  I hope https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163761 can change the "I sort of get why" into a "I get why"~

seems cool, but weird non-oss license ahead warning.

yladiz 2y ago

It’s free for individuals and organizations that make less than $5 million in revenue. Seems fine and not weird to me?

speedgoose 2y ago
If a fair offer, but it’s not open source compatible.
- yladiz 2y ago
  Sure, but am I missing something and it says it’s open source?
  - claytongulick 2y ago
    They used to be open source, and actively advertised themselves as such. Around two years ago they changed their license. I used to be a big champion, and used it at a Healthcare organization I was the CTO of. After the license change, I moved on to other solutions. Not because of the cost, but because I couldn't justify the risk of building systems on top of a non-open platform. I've seen too many vendor relationships sour over the years. Also, IIRC, the 5 million threshold isn't just for revenue, it includes funding (or at least it used to, not sure if it still does).
    - include 2y ago
      "I moved on to other solutions (...)", which ? kthx
      - cbnotfromthere 2y ago
        [dead]
      - claytongulick 2y ago
        Supabase is pretty nice, strapi is great if you mainly need a headless CMS. Node Red is really interesting is you need more of a workflow style thing. Honestly though, I've mostly just fallen back to good 'ole express. With a well architected set of middleware, you can have declarative auth and all the bells and whistles directus offers, but at 100x the performance and trivial debugging. It used to be a bit more work, but with Claude these days, spitting out high quality restful routes is a matter of minutes...
    - lol768 2y ago
      > I used to be a big champion, and used it at a Healthcare organization I was the CTO of. Same, it was a real shame to see it change in this way. I'm also not impressed with how they've gone about doing it; no transparency on pricing for the self-hosted solution, you have to be subjected to a sales call to even get a quote. They're clear that they use "total finances" for trying to determine how much to charge you, which has its own issues with some business models. The money also seems to be going towards lots of activities that have very little to do with actually .. building the core of the CMS. This whilst there's still fairly fundamental missing validation logic, even in the now-paid SaaS product [1]. How much of the now-$500 a month plan for 10 users goes towards the "Directus TV" (with content such as "Live scenes from our team with ambient music to help you get into the flow when you're coding") nonsense? It was enough to put me off. [1] https://github.com/directus/directus/discussions/2993 https://github.com/directus/directus/discussions/2993
      - dankwizard 2y ago
        "Directus TV" (with content such as "Live scenes from our team with ambient music to help you get into the flow when you're coding") - They really did it. FSaaS (Flow State as a Service) Sign me up
        rijkvanzanten 2y ago
        haha (hopefully) obviously not something we're spending any real time on ^^ Just a bit of fun~
  - rustc 2y ago
    > From indie devs to enterprise teams, our growing community is building faster with an open source backend built from the ground-up for developers. From https://directus.io https://directus.io.
luke-stanley 2y ago
It's not a normal license. It's not worth the hassle.
- pan69 2y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what is "a normal licence"?
  - luke-stanley 2y ago
    GitHub's recent report has this breakdown of the top licenses: https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/#breakdown-of-license-usage https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on... MIT: 44% GPLv2: 12.9% Apache: 11% GPLv3 8.8% BSD: ~6% Unlicense: 1.8% LGPLv3: 1%
    - pan69 2y ago
      The change licence in Directus simply seems to be GPL3: https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/directus/license https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/directus/lice... The only provision they have added is that if a business uses it in production and that business has >5 revenue/funding then they have to obtain a commercial licence.
      - rijkvanzanten 2y ago
        Yup! It's a delayed-open-source license that auto-converts the code to GPL-3 (a "normal" license) after 3 years. It's free to use for non-production, and free to use for companies / individuals with <5mm in finances. It allows us to make the project sustainable, without punishing the folks who've historically contributed the most I wrote a more in-depth how/what/why in the thread above~
        luke-stanley 2y ago
        A sustainable project income can be hard, I get that, but an auto-converting license sounds like some kind of trick weapon, not like a real GPL-3 license. I suspect that weird versions of "open-source" licenses are rarely good for any party involved.
rustc 2y ago
And the price is "Contact our sales team" [1] for self hosting for those with > $5 million revenue. Seems like not a good idea if you think you're ever going to reach that number. They also considerably increased their cloud hosted pricing from $25/month unlimited to $500/month for 10 user + 250k rows + 1 million API requests. Old pricing: https://web.archive.org/web/20220619075129/https://directus.io/pricing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220619075129/https://directus.... [1]: https://directus.io/pricing/self-hosted https://directus.io/pricing/self-hosted
zephyreon 2y ago
They’re subjective with how that’s enforced. We used it in a higher ed institution in a small department and they reached out to us demanding we fork over (a lot of) cash to continue use. They considered the entire institution’s budget as the deciding factor. Yes, that aligns with the license, but I’ve found most companies will negotiate in good faith when the use is limited within an organization. This felt very Oracle-like.
- rijkvanzanten 2y ago
  The cost is based on usage, not on company size. The threshold is just to check _if_ you're required to get a license. If the use is limited, so will the price. Education is a tough industry wrt pricing / budgeting, _especially_ in the USA. Oftentimes individual teams have a $0 budget even if the school makes (massive) profit. I've seen this first-hand as well! I am a part-time professor at Parsons, and it's a similar story there. Our program / faculty team has a near-$0 budget for things like software / guest-speakers etc, meanwhile tuition is tens of thousands per semester per student, and the school makes millions in profits every year. Make it make sense! That of course doesn't apply to every school, and certainly not elsewhere on the planet, which is why we rely on a sales team to adjust contracts accordingly rather than have a (higher) flat fee for everybody.

the_real_cher 2y ago

I think like me you saw the cloud section and thought it was a paid product for a minute.

lol768 2y ago

It used to be actual FOSS but then they went down the route of making it nonfree. I sort of get why, but not really a fan of how they went about doing it (and arbitrary "revenue-based" thresholds really don't work for businesses that operate on a commission/agent basis - you can have a massive turnover but huge cost-of-sales - it's a very blunt instrument). For that reason I've kept self-hosting the older, actual-FOSS versions and they're just sat behind auth. I've not looked at alternatives yet but would be interested in any suggestions

rijkvanzanten 2y ago
I hope https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163761 can change the "I sort of get why" into a "I get why"~