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Appreciate you engaging with people here. I think the key difference between Directus and Sentry is that the restrictions Sentry put in place are directed at f
by lol768 2y ago
Appreciate you engaging with people here.
I think the key difference between Directus and Sentry is that the restrictions Sentry put in place are directed at folks who want to build and sell their own error reporting service to software companies (and obviously commercially exploit the work they have done). In the same way that Redis went down the route of SSPL with the aim of impacting cloud services with their own Memorystore product that just resold Redis. That meant that most users were unaffected and your 10-person company using Redis as a cache to power their website could continue to do so. We continue to self-host Sentry and we're incredibly grateful that that's something we do have the option to do.
I don't have much of an issue with companies taking that approach. I actually genuinely wouldn't have an issue with an AGPL Directus, or SSPL (and releasing all of the plugins we developed internally). But that's not where Directus ended up and so we'll eventually either move to something written internally or an alternative that actually is FOSS.
> With an delayed-open-source-license w/ a usage grant that allows all the community members that historically contributed to use it for free, we found a balance between keeping it as open source as possible, while making sure large companies that make a lot of money using it are required to contribute back.
I do want to reiterate that a specific "total revenue"/"total funding" figure != "making a lot of money" and I don't think your license captures this nuance at all, today.
- rijkvanzanten 2y agoTotally! I'm also not saying — at least didn't intent to — that we're doing the exact same approach as Sentry here :) I meant that as "Directus is like Sentry in the sense that it moved away from FOSS as it ran into the OSI rules around no-license-discrimination-against-groups-or-use-case. Part of the trickiness for Directus specifically is that it's intended to be self-hosted first software. Going all-in on the SaaS as the moneymaker means divesting in self-hosted and focussing on differentiators for the SaaS offering to make up for the loss in funding of folks who self-host. > I do want to reiterate that a specific "total revenue"/"total funding" figure != "making a lot of money" and I don't think your license captures this nuance at all, today. Agreed! It's been the best I've been able to come up with, but it isn't perfect. Out of curiosity (not snark), what metrics would you have used as a more generic measurement of (large) company?
- lol768 2y agoEBITDA? I'm not going to claim it's perfect (and if the company is struggling and paying back loans it's going to ignore the interest charges), but the idea behind it AIUI is that you strip out some of the, perhaps, "creative accounting" (that is mostly there to reduce a corporation tax bill) and deductions and focus on earnings/cost-of-sales. Which, should, in theory relate to how much a company can afford to pay for ancillary services. In the industry I work in, between 96%-97%+ of revenue is the cost of the sale and is immediately handed over. Many purchases don't make a profit at all (fixed costs, commission doesn't cover them so it's loss-making - but you need to be able to offer them anyway).