4 ms·

O'saasy License Agreement

53 points by d3w1tt 10mo ago

dontdoxxme 10mo ago
It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license. It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the copyright discussions there.)
- jrowen 10mo ago
  > It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? This strikes me as somewhat contrived. Like yeah, if you're gonna do some weird button-pushing thing, it's not worth it, steer clear, keep this product off your platform, easy. Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed? There's a million ways to get value out of source code that don't involve pushing the envelope. I've accepted every EULA ever without reading and never once worried I would get in trouble with any of them, it's generally pretty easy if you're not trying to invent ways to do so.
  - jchw 10mo ago
    > Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed? It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed, as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn't be open source and it is going to be license-incompatible with many projects anyways. That said, I find it preposterous to accept this notion even ignoring that point. You shouldn't have to take it on faith that what you're doing is allowed by the copyright license—the whole point of the license is to make that clear. Everybody always shrugs off the risk of a malicious owner until Oracle acquires their dependencies.
    - jrowen 10mo ago
      I understand that it's not open source. I just see it as like, a spot where a company that would normally make a closed source product wanted to make it more open and hackable and did actually put the code up and take contributions, which should be a kind of good thing, but it's automatically assumed to be the worst, a rugpull, etc. What if I operated in an ethical gray area right around this pretty reasonably worded term?
      - jchw 10mo ago
        I was trying to make the point that "unfree" software is not really useful at all to the "open source" community, and not because of terminology nitpicking but because of the consequences that has. But anyway, my problem with a license like this is indeed the existence of gray areas. Open source licenses are in some ways clever attempts to make a social contract into a legal obligation. It isn't perfect, but the side effect is that you don't have to take it on faith that people will follow it: people can be sued for violating it, and depending on how that Vizio case goes, it's not just the copyright holders who are eligible. But that's a two way street. In return, I shouldn't have to take in on faith that my use case is legal according to the copyright license: it should be clear as day with no room for interpretation. If it's not, then my best hope is to simply never get sued. That is not good. Hope is not a strategy here, not for individuals and not for corporate users. Business/"fair" licenses seem to offer a good compromise, but it's a mirage: the software still has to be treated a bit like toxic waste in Linux packaging, won't be compatible with strong copyleft licenses, and ultimately, presents an uneven playing field for contributors. There isn't much to be excited about from a hacking PoV. With projects like these, you're probably already going to be submitting your code under an unconditional CLA, which essentially forfeits your rights as a contributor, then if it's this license, you also are giving the original copyright owner more rights to use your contribution than you even have. I don't think this is a good or healthy status quo at all. The only upside of this is that it protects someone's business model from competition. Well good for them. But making the license look like MIT is just a bit of cosplay, yet another attempt to try to push something as being open source when it's not. This cognitive dissonance can't go unnoticed; it really does trick people if they don't fully think through the consequences. You're better off going with a license that makes no attempt to pass itself off as open source.
- m463 10mo ago
  correct. free software doesn't place any restriction on the USE of software. The rights go to the user. The restriction is on the redistribution of the software - the same rights must be passed on when redistributing it. this license places (complicated) restrictions on how the software is used.
the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago
I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product, you were still not fully in control and someone else exploits the economic value without investing. Our way of dealing with this was delayed open source publication. That led to the FSL [1], and later to bootstrapping the Fair Source initiative [2] to establish an umbrella term that does not conflict with Open Source. What I have found interesting in the years since is that many companies are wrestling with the same problem, but feel that the two year head start the FSL gives is too aggressive. I actually still find that surprising. I would like to know whether this is a legitimate concern that two years is not enough, or mostly a perceived one. To me, moving to an Apache 2 or MIT license after a relatively short period is a much stronger statement than a license that risks the project effectively ending if the commercial entity is unwilling to relicense it more openly at the end of its life such as the O'saasy license. [1]: https://fsl.software/ https://fsl.software/ [2]: https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/
- bberenberg 10mo ago
  Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
  - Nextgrid 10mo ago
    Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc. But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.
  - 10mo ago
tzahifadida 10mo ago
I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose: A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it. I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like shared protocols, libraries, etc...) Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it, essentially paying to keep it on your turf. Reasons for not stealing: 1) Security CVEs and patches. No serious company will use it without these. 2) Bugs, if I take it I will have to fix it. 3) Merging changes. If the source is branched, I will have to get people to move to my project. Otherwise, I will have to employ people just to merge the changes all day. 4) Authority. I would argue that if you do not control the narrative of the project it is essentially similar to abandonware of the project. What would a customer/client prefer more? to use the original product or some copy of it? If you are the Authority that inspire people, they will not go to the competition. I remember in the past the open source were thought of as communists. I think that we are far from that, and big capitalist companies knows how to profit from open source (even Apache 2.0 and MIT).
- Sander_Marechal 10mo ago
  > Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it But that's evidently not true. Amazon has co-opted plenty of open source projects and put the squeeze on the original maintainer's SaaS offering.
  - tzahifadida 10mo ago
    Look at the caveat. If you cannot control the nerrative, you are done. Code is nothing in 2025, when a few 100$ can recreate a code base. AWS could have just recreated the code if they wanted, they just didn't have to. And, with their money, they could have bought redis labs if it was too difficult. I think people are looking at it the wrong way. The license wasn't the thing holding them back, they have the cash.
- tsimionescu 10mo ago
sneak 10mo ago
People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0. If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  > If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part No the problem is that it cant compete on the hardware part sometimes Lets face it even if it something is open source, chances are that the most contributions/time are still spent by the person making it or the saas provider in this industry. Imagine that someone goes ahead and launches a cheaper version of their saas and people go use that, since that person isnt having his time invested in the software as much as the original person and thus is willing to undercut him because his investment/returns expectations are very minimal whereas for the original saas it can be very high (writing good quality software which costs some developers real time and even real money)
  - Joker_vD 10mo ago
    Okay, I've imagined that. Am I supposed to sympathise with the end users in this scenario or?..
    - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
      Well this actually proves my point even further because the end users just care about price sometimes and since other competition with less investment can drive the company who created the software in the first place by undercutting them This shows that, Companies shouldn't create open source software itself if people have such mindset since creating open source software/software in general takes sometime and it sucks if I create something, then someone grabs it and undercuts me. This is the reason why people create source available licenses/use them. Time to create software isnt free in my opinion and we shouldnt treat it as such Plus, what I am saying is that these licenses dont allow you to not self host, they allow you to self host, they are basically like MIT except with one clause that doesnt allow the vps providers/datacenters/other companies to compete directly against you. Its the best of both worlds in a way. You get money which can allow you to work full time on the project Most people can audit the code/still run it locally/on their own VPS People who want to rent your open source software basically by having infrastructure/undercutting you etc. actively harming you and both the community etc. are unable to bypass the intricacies of licenses.
gorgoiler 10mo ago
Very cute but I am pessimistic about the battle tested nature of the second clause. Licenses are like mythical swords in fantasy stories: the famous ones are famous because they are not only objectively well made, but also because they survived in battle. Imagine some blacksmith presenting King X with GoblinsbaneY touting it as the greatest sword ever yet having only a blank face when asked what battles it has won. He’d be laughed out of court. Or maybe an analogy closer to home (Anduril notwithstanding) would be cryptography code. New ideas are cheap compared to code that has been to hell and back in the wild and remained unbroken. (I assume this license is novel and untested. I’ve not heard of it before. Happy to hear otherwise, of course.)
unsungNovelty 10mo ago
I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO. https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/ https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/
tigranbs 10mo ago
I used the MIT license for https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna mainly because the challenge is usually in product velocity and direct sales/distribution. Blocking from SaaS is explicitly entirely redundant. Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO
mythz 10mo ago
Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
- disgruntledphd2 10mo ago
  > ARR This is not a "real" (i.e. GAAP or accounting standards) metric, so that would seem like a bad idea. The trouble is that lots of even the accounting metrics are gameable, but a comptent auditor(s) probably won't let the metric divulge too much from "reality" (i.e. conformance with accounting standards).
- unsungNovelty 10mo ago
  > Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters. All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?
- chrysoprace 10mo ago
  What are they exploiting? Are they violating the terms of the license? The point of OSS is that there aren't arbitrary restrictions to its use; you can do what you like with it and the open source maintainer has absolutely zero obligations to continue supporting the software, or implement any of your requests.
- pointlessone 10mo ago
  So basically Big Time Public License. https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2 https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2
  - mythz 10mo ago
    Too complicated, should be simple like O'sassy, i.e. modified MIT with a clause where it doesn't extend to oligopoly cloud corps.
socketcluster 10mo ago
This is a very compelling SaaS license.

53 points by d3w1tt 10mo ago

It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license. It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the copyright discussions there.)

jrowen 10mo ago
> It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? This strikes me as somewhat contrived. Like yeah, if you're gonna do some weird button-pushing thing, it's not worth it, steer clear, keep this product off your platform, easy. Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed? There's a million ways to get value out of source code that don't involve pushing the envelope. I've accepted every EULA ever without reading and never once worried I would get in trouble with any of them, it's generally pretty easy if you're not trying to invent ways to do so.
- jchw 10mo ago
  > Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed? It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed, as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn't be open source and it is going to be license-incompatible with many projects anyways. That said, I find it preposterous to accept this notion even ignoring that point. You shouldn't have to take it on faith that what you're doing is allowed by the copyright license—the whole point of the license is to make that clear. Everybody always shrugs off the risk of a malicious owner until Oracle acquires their dependencies.
  - jrowen 10mo ago
    I understand that it's not open source. I just see it as like, a spot where a company that would normally make a closed source product wanted to make it more open and hackable and did actually put the code up and take contributions, which should be a kind of good thing, but it's automatically assumed to be the worst, a rugpull, etc. What if I operated in an ethical gray area right around this pretty reasonably worded term?
    - jchw 10mo ago
      I was trying to make the point that "unfree" software is not really useful at all to the "open source" community, and not because of terminology nitpicking but because of the consequences that has. But anyway, my problem with a license like this is indeed the existence of gray areas. Open source licenses are in some ways clever attempts to make a social contract into a legal obligation. It isn't perfect, but the side effect is that you don't have to take it on faith that people will follow it: people can be sued for violating it, and depending on how that Vizio case goes, it's not just the copyright holders who are eligible. But that's a two way street. In return, I shouldn't have to take in on faith that my use case is legal according to the copyright license: it should be clear as day with no room for interpretation. If it's not, then my best hope is to simply never get sued. That is not good. Hope is not a strategy here, not for individuals and not for corporate users. Business/"fair" licenses seem to offer a good compromise, but it's a mirage: the software still has to be treated a bit like toxic waste in Linux packaging, won't be compatible with strong copyleft licenses, and ultimately, presents an uneven playing field for contributors. There isn't much to be excited about from a hacking PoV. With projects like these, you're probably already going to be submitting your code under an unconditional CLA, which essentially forfeits your rights as a contributor, then if it's this license, you also are giving the original copyright owner more rights to use your contribution than you even have. I don't think this is a good or healthy status quo at all. The only upside of this is that it protects someone's business model from competition. Well good for them. But making the license look like MIT is just a bit of cosplay, yet another attempt to try to push something as being open source when it's not. This cognitive dissonance can't go unnoticed; it really does trick people if they don't fully think through the consequences. You're better off going with a license that makes no attempt to pass itself off as open source.
m463 10mo ago
correct. free software doesn't place any restriction on the USE of software. The rights go to the user. The restriction is on the redistribution of the software - the same rights must be passed on when redistributing it. this license places (complicated) restrictions on how the software is used.

the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago

I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product, you were still not fully in control and someone else exploits the economic value without investing. Our way of dealing with this was delayed open source publication. That led to the FSL [1], and later to bootstrapping the Fair Source initiative [2] to establish an umbrella term that does not conflict with Open Source. What I have found interesting in the years since is that many companies are wrestling with the same problem, but feel that the two year head start the FSL gives is too aggressive. I actually still find that surprising. I would like to know whether this is a legitimate concern that two years is not enough, or mostly a perceived one. To me, moving to an Apache 2 or MIT license after a relatively short period is a much stronger statement than a license that risks the project effectively ending if the commercial entity is unwilling to relicense it more openly at the end of its life such as the O'saasy license. [1]: https://fsl.software/ https://fsl.software/ [2]: https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/

bberenberg 10mo ago
Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
- Nextgrid 10mo ago
  Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc. But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.
- 10mo ago

tzahifadida 10mo ago

I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose: A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it. I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like shared protocols, libraries, etc...) Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it, essentially paying to keep it on your turf. Reasons for not stealing: 1) Security CVEs and patches. No serious company will use it without these. 2) Bugs, if I take it I will have to fix it. 3) Merging changes. If the source is branched, I will have to get people to move to my project. Otherwise, I will have to employ people just to merge the changes all day. 4) Authority. I would argue that if you do not control the narrative of the project it is essentially similar to abandonware of the project. What would a customer/client prefer more? to use the original product or some copy of it? If you are the Authority that inspire people, they will not go to the competition. I remember in the past the open source were thought of as communists. I think that we are far from that, and big capitalist companies knows how to profit from open source (even Apache 2.0 and MIT).

Sander_Marechal 10mo ago
> Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it But that's evidently not true. Amazon has co-opted plenty of open source projects and put the squeeze on the original maintainer's SaaS offering.
- tzahifadida 10mo ago
  Look at the caveat. If you cannot control the nerrative, you are done. Code is nothing in 2025, when a few 100$ can recreate a code base. AWS could have just recreated the code if they wanted, they just didn't have to. And, with their money, they could have bought redis labs if it was too difficult. I think people are looking at it the wrong way. The license wasn't the thing holding them back, they have the cash.
tsimionescu 10mo ago

sneak 10mo ago

People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0. If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.

Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
> If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part No the problem is that it cant compete on the hardware part sometimes Lets face it even if it something is open source, chances are that the most contributions/time are still spent by the person making it or the saas provider in this industry. Imagine that someone goes ahead and launches a cheaper version of their saas and people go use that, since that person isnt having his time invested in the software as much as the original person and thus is willing to undercut him because his investment/returns expectations are very minimal whereas for the original saas it can be very high (writing good quality software which costs some developers real time and even real money)
- Joker_vD 10mo ago
  Okay, I've imagined that. Am I supposed to sympathise with the end users in this scenario or?..
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    Well this actually proves my point even further because the end users just care about price sometimes and since other competition with less investment can drive the company who created the software in the first place by undercutting them This shows that, Companies shouldn't create open source software itself if people have such mindset since creating open source software/software in general takes sometime and it sucks if I create something, then someone grabs it and undercuts me. This is the reason why people create source available licenses/use them. Time to create software isnt free in my opinion and we shouldnt treat it as such Plus, what I am saying is that these licenses dont allow you to not self host, they allow you to self host, they are basically like MIT except with one clause that doesnt allow the vps providers/datacenters/other companies to compete directly against you. Its the best of both worlds in a way. You get money which can allow you to work full time on the project Most people can audit the code/still run it locally/on their own VPS People who want to rent your open source software basically by having infrastructure/undercutting you etc. actively harming you and both the community etc. are unable to bypass the intricacies of licenses.

gorgoiler 10mo ago

Very cute but I am pessimistic about the battle tested nature of the second clause. Licenses are like mythical swords in fantasy stories: the famous ones are famous because they are not only objectively well made, but also because they survived in battle. Imagine some blacksmith presenting King X with GoblinsbaneY touting it as the greatest sword ever yet having only a blank face when asked what battles it has won. He’d be laughed out of court. Or maybe an analogy closer to home (Anduril notwithstanding) would be cryptography code. New ideas are cheap compared to code that has been to hell and back in the wild and remained unbroken. (I assume this license is novel and untested. I’ve not heard of it before. Happy to hear otherwise, of course.)

unsungNovelty 10mo ago

I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO. https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/ https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/

tigranbs 10mo ago

I used the MIT license for https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna mainly because the challenge is usually in product velocity and direct sales/distribution. Blocking from SaaS is explicitly entirely redundant. Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO

mythz 10mo ago

Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.

disgruntledphd2 10mo ago
> ARR This is not a "real" (i.e. GAAP or accounting standards) metric, so that would seem like a bad idea. The trouble is that lots of even the accounting metrics are gameable, but a comptent auditor(s) probably won't let the metric divulge too much from "reality" (i.e. conformance with accounting standards).
unsungNovelty 10mo ago
> Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters. All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?
chrysoprace 10mo ago
What are they exploiting? Are they violating the terms of the license? The point of OSS is that there aren't arbitrary restrictions to its use; you can do what you like with it and the open source maintainer has absolutely zero obligations to continue supporting the software, or implement any of your requests.
pointlessone 10mo ago
So basically Big Time Public License. https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2 https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2
- mythz 10mo ago
  Too complicated, should be simple like O'sassy, i.e. modified MIT with a clause where it doesn't extend to oligopoly cloud corps.

socketcluster 10mo ago

This is a very compelling SaaS license.