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- cross-posted to:
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Sentry has moved to a new license for its products called Functional Source License, and explains in this article the story of the licensing for these products and why they throw BSL for FSL.
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I think this is a pretty reasonable compromise to stop big cloud companies from offering their service using their code. Putting the code under either Apache or MIT after 2 years seems like a good approach to me, I like it a lot more than the ‘open core’ scheme a lot of SaaS companies use.
I would actually entertain the argument of protecting themselves against free-riding if and only if they would publish a transparency report detailing how they reimburse open source projects for the “common infrastructure” like, say, Linux, that they use to build and run their commercial offering and how they arrive at the amount they consider fair for their use. So far, I have not been able to find anything remotely like that, so their while argument is marketing and gas lighting.
I agree that that would be excellent, but I think there is still a difference, like Linux they do allow a company to use (but not for anything, only for some things) and enhance their open source software instead of paying for their service without contributing it back.
Except its not like Linux at all. Linux uses the GPL which imposes no usage restrictions. This is why the GPL is a free software license and the FSL is a proprietary software license.
I wonder if this kind of license would be accepted by the rest of open-source communities. So far, SSPL is treated like a villain.
One difference (so far as I know, I’m not an expert on either situation) is that MongoDB requires copyright assignment for contributions seemingly because the license is so restrictive they can’t offer their own service under its terms (without open-sourcing all the software they use to host it). So far as I know Sentry does not require this (although the restriction against running a competing service does not affect them since they are the service, so I’m not sure this argument really holds up that well). Also the fact that that one encumbrance is released after two years helps their case a lot in my eyes.
FSL is better than strait proprietary and if a company had to choose between the two I hope they choose FSL. All that said it just doesn’t feel like there is a real hope here for the eventual Open source fork here. It’s just a fail safe for people still on legacy systems and even then 2 years of potentially no new updates … Could be killer for security flaws. With tons of paradigm shifts between then too.
It almost needs a SLA that says if it isn’t maintained to a certain level then it is also opensourced.
I disagree. With licenses that are “straight proprietary”, it’s obviously whats going on. The FSL is proprietary but tries to gaslight you into thinking that maybe its kinda not. That’s clearly worse because it relies on manipulation and can only ever be useful to someone acting in bad faith.