Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later…

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.

  • explore_broaden@midwest.social
    102·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
      101·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • explore_broaden@midwest.social
        22·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
          71·
          7 months ago

          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.

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • explore_broaden@midwest.social
        21·
        7 months ago

        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.