[cycloptic]

The idea behind community-based development is that anyone can provide a business around the output of others, and it's not a problem because all improvements are shared by everyone.

All the license change says to me is that the development team was very insular and ended up all at the same company, so they ultimately saw no benefit to participate in the wider community. Closing themselves off further is a natural progression from this. That's fine for them, and I'm not going to dig into the deeper reasons why it happened, but for this reason it's a big red flag to me when a FOSS project fails to attract contributors from more than one company.

[jsmeaton]

> The idea behind community-based development is that anyone can provide a business around the output of others

I disagree with this statement. Being able to build a business around the output of others is a side effect, and not the primary reason for open source. I would argue, and many companies are arguing, that the side effect causes more harm than good, and there should be some kind of optional middle ground.

> the development team was very insular and ended up all at the same company

Look, I have no statistics around contributors that are employees vs contributors from other companies. Zeeg may have an idea. But as he said up-thread, they tend to hire those that contribute.

Operating Sentry at scale is no small feat, and I'm not surprised that most companies prefer to spend the money on the SAAS solution rather than on employees to operate it.

> so they ultimately saw no benefit to participate in the wider community

This is the bit I most disagree with. They are still participating in the wider community in the vast majority of cases. There is a single restriction - you may not take the output and duplicate their business.

[cycloptic]

>I would argue, and many companies are arguing, that the side effect causes more harm than good

I would not. Community development means just that: community development. Everyone contributes to a shared set of code that everyone gets an equal chance to profit from. If you know something the others don't then you can charge them to go do consulting/support/training/etc, but you can't stop them from building a separate business around that code and you can't sabotage the code or the license to go and try to steal their customers. That's part of the deal and no one gets to have their cake and eat it too, not even Amazon or whoever the villain of the day is. There is a middle ground away from this, which is to make parts of your product not open source anymore, which is what Sentry did.

>they tend to hire those that contribute.

That's not a problem in and of itself. It's when they're the only ones doing the hiring. That to me means a product-market mismatch where there are not enough companies to create a competitive ecosystem of other things around the open source project.

>you may not take the output and duplicate their business.

For me as an outsider of this company, this is a negative. I want their business to be easily duplicated. It means they have to work harder and make better products.

[jsmeaton]

There are other products in the same domain. That’s where the competition should be. Not ripping off work.