For once, someone got it right and didn't claim with bold, uppercase letters that it's an Open Source project, like it usually happens with a lot of HN entries of that topic. Lately, the relicense of some Sentry product to a non-OSS license that was wrongly called "Open Source" just because the source was shared. As deserved, these kinds of usages tend to receive a good amount of backlash due to wrongly using the term.
But here, all is right, I don't see where anyone could base any complaint. Except for being entitled to instruct others about the license they should use for their own work, that is. I'd say they are walking the line with insisting on how "open" this solution is, but it doesn't really cross any line.
They are missing a very strong 4th line in "How is this different than OpenStack?" [1], though: OpenStack is Apache 2.0, aka. proper OSS, thus you can use or host it in whatever way you want, even use it to create an IaaS if you wanted. With UbiCloud, I didn't read the license, but probably not.
Thanks for pointing this out. We updated our website.
For clarification, we weren't planning to launch until we had a proper looking website. Yesterday, I shared our GitHub repo on LinkedIn to get feedback from friends. Then, we saw this on HN - and realized that we haven't looked at our website in quite a while.
We're also trying to formulate a better point of view on the license and its implications. We Ask HN'ed several days ago, but there wasn't much input: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998888
In the end, we picked a more restrictive license. An important reason for that is, we feel that we can move from a restrictive to a more liberal license easily. Doing the inverse would feel like not doing the right thing by our users.
For the record, I believe you did the right thing. It's your work so you should use whichever license you like, and have users use your product on your own terms. It's just that passing non-OSI approved licenses as "Open Source" does tend to trigger strong responses.
OSS flies faster because people love the ability to use and reuse source code. But not everything must be OSS especially if the source code itself must be the source of income (thinking here of a mantra that's been repeated in HN several times, and which is very correct IMO: "Open Source is not a business model")
And yes you're right that it's better to go from restricted to open. The opposite direction has always been received with harsh criticism. Also you open yourself to the risk of a community forming around forking the project from the last commit that was OSS, and departing with their own thing form there. Unlikely, but technically possible.
normally I give "open source" comments like this the label they deserve, which is "troll". however in this case it seems justified:
> You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key.
> You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service
What exactly is a third party?
Does this prohibit one department/team from managing it and offering it as a service to other departments/teams in the same company? Does it prohibit using it in a homelab I share with my friends and family?
> Any use of the licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.
IANAL, but if any of the protected parts of the code use trademarks, which seems pretty likely, wouldn't any forks risk trademark infringement?
I also commented this on their previous thread looking for input on licenses. I have no problem with monetising a managed service and preventing others from doing that on software you build, but disallowing ‘third parties’ is too broad. I wouldn’t be comfortable using this under that language.
It is fair criticism. We don't claim to be "open source" rather we are open and free as in you can see the code and host it yourself if you want. The primary restriction is that license does not allow building a managed service out of it.
BTW, we don't have any license key, so that part of the Elastic License wouldn't apply. It is there, because we wanted to use a known license that fits the bill instead of creating our own obscure license.
Pretty terrible look, given you're lying already with this "We don't claim to be "open source" rather we are open and free as in you can see the code and host it yourself if you want. "
I replied this in another thread and didn't want to repeat myself here but that was probably oversight on my part.
> Truly sorry that we missed these instances of "open-source" references. We scrubbed the use of open-source in most places, but forgot about our home page, which might sound weird as the home page is... well... home page. The truth is that our web site is not our primary focus at the moment. Rather we are putting almost all our effort for building the product (You can watch all of it in GitHub)
Truly sorry that we missed these instances of "open-source" references. We scrubbed the use of open-source in most places, but forgot about our home page, which might sound weird as the home page is... well... home page. The truth is that our web site is not our primary focus at the moment. Rather we are putting almost all our effort for building the product (You can watch all of it in GitHub).
We don't claim to be "open source" rather we are open and free as in you can see the code and host it yourself if you want. The restriction is that license does not allow building a managed service out of it.
But here, all is right, I don't see where anyone could base any complaint. Except for being entitled to instruct others about the license they should use for their own work, that is. I'd say they are walking the line with insisting on how "open" this solution is, but it doesn't really cross any line.
They are missing a very strong 4th line in "How is this different than OpenStack?" [1], though: OpenStack is Apache 2.0, aka. proper OSS, thus you can use or host it in whatever way you want, even use it to create an IaaS if you wanted. With UbiCloud, I didn't read the license, but probably not.
[1]: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud#how-is-this-different-t...
EDIT: turns out they say "open source" not in the linked github repo, but in the project's homepage. Back to square one then: they are lying.