[bentlegen]

Sentry was already using BUSL (Business Source License) for 4+ years with a non-competitive Additional Use Grant. So we had already been doing this for a long time.

The new license actually allows for more competition, because it has a shorter change date to permissive OSS than the aforementioned prior license (2 years vs 3 years).

So another read of this is: the business model is going great, so much so that we're comforable switching to a more progressive license vs. what we had.

[James_K]

So why don't you switch to a fully progressive license? What you're saying here is "we're putting our competitors at slightly less of a disadvantage, and that's good", so why not release under a free license and not put your competitors at any disadvantage? Either you want competition or you don't. What's offensive about this to some people is that you're trying to have the best of both worlds. Pretend that you welcome competition while still suppressing it. I don't think there's anything wrong with you not giving competitors your source code, but I'd rather you were honest about it instead of using this silly half-measure.

[etothepii]

> Why don't you switch to a fully progressive license?

Because the users who pay / use the software as the developer intended are to be rewarded with new features sooner.

> Either you want competition or you don't

Customers want competition. To a first order approximation businesses don't. No one want competition for SEO which is essentially what is being suggested here. If the product can be taken and spun up instantly on any new release all the "competition" is on who can make page 1 of Google. As we have all seen with stack overflow content this is not ideal.

[zeeg]

We welcome you to spend 15 years and 10s of millions of your own money to compete with us, by writing your own software. If you think taking someone else’s software and spending ad money to sell it is “competition” I don’t know what to tell you.

[James_K]

Did you even read what I wrote? I said that I don't think they need to give people access to their software. That it might even be unfair to expect them to do so. But if they don't do it, they can't call themselves FOSS. It would be unfair to expect a restaurant to sell everything at a 50% discount, but if they said they were doing that and it turned out they weren't, I'd have every right to complain.

[zeeg]

Where do we (Sentry) ever call ourselves FOSS?

If FOSS is represented by the community in this thread I want no part of that toxicity.

We do what we think is good and for developers and customers, and the broader open source ecosystem. A lot of us have been doing that for quite some time and will continue to do so.

[growse]

> Where do we (Sentry) ever call ourselves FOSS?

If you don't, it's pretty weird to want to do what you "think is good for the broader open source ecosystem".

[James_K]

EDIT: actually, you couldn't be more blatently lying about this.

https://open.sentry.io/

> We're Open Source

The title of the page. You really thought you could sneak that past me. You cannot seriously make a reply like this when you have an entire domain name dedicated to the tile "We're Open Source". That is the most obvious of obvious lies. Even the page title "yes, we're open source" is a kind of passive-aggressive jab at people who think you aren't.

Stop pretending to be open source and stop calling the open source community toxic.

------- End Edit -------

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/11/19/cathedral-and-bazaaar-li...

> I assert that the FSL's approach is more closely aligned with Open Source ideals than mere source availability.

https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...

> We think it is a compelling option for Open Source-minded SaaS companies such as ourselves who wish to grant freedom

> for Open Source-minded SaaS companies such as ours, we think it’s a strong option.

This entire article is full of vague legal-speak designed to associate yourselves with FOSS as much as possible without actually saying you are. I can't see why you would do this unless your intention is to mislead or you have been mislead yourselves. You spend so much time talking about user-freedom, which has nothing to do with this license as it promotes developer sustainability over user freedom (even more-so than a simple non-compete license).

Like it or not, this is misleading. You should clarify your language on the matter. You aren't open source, and you've admitted as much yourself. You aren't "open-source minded" either (whatever that means). You said in the article that you should find a name for what you are doing, well, one already exists. It's called "source available". Open source software exists for anyone to use and profit from as they wish. You make the source of your code available because you think it will make a better product. You say that your software will become FOSS if you stop working on it to create more confidence in your product. These are all focused around selling your product, rather than around being genuinely free and open. Until you admit that this is what you're doing, you will be misleading people.

[zeeg]

https://github.com/getsentry

You suggesting we are anything but what we are just makes you look like you have an agenda at best, or foolish at worst.

All you're doing is harming the broader community by arguing about nonsense which is factually proven to be untrue. You came in here trolling as best you could, making false statements without reading or educating yourself on any components. Making statements as if you're a legal expert, as if you're an expert on open source history, on who or what Sentry is or has been.

1. A majority of Sentry's source code permissive open source. This is a fact, and easily verifiable.

2. FOSS is not Open Source. So when you constantly equate the two you simply come off as misinformed.

3. Sentry has continually shown good faith in a variety of activities, including donation of services, financial backing of large projects, financial backing of our dependency graph.

4. We are not rug pulling - we migrated our BUSL-licensed projects to FSL. BUSL is already non-compete source-available, FSL is the same thing but a more aggressive time-delay, and a better license conversion mechanism.

5. There is no "vague legal speak designed to [do anything harmful]". If its vague to you, maybe you should stay away from licensing, or you should start contributing back intead of creating toxicity on internet forums. In fact, the FSL is designed to be _more easily understood_ than prior licenses of its type.

[arp242]

To claim that the FSL and Sentry is completely disconnected from FOSS and something different entirely that should never under any shape be associated with it is, quite frankly, just weird. It's "almost FOSS" and they're quite upfront about that, more so than they really need to be. You can decide if you care about that or not, but it's just not misleading under any sort of reasonable definition. This is a profoundly silly and frankly toxic hill to die on.

[zeeg]

It’s not misleading. You claiming we say something we do not is.

I’m not going to continue this conversation as you’ve shown only to be here in bad faith.

[bentlegen]

All of this is covered in the article.

[James_K]

I don't think it is.

[bentlegen]

I don’t feel “given you already have a proprietary license, why wouldn’t you just make it freely permissive” needs much explaining. We develop the software; the exclusivity period helps us monetize the work (vs giving it away to someone else who would).

I think it’s worth reading the announcement from 2019 when Sentry first switched to BUSL. The original article links to many such pieces.

https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/

[James_K]

So, you don't want to competition from large cloud providers, but you also want your source to be available to users, and you want to give them a guarantee that the software will not simply die once you stop maintaining it.

Then release your software under a source available non-compete license with the caveat that it will become open source when you stop working on it. (Basically what you have already done.)

Don't pretend it's FOSS or that it has anything to do with open source because it isn't and it doesn't. You have not made the software open until you have relinquished it to the community at large to do whatever they wish with it. Open source developers dislike this kind of marketing because it muddies the waters of what isn't and isn't free. If someone contributes to your software thinking it's free, you have mislead them to profit off their work. I don't care what you do with your code, but don't mischaracterise it. Don't give big talk about how you "believe in open source" or whatever. Say that you are source-available, and that isn't FOSS, but say no more than that. Especially do not say that you are "The Future of Open Source". That is nothing but a lie an it's obvious why real open source developers giving their time for the public good would take offence to it.

Open source is like charity. Don't call yourself a charity or associate yourself with charity unless you actually are one.

[bentlegen]

> Then release your software under a source available non-compete license with the caveat that it will become open source when you stop working on it. (Basically what you have already done.)

Done.

Note that the license website is pretty clear that it is not Open Source. If you find a place where that is not true, you can open an issue on the website’s repo and we’ll address.

https://fsl.software/