[zeeg]

> FWIW, if Sentry had stayed GPL or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.)

We never were once GPL, or remotely copyleft.

Is this an AI generated comment?

[cwillu]

> Is this an AI generated comment?

“Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like.” --hn guidelines

[vetrom]

Not one bit, I misspoke from memory there, sorry. FWIW I spent multiple years running Sentry for some fairly large orgs in the eras prior to Sentry's first relicensing. A large part of what got our teams interested in the product were the quality of engineering and the low risk of adoption.

In particular, not having to worry about some others' business model changing and increasing the risk of using the product, as well as the experience with Sentry being portable across many different companies and verticals.

When a midsize company drops what was previously an open source product, and turns it into something that shifts to an enterprise sales model, the value of that experience drops drastically. IMO that drop is the reduction of utility and value of that previous experience. It also creates a gap that is a real problem in making open source software sustainable at scale -- if no company can afford to take a successful OSS product and graduate it to a more structured and contractual environment, that creates a ceiling on how successful OSS software can be.

I appreciate that Sentry is (i think?) trying to create a real solution to that, but I think their basis for it is wrong. I have some of my own ideas on what a solution there would look like, but its something I'd really have to study more deeply as well I think.