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by vanschelven 590 days ago
This is a great initiative, but one wonders to which degree this is mostly a marketing stunt, white-washing their own "fair source" efforts.

Sentry is a multi-billion company, and Open Source pays exactly none of their bills (though it may serve other purposes). This leads to pages such as [1] where they actively steer users away from self-hosting their "open source" (in name only) solution.

Much has been said about Sentry's switch to "Fair Source"[2], but for me personally, the ship of "open source in name only" sailed long before that with the ever-increasing complexity of managing your own setup.[3] It’s clear that the priority here has shifted to pushing users toward their hosted, paid plans. Business models beat licenses every time if you want to understand actual intentions.

Disclaimer: I am the solo-everything at a competitor, which is in fact _not_ Open Source.[4]

[1] https://sentry.io/resources/self-hosted-vs-cloud/ (click on pdf for scary pictures)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41171665

[3] https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/ commit/78bc759d1be4fa6b8ae3e2764e7156e05eb22ab9

[4] https://www.bugsink.com/

2 comments

By this logic, should companies never donate to open source because any contribution could be labeled as marketing? The $750K will have real, tangible benefits for open source projects regardless of Sentry's motivations. It's a net positive. And we all know how many profitable companies built on open source give nothing back at all.

The point about "open source in name only" due to hosting complexity overlooks that this is a natural consequence of the product's evolution, not malicious intent. Enterprise-grade scaling of such monitoring requires sophisticated infrastructure. Suggesting they should artificially keep it simple for self-hosters would hold back product development.

It's only natural evolution in an environment in which there is no price for self-hosters giving up, which brings us back to the point I made originally :-)

I agree about the real, tangible benefits for open source. But wouldn't you agree there's at least _some_ point on the scale of evil where donor motivations can be questioned?

Sentry has been donating significantly for years now.

It's definitely marketing, otherwise they wouldn't be publishing the blog article - but what you're insinuating doesnt hold up considering the timeline