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Comment by martingxx | Hacker News Reader

This looks great, and I look forward to finding time to try it soon.

However, I believe it's misleading to call it "open source". The SPPL license is not generally considered to be an open source licence by any meaningful definition, and in particular does not meet the OSI definition and is incompatible with most licences that do.

I understand the need these days to protect against aggressive cloud providers, but there are other ways to achieve that without becoming completely non open source, such as the BSL

(See license.https://opensourceforu.com/2019/06/cockroach-labs-changes-it... )

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Thanks for the pointer - will check it out. We are totally novice on this - we don't even have a license attorney. We just picked SSPL because that's what everyone seemed to suggest to prevent the likes of AWS cloning it. Now that we got some visibility, we will carefully take a look at this issue.

But at heart we want to build an open-source community while still being a viable business on the likes of MatterMost, Elastic etc.

This is, what I think is, Mattermost's answer to the current debate around the ethics of FAANG (and others) using open source software to make lots of money without substantially contributing back to the OS projects financially or in code. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

My understanding is that, Mattermost is okay with others making money from their software if they don't modify it - which will practically work for some, but not all, small companies, and will be very difficult for the big companies to use. If the big companies want to modify and use Mattermost-server for free they are forced to contribute back the changes to the OS project, and then can make as much money as they want. Or use option 2, pay Mattermost a bunch of money for the privilege of not contributing back code to the OS project. In other words FAANG and co can either contribute to Mattermost financially or in code - their pick.

That would work perfectly for us too. Is that considered an open-source license? We have heard OSI has strict standards around that

The AGPL license Mattermost uses for their source is OSI approved Open Source.

Wow! Thanks for posting this. I had no idea Mattermost had done work to solve this problem.

The BSL is not open source, but appears to be a commitment to eventually releaseing code as open source.

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