How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Is that what open source is?
They're saying you can use it for anything except building a competing product.
You drew a line in the sand, do not presume that someone else will draw the line in the same place. For example, some people draw the line at GPL. I, personally, greatly prefer a BSL license to a fully proprietary license. That means, from me, they do get both.
If we just let everybody call them self opensource and free, those terms will loose all of its meaning.
The fact that BSL is better than completely closed source option is different discussion.
But they take the successful open source thing, skin it, provide something similar with the same API, and that's it.
This contributes back nothing to the community. It actively distorts the cashflows. (Because instead of hiring someone to set up a let's say ES cluster, or buy it from elastic co. they buy it from AWS.)
Many developers at Amazon love(d) using Sentry, and one wanted to contribute (in a small way).
The benefits include things like volunteer labor, more alpha testers, and community goodwill. The negative is that you have less control over how your software is used.
I don't have an answer to how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software. I do know that redefining open source is not the way to handle it though.
Look, if Sentry wants to make money selling their software they should have just been proprietary from the beginning.
AWS has more than enough resources to re-implement (or fork/maintain) your software. So if you write a license that pisses off your own community and prevents AWS from using it, then that's probably what they're going to do, and now you have no users.
The answer to AWS running a hosted version of your software is, encourage it and ask for patches and contributions back.
If you don’t want it to be open, don’t make your code open. (It’s not open by default.) If you do, don’t be surprised or dismayed when someone takes you up on the offer you created.
There are more things than the extremes.
I don't think we need software Manichaeism. Software can be as open or closed as anyone likes with many degrees in between.
It is preferable for everyone to have software that is relatively permissive but has barriers in place as to not run into a tragedy-of-the-commons like situation where large companies simply take the code of small innovators wholesale and profit off their work without contributing back. License extremism is silly.
Why would we be better off if sentry completely closed down their source code, thus robbing everyone of running and using sentry themselves?
BSL is just better proprietary licence. It definitively isn't open source. I think of it as better way to do shareware. But there is big difference between shareware and open source and we don't want to muddy it.
If all you do is use sentry internally (which is a major use case for this particular piece of software) you can do what you want. This is not at all close to a proprietary license.
Can I sell this product as SaaS ? Can I put that code in a library that would be usable by SaaS product ? Who decides if it competes with sentries ? How about if sentry suddenly adds functionality it didn't have before, so now it competes and before it didn't.
Or maybe they don't get to do their IPO and are bought out by oracle(or similar). And their lawyers smell an opportunity ?
If this code would be any other standard open source licence the answers is simple. I don't even have to ask anyone.
But sure if I wanted to use it mostly like flexible shareware internally I can do that.
I think that's a fair decision for them to make and license their code accordingly.
They said very explicitly in the article that this is technically not "open source"
I do disagree with the use of “technically” in the last line. It’s simply “not open source” (which is, of course, fine).
Does it matter if they do that or do their own thing with an interoperable API (possibly starting with a code base forked from the last open source release)? Do you think that AWS can't afford the engineering to do the second if there is a business opportunity and the first is foreclosed by licensing terms?
Aside from all the other arguments, I don't think this licensing gambit has a chance of actually protecting substantially against the problem that supposedly motivates it, except by reducing the profile of the product to a level where AWS has no reason to care about releasing a compatible service.