I would argue that they prohibit far less use cases than they are open for.
In any case, how would you describe these licenses? I don't feel like "source available" is an accurate descriptor in this case.
Sure the SaaS server licenses are more or less open use with caveat, but why won't a process paralleling tivoization occur?
I wouldn't find it odd for a hardware vendor to release source code, "for review" without the rights to use it on any other hardware as some do for binaries.
In a way that could be worse than closed source as that is similar to the problem of suspicion of reading leaked source code, maybe you are tainted and can't actually write software licensable for competing hardware. Maybe you never read the code yet it will appear that way, but you shouldn't check.
Given the oddities of IP and copyright infringement, it is often the case that only the owner benefits from a process of publishing. I.e. what good is the disclosure of a modern patent?
It’s kind of like that thing where software vendors give cheap or free licenses to educational users in order to get them hooked and then charge whatever company they might work for an arm and a leg to keep using it.
> My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition"
Large companies are free to use Sentry. There are Fortune 50 companies running Sentry at scale internally without paying us a cent. That's totally cool.
You're also free to compete with Sentry. You're not free to repackage Sentry for the purposes of competing with us. There are lots of competing error and performance monitoring products out there that do perfectly fine without it.
I should also note that many components of Sentry are distributed with OSI-approved licenses that you are free to use to compete with us. For example, our Symbolication service (https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator) ships with an MIT license, and it's an important part of our business.
That seems like an obvious growth opportunity when investors need to see numbers go up
Aside, there seems to be confusion about what “relicensing” means. Even in this hypothetical scenario you’ve outlined, we can’t “relicense” already released software. Many users hosting Sentry internally are using years-old versions happily; they would continue to be able to do so. They could also choose to fork the last permissible version and maintain it themselves.
Personally, I think this scenario (relicensing such that self-hosted users could no longer do so) is incredibly unlikely. I don’t believe it would really do anything to grow the company.