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Comment by ilc | Hacker News Reader

Not open either. :)

TBH, I love BSL licenses. You can use it as you want for free, except being a competitor, and there is a high chance of a sustainable business model. (What benefit do you expect if the company goes bankrupt?) Despite the unpopular opinion, you have free and easy access to the code, so it is open source in the sense of words. Just not in the sense that you can steal their business like AWS does. Feel free to start a similar project, invest your time and money, and make it available under whatever license you want.

It doesn't matter how much you love it. It is still not open source.

It is open for me to use as I please. And I don't want to destroy their business. I can understand your ideological drive, but in reality it doesn't matter until you behave unethically and steal their intellectual property. Do you want that?

If you are sure that what you please is and always will be in line with what their company pleases, then I suppose so. Ideology has nothing to do with it. Nor does "unethically and steal their intellectual property" have anything to do with it- they can choose whatever license they want for their intellectual property and I can ethically choose not to use it. Unless your idea of "ethics" is for force me to use their intellectual property and agree to their license?

> It is open for me to use as I please.

Sure, but that's not what "open source" means.

I mean I can go around calling C a functional programming language because it functions and I can build functioning programs with it... but that's not what the word means in anyone's discourse besides yours. I mean I support your freedom of speech, but also mine in saying your usage is disingenuous.

What's not open about it? I see the source, I see instructions to build from source, I see a license that seems to say I can copy and make derivative works out of it. Can you try to make a more substantive comment?

It's a weird license that seems to say "you can use this as long as you don't compete with us", with an automatic switchover to Apache 2.0 in 5 years. Definitely better than closed source, but probably not Open Source by the OSI definition.

BSL license is more company-friendly than AGPL.

Being company-friendly is a separate point from being open source.

Restricting Usage or Distribution makes it de-facto not OSS.

It's actually a slightly different form of an old debate. I'm thinking in particular about the Crockford license (the MIT-like one with "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." bit). It was determined to be non-free quite a while back due to such restrictions.

That being said, it hard to be a commercially successful software editor with an OSS model (RethinkDB comes to mind).

I do understand why BSL exists, but it feels to me like an unsatisfactory compromise.

The license comes with restrictions on what you can use your derivative works for - e.g. not creating an in-memory datastore service. It's essentially an Apache 2 with a "Also AWS can't just steal it and sell it as a service when it gets huge"

Is it open-source? Well, depending on your definition probably not. Is it a fair license? Yeah I'd think so.

It is open-source, no question.

What you might mean is that it isn't free/libre as in FOSS.

That’s the Stallman kind of point of view. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source section "Open" versus "free" versus "free and open"

But to a lot of us, “open source” has a specific meaning as well.

> Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.

https://opensource.org/osd/

From my point of view, for example, GPL is not "open" at all. And yet it is on the list. In my opinion, BSL is even more "open" than GPL. Feel free to have a different view.

Open Source as defined by OSI, which means BSL is not considered as Open Source.

Open Source as defined by majority of programmers on Internet, which means either GPL, MIT, or Apache and their derivatives.

Open Source as defined by HN, depending on which timeline you join HN, it could be MIT, BSD only all the way to AGPL only.

Open Source as defined by layman, anything I can see its source is considered as Open. Open Source in its literal sense.

DragonflyDB cofounder here. I am not shy about our choice of license. Like with software design, everything is about trade-offs. Folks here voiced reasons why we chose BSL. I am sure you perfectly aware about all this.

I do not know personally you but I noticed that you posted the link to the announcement. I am guessing you are passionate about the technology and innovation. Dragonfly is much more than the licensing choice we made. I wish HN discussions here were about how fibers work in Dragonfly and how SSD tiering is gonna be implemented and how we provide atomicity for lua scripts while running many of them in parallel etc. Btw, Dragonfly relies on an io-engine called helio (roughly equivalent to tokio) that has been developed by me and open sourced under Apache 2.0.

While technical discussion about those details would be interesting, HN is also a strong entrepreneurial community and your license choice has a big impact on whether or not a business would choose to depend on your product. I would not choose to build on a BSL licensed foundation for my product because of real business concerns with vendor lock-in. I would also not choose to contribute to a BSL licensed code base because the CLA means I am not free to use the code base on equal grounds with other contributors (DragonflyDB Ltd in this case).

Because of these two things, I didn't spend a lot of time looking into the technical details and therefore can't really say much on them. By all means it sounds like a very interesting piece of technology- but the license makes it useless to me.

Please do not express your opinion as the opinion of the majority. Instead of discussing license choices, create your project and open source it as you like. Do not tell others how to build their business, especially on HN.

I never expressed my opinion as that of the majority. I expressed my opinion as my opinion, and I can express whatever opinion I want to and discuss whatever I want to on Hacker News, so long as as Y Combinator (Who owns Hacker News) is okay with it.

Are you a representative of Y Contaminator/Hacker News? If you are, I will be glad to comply with your request.

The reply wasn't directed at DragonFly, but simply an answer to parent. I think you got a lot of sticks on HN. [1] In case you are wondering, I am much closer to Laymen in my definition of Open Source so I am actually extremely supportive of BSL. A perfect balance of Business Needs and Open Source. But HN has gotten a lot more ideological than it used to be. So please keep up the good work.

[1] Part of the reason why I submitted Dragonfly, interesting technology should get more coverage on HN, and not be ignored simply because of some over zealotry ideological reason.

It is not open to use as you please. For example, I cannot pay the supplier of my choosing to provide services using the code.

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