Hacker News Reader

Comment by HyprMusic | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on being the only commercial company to actually sponsor rrweb[0] rather than just fork it and contribute absolutely nothing back (or in the case of Sentry - remove their copyright and violate their license).

Seeing as you're "open-source", why chose to fork and detach the project rather than contribute directly to it? With a detached fork, other users can't even compare your changes to the original and pull in fixes. If you truly believed in the spirit of open source, you'd believe in working together and giving back; not just taking advantage of a free lunch.

It feels like all these "open-source" companies are just closed source but with open-source as a marketing gimmick.

[0] https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb

View on HN

Sentry’s license change on the fork was a mistake. It has been fixed though: https://github.com/getsentry/rrweb/pull/92

The fork exists as a ‘buffer’ to get some changes (features or bug fixes) out without the need to couple with the npm release of rrweb itself. Sentry engineers have several PRs in upstream rrweb merged and the goal is to increase the upstream contributions and close the gap between our fork and upstream. We’re currently porting our changes from v1 to the v2 branch.

I believe Sentry has made financial contributions to rrweb but directly to a maintainer. I'll let others who know details to comment on this. I'm sure more contributions will be done, as this is very much in the interest of Sentry anyway.

Worth noting, Sentry has been making larger contributions to OSS every year, as the company grows:

2021: https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-154-999-dollars-and-89-c... 2022: https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-260-028-dollars-to-open-...

In addition to that, there are contributions to open source done in the form of code that is, open source, such as the symbolication service: https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator and many others: https://github.com/getsentry/

Thanks for clarifying, no need to provide specifics - those blog posts demonstrate that that Sentry is indeed committed to giving back to FOSS. Apologies for my initial cynicism.

Thanks. Frankly, the reason we have a separate fork is because some of our changes to rrweb in the early days were "hacky" to the say the least, and given that their team is part time on the project, there was occasionally a long cycle to get changes in.

We do have plans to consolidate one day, and I understand your sentiment about making diffs hard.

Fwiw, even beyond sponsoring the project, we even sponsored some folks on their team to work on particular features in the privacy and webgl space, so we have a really good relationship at this point.

I'll talk to the team regarding consolidating at this point. I appreciate the message.

Thanks, I appreciate the response. Re-reading my original post, it came off more aggressively than I indented. It's just frustrating to see so many "open-source" companies use rrweb as a big selling point in their product yet not give anything back in terms of financial support or contributions (present company excluded of course).

That's great to hear, thank you for supporting open-source! I'll be sure to give your product a trial.

All good, these are very valid points. Thanks for feedback and definitely give highlight a try when you get a chance.

I can't speak to rrweb specifically, but I can say having used open source projects at large companies that sometimes they require major code changes to work around an internal limitation or use case that upstream frankly might not want.

E.g., my team wrote an exporter plugin for an internal only database, so there's almost zero value to open source it when other exporters for OSS data sources already exist as reference material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com