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Comment by stsewd | Hacker News Reader

Not really open source, they are releasing their code under the BSL (Business Source License https://github.com/codecov/self-hosted/blob/main/LICENSE). But still great, and they use Django :D

It's also interesting that they will no longer offer a commercial self-hosted solution.

> As a part of this shift, we are offering a new self-hosted repo that makes it easy to run Codecov in a minimal docker-compose based setup for proof-of-concept and small volume deployments. We are end-of-lifing our commercial self-hosted offering, but will continue to provide support to existing customers who are running Codecov on-prem.

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N.B. BSL already refers to boost

Yeah BUSL or better yet BUSL-1.1 is the right way to refer to the Business Source License https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html

BSL or better yet BSL-1.0 is indeed Boost https://spdx.org/licenses/BSL-1.0.html

Noted! We’ve messed this up in the past and I have a vague recollection of this same confusion. Hasn’t helped that others (possibly also partly due to us) have made the same mistake. We’ll work to correct this usage.

FYI we have a follow-up at https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/.

> Yesterday we announced that Codecov is now “Open Source”, and we messed up in two ways:

> - We wrongly used the term Open Source; while unintentional, we should have known better

> - We let our emotions get the best of trying to explain our position, rather than stepping back and addressing the problem

> I want to talk about both of these, how we made the mistake, why it’s important to us, and what we plan to do about this to improve the conversation in the future.

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990036

> Business Source License

Standard open-source but you can't use it in a competing commercial offering.

So not open source.

Mostly open source.

Don't forget that it reverts to Apache 2.0 after three years—eventually open source for the nit-pickers. ;^)

[disclosure: I'm Head of Open Source at Sentry, which owns Codecov.]

You should probably use your position to get the title of this blog post changed, then. "CodeCov will eventually be Open Source" is far less deceptive.

Or, more elegantly, "CodeCov is now Source Available".

Okay, then either title the page "CodeCov will be Open Source in 3 years", or wait 3 years and then release a post titled "A really old version of CodeCov is now Open Source".

Exact text copied from the license file:

    Change Date:2023-06-29          2027-01-01
    
    Change License:       Apache License, Version 2.0


    Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the paragraph above terminate.

Did Sentry inadvertently open source CodeCov under Apache terms as of June 29, 2023?

Good catch, thanks! Fixing in https://github.com/codecov/self-hosted/pull/6.

I'm not sure you can undo this with a pull request.

This mistake only occurs in the self-hosted repo, which contains very little code. All of the "real" code is in the other four repos, each of which have their own LICENSE file that did not have this mistake.

Yes you can. If someone claimed "I can use it because they accidentally published the wrong license and swiftly corrected it", that wouldn't hold in court.

Would you have any precedent for that? I think in most of the world, that would hold in court.

Is this an official statement we can ignore the license differences? Or are Sentry nit pickers also?

Eventually open source.

If you go by the OSI definition of Open Source (which, I know, not every does), then it's either open source or not. In this case, that license is not open source.

https://opensource.org/osd/

> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

From CodeCov's BSL which goes directly against the above:

> You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you do not use the Licensed Work for a Competing Service.

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With that said, huge applaud to CodeCov for even making the code public under a BSL license, it's obviously a great step compared to status quo. I just wish they'd call it "Source Available/Public" instead of "Open Source" as many already seem to have troubles with what open source means.

So not open source.

It is open source, just delayed.

Open source enough that you can use it privately

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