Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, Apache 2 straight away would be nicer but in practice that’s really impossible to accommodate in a commercial context. The only alternative I know is where you keep the interesting pieces closed (eg: open core).

"impossible", huh? Wow, that must make Zulip the company really mad to hear they're going to close up shop tomorrow morning, and those GitLab folks are never going to go public </snark>

I mention GitLab as a nod to your open core comment because the MIT product they ship provides real value, as does their very real hosted offering

View on HN

Do you disagree the Apache licensed version of Sentry doesn’t provide real value?

What about all the supporting tech that we have released as MIT, BSD, or Apache?

All of that is funded by our ability to stop companies like your beloved GitLab from being the ones who commercialize the other parts. Our goal is not to argue about proper nouns, but to maintain the spirit of open source, and to do that we need to move the conversation forward.

GitLab is a good example of not actually opensource. They are open corse which is much worse than BSL. There are tons of features they don't allow you to use even if you self-host unless you purchase a license.

BSL lets you use all features and self-host as long as you aren't a reseller. It is the best model I've seen.

I would enjoy seeing the specific features of the MIT codebase that they "don't allow" you to use

All the features they exclude from the MIT code base and only include in the The GitLab Enterprise Edition...

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#compare-options

There is a box for "Open Source - MIT License". You'll notice most of the features are not covered under it.

> All the features they exclude from the MIT code base and only include in the The GitLab Enterprise Edition...

> > I would enjoy seeing the specific features of the MIT codebase that they "don't allow" you to use

I feel we are not on the same page. But, good luck with your BSL future

What do you mean we aren't on the same page? These are two options when opensourcing things:

- GitLab went with Open Core and kept most of their features closed source and not available to the community

- Companies that choose BSL provide all their features to the community both from a source available standpoint AND a usage standpoint.

In my opinion BSL is a MUCH better place to be in than the open core model.

I agree with you.

If the choice is Open-Core vs Non OSI Approved License(tm) Open-Source, I definitely support the latter.

The OSI needs to be honest and push "OSI Approved Licenses(tm)"... Instead they're like the Simpson's Old Man Yells at Cloud meme, trying to pretend their special interest group has a trademark on "open-source"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud

Even though they admit that trademark was denied

https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

Everything is always fine until someone comes along and starts selling hosting of Open Source SaaS projects. I cannot talk for Zulip and I truly hope they will succeed with not relicensing or closing part of the software.

This strawman argument gets trotted out every time and every instance that I've heard thus far is exactly that. It's the "otherwise the terrorists win" of my profession

Ordinarily I would have gladly used Sentry's community and my good experience with its hosting and customer service as rebuttals but now ...

At one point Sentry was packaged with GitLab and bundled as a capability/extension of the GitLab suite of products (see "Error Tracking"): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/39701

You are misinformed; they implemented a Sentry-compatible endpoint if the Project enabled it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v15.0.0-ee/lib/a...

I feel perhaps you meant to link to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/329596 which describes their intention to accept Sentry formatted JSON payloads and store them in their own database. Searching for "no need" in that issue will highlight the number of times they were drawing a distinction between the effort required to run GitLab and the effort to run the 15 containers of Sentry self-hosted

Reply on news.ycombinator.com