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Comment by bentlegen | Hacker News Reader

> My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it".

I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors.

The license does not prevent you from the former. You could fork it and do what you want with it to monitor your own non-competing software.

And if your goal is the latter – to fork the project to compete with the original authors – why do you feel you should be allowed to do that? Sentry is developed by employees on its payroll, not from community contributions (with a caveat that there are many parts that are fully permissive OSS, licensed under Apache 2 or MIT, and those projects do have some community contributions). And yes, the license is meant to discourage this competing use – for 2 years.

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> I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors.

The problem is that whilst the license attempts to define what "competes" means, it's not a good definition. Specifically:

  Competing Uses specifically include using the Software:
  1.  as a substitute for any of our products or services;
  2. in a way that exposes the APIs of the Software; and
  3. in a product or service that offers the same or substantially similar functionality to the Software.

(1) & (3) are highly subjective, and (2) attempts to assert a copyright claim over APIs (definitely doesn't work across most jurisdictions). No-one is going to seriously use this software with such a badly written and vague license.

(I suspect this is on purpose, and the actual motivation of the license author is to try and discourage anyone else from using / forking the software, whilst at the same time getting marketing cred for pretending to be "open". It's a source-available license. Others may come to different conclusions).

I'm not a lawyer, but here's my non-official interpretation:

1) If you host the software, and say "hey get your Sentry over here", that's basically a substitute.

2) Means use the work in such a way where you expose its APIs (i.e. the software is returning API responses). Note this is written as "using the software ... in a way that exposes the APIs of the software".

Perhaps this could be made more clear, but I believe this was written with the understanding that there is prior art on the copyrightability of APIs, not some feigned attempt to assert a copyright.

3) If you're building some kind of software observability platform that leverages Sentry.

If you're concerned about doing any 3 of those, then yes, perhaps you should not use the software. Overwhelmingly 99.99% of software people aren't doing anything remotely close to any of these clauses.

I'll also note that Sentry itself was licensed for 4+ years under BUSL using similar terminology (that was arguably far more vague). The inclusion of non-competitive language in the license did not stop users from using the software – because again, most people aren't competing.

You're welcome to make your own decision, of course. No one is forcing you to use anything.

No license can prevent you from making alterations to your private copy of a piece of software.

> No license can prevent you from making alterations to your private copy of a piece of software.

The right to make alterations to someone else's intellectual property does not exist except as granted by licence or fair use exceptions.

Copyright is about copying. For instance, if I buy a book, I cannot distribute copies of that book. But I can write whatever I want in the book, change any of the text in it, provided I don't then copy the modified text. They own the copyright to the intellectual property, not the physical item you are given or the bits in your computer's RAM, which you are free to do as you please with.

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