The entire justification of the existence of the license talks about the problem of the "harmful freeloaders".
The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. The word we used are "free-riders" and that does not refer to our users. Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business.
This is nit-picking pedantry. The term "free-riders" appears six times on this site https://fsl.software/, but my bad for using a slightly different term that has the same meaning. From your very public announcement and linking to the text, it's pretty clear what you think of some of your users.
> Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business.
You're redefining the concept of "user" to suit your own ends.
(There was a talk given at Strange Loop titled The Economic of Programming Languages by the creator of Elm about this and it sounds like he's hesitant to release something interesting he's been working on because of it. So it's a real issue in my opinion that can lead to a worse outcome for most of us.)
It's perfectly reasonable not to subscribe to this ideology. I don't particularly think it is a very good or well motivated ideology. However, you can't pretend that you are a free software adherent while also wishing to prevent certain uses of your software.
Note that Stallman has explicitly come out against IBM RedHat's similar complaints about people distributing copies of RHEL for free for this very reason.
The clause is not written in good faith. It's designed to essentially make it enormously risky to use in any serious environment, because the actual ambition by the clause author is that no-one else uses their software.
I don't challenge that the license may have shortcomings, but I think better evidence is needed before bad faith can be asserted.
Then the next sentence immediately goes into ways in which it is not intended to be used. Make up your mind guys.
We're concerned about people who have taken the software for the purposes of competing directly against us, that hinders our ability to monetize the work. Monetizing the work helps us continue improving the software and distribute it for free use, benefitting those aforementioned real users (e.g. https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted).
You create a new license to keep competitors artificially in check.
Doesn't this hint to a flawed business model?
When the FOSS you're trying to build and share isn't covered by those- when you need to self fund so you can have an actual life- that's where it's always broken down. Patreon/gofundme type stuff can fly in single dev setups, but doesn't scale when it's a large team. There are exceptions to what I'm stating, but as a general rule, this is my experience across a couple decades of FOSS.
So if you want to build this thing full time and share it with others, and not subsist just on cardboard ramen and other folks coaches, what's your options here? Provide a paid service in parallel (we host it for you). What do you do when others take your development work- which has an inbuilt RD cost (development)- and try to compete with you via offering lower prices since they're just paying hosting rather than hosting + development?
But now that the idea is "out there" everyone can produce it, perhaps even cheaper. Actually, all other things being equal they will always be cheaper because they don't have three years of development costs.
Does this mean that selling these coat hangers is a "flawed business model" because cheap Chinese knock-offs can undercut her (small) business?
I know lots of people here don't have a lot of love for patents, and neither do I, but these kind of protections do exist for a reason. That doesn't mean I think that our current systems of patents is the best solution, but it also doesn't mean we shouldn't have any protections. And "be better at marketing" strikes me as a very poor answer.
My point here is that "produce something, but take a bit of protection against being exploited" is fairly reasonable in many cases. I also don't think it's "artificially" because under more traditional EULA-type software you're not allowed to do anything except "run it, but only in the way we want".
the coathanger is the kind of case that patents were intened for.
software patents are different.
as far as i am aware most people dislike software patents specifically and are fine with other patents.
and even with software patents the problem is not the idea of patenting software, but the broad scope and timeframe. for software 20 years are just to long, and many patents are to broad.
if software patents could be reduced in scope and more importantly reduced to a lifetime of eg no more than 5 years, they would be much less of a problem.
The new license actually allows for more competition, because it has a shorter change date to permissive OSS than the aforementioned prior license (2 years vs 3 years).
So another read of this is: the business model is going great, so much so that we're comforable switching to a more progressive license vs. what we had.
Because the users who pay / use the software as the developer intended are to be rewarded with new features sooner.
> Either you want competition or you don't
Customers want competition. To a first order approximation businesses don't. No one want competition for SEO which is essentially what is being suggested here. If the product can be taken and spun up instantly on any new release all the "competition" is on who can make page 1 of Google. As we have all seen with stack overflow content this is not ideal.
If FOSS is represented by the community in this thread I want no part of that toxicity.
We do what we think is good and for developers and customers, and the broader open source ecosystem. A lot of us have been doing that for quite some time and will continue to do so.
If you don't, it's pretty weird to want to do what you "think is good for the broader open source ecosystem".
> We're Open Source
The title of the page. You really thought you could sneak that past me. You cannot seriously make a reply like this when you have an entire domain name dedicated to the tile "We're Open Source". That is the most obvious of obvious lies. Even the page title "yes, we're open source" is a kind of passive-aggressive jab at people who think you aren't.
Stop pretending to be open source and stop calling the open source community toxic.
------- End Edit -------
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/11/19/cathedral-and-bazaaar-li...
> I assert that the FSL's approach is more closely aligned with Open Source ideals than mere source availability.
https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...
> We think it is a compelling option for Open Source-minded SaaS companies such as ourselves who wish to grant freedom
> for Open Source-minded SaaS companies such as ours, we think it’s a strong option.
This entire article is full of vague legal-speak designed to associate yourselves with FOSS as much as possible without actually saying you are. I can't see why you would do this unless your intention is to mislead or you have been mislead yourselves. You spend so much time talking about user-freedom, which has nothing to do with this license as it promotes developer sustainability over user freedom (even more-so than a simple non-compete license).
Like it or not, this is misleading. You should clarify your language on the matter. You aren't open source, and you've admitted as much yourself. You aren't "open-source minded" either (whatever that means). You said in the article that you should find a name for what you are doing, well, one already exists. It's called "source available". Open source software exists for anyone to use and profit from as they wish. You make the source of your code available because you think it will make a better product. You say that your software will become FOSS if you stop working on it to create more confidence in your product. These are all focused around selling your product, rather than around being genuinely free and open. Until you admit that this is what you're doing, you will be misleading people.
You suggesting we are anything but what we are just makes you look like you have an agenda at best, or foolish at worst.
All you're doing is harming the broader community by arguing about nonsense which is factually proven to be untrue. You came in here trolling as best you could, making false statements without reading or educating yourself on any components. Making statements as if you're a legal expert, as if you're an expert on open source history, on who or what Sentry is or has been.
1. A majority of Sentry's source code permissive open source. This is a fact, and easily verifiable.
2. FOSS is not Open Source. So when you constantly equate the two you simply come off as misinformed.
3. Sentry has continually shown good faith in a variety of activities, including donation of services, financial backing of large projects, financial backing of our dependency graph.
4. We are not rug pulling - we migrated our BUSL-licensed projects to FSL. BUSL is already non-compete source-available, FSL is the same thing but a more aggressive time-delay, and a better license conversion mechanism.
5. There is no "vague legal speak designed to [do anything harmful]". If its vague to you, maybe you should stay away from licensing, or you should start contributing back intead of creating toxicity on internet forums. In fact, the FSL is designed to be _more easily understood_ than prior licenses of its type.
2. I know. I type one because it is shorter. As cool of a pedantic ad-hominem as this is, my arguments all hold up when you replace FOSS with open source. So imagine I have done this.
3. Irrelevant.
4. Irrelevant.
5. Irrelevant.
Stop calling everyone who disagrees with you toxic. Stop lying about being open source on your website https://open.sentry.io/.
Several of our core services are licensed under the FSL (previously the BUSL). Some of that code was open source a _long_ time ago, some was never open source. Most of our projects are licensed under permissive licenses, including many projects which other companies rely on _to directly compete with us_. When I say "the majority of Sentry is open source" I mean that literally, both with many older versions of our software being more free than any copyleft license would make it, as well as many of our "hard" technologies being open by default.
None of my points are irrelevant beause you're all over this thread suggesting bad faith by Sentry, by our employees, by others in the community. You seem to have an awful lot to say about how harmful Sentry is, and how harmful some of our employees are who have been contributing in significant ways for their entire career. That is definitionally toxic, and exactly why HN has such a bad reputation.
Is the messaging on that URL you found misleading? Yes, and we will improve upon that, but that doesn't make you right. You just continue to look like someone with a grudge who is wildly misinformed, making demands as Anonymous Internet User #67.
Will you improve on the rest of your messaging? For instance, the FSL is not "closer to open source than source available". It is just source available. You seem to view "that URL" as something external to your organisation – a little slip-up in an otherwise clean record – but I see it as a logical continuation of a long process of making yourselves seem as close to open source as possible. Every communication I've seen has been worded to downplay the ways FSL is not open source. You start by calling it a "not OSI approved" license instead of just source available, then you move on to an "eventually open" license then a "mostly open" license then a "more open than not" licence. Dropping the qualification is just the end point of all this. If you had started with the attitude "this isn't open source, we wish it could be but we can't manage that", you would not have eventually told a full blown lie. A lie is just what happens when you keep permitting half-truths. It's the exact reason I'm so pedantic about this and view even the small missteps as so important. You have seen here the direct consequence of them.
Real improvement on this matter will require you to change a lot more than the most obvious failure.
> you're all over this thread suggesting bad faith by Sentry, by our employees, by others in the community. You seem to have an awful lot to say about how harmful Sentry is
I believe that communicating you are open source when you aren't or attempting to create ambiguity in the definition of open source is harmful. It doesn't matter who's doing it. Doing unrelated good deeds isn't an excuse. You could be curing cancer or creating world peace for all I care, I would still insist that you do not associate this source available license with open source. I have accused you of doing this to improve sales, which is bad faith as it may be you had some other reason, but also an important point to make – these kinds of misrepresentation may influence people to pay you money and hence have real stakes. People in this very thread have said they bought your software under the impression it had some of the favourable aspects of open source which are impeded by the FSL.
> That is definitionally toxic, and exactly why HN has such a bad reputation.
Maybe people would reply to you in a less "toxic" manor if you didn't make every attempt possible to insult them and every community they are a part of. Just a passive-aggressive suggestion.
> You just continue to look like someone with a grudge who is wildly misinformed, making demands as Anonymous Internet User #67.
So you admit to being incorrect, and to having lied in a number of aspects, but you still want to keep insulting me? And you think I will come out of this looking bad? Maybe you should apologise for your mistakes instead of demeaning me and and the entirety of the open source community and HN. A simple "you are correct" would have sufficed even if you couldn't manage a "sorry".
sorry, what?
All Free Software licenses are also Open Source licenses. so how can FOSS be not Open Source?
Open source is constantly under attack from various corporate entities, so it makes sense that we should guard our image. Asking people to be clear about what is and isn't FOSS is a basic consequence of that. FSL is a source available license, and I am simply asking that its users make this fact clear instead of trying to associate themselves with FOSS. That is not unreasonable. That is not toxic. That is simply asking that people don't obfuscate the truth.
> Asking people to be clear about what is and isn't FOSS is a basic consequence of that.
You are throwing around wild accusations bordering on the conspiratorial and making demands that are just beyond reason. The simple good-faith reading is that the Sentry people want to be as "open as possible" without compromising their business to the point of being unviable. There is nothing I know in the entire context and history of Sentry that would dispute that, and you've certainly provided zero evidence of it.
Quite frankly it amazed me that the people at Sentry even try in the face of complete rubbish that's being thrown around here by various people.
> People have come out of Guantanamo Bay less tortured than that analogy.
A charity is an organisation of people can donating money or doing volunteer work to contribute to a cause they see as in the common good. An open source project is an organisation of people donating money or doing volunteer work to contribute to a piece of software for the common good of its users. They are more than a little similar. Even if they aren't, people deserve to know where their work goes if they are doing it for free.
I’m not going to continue this conversation as you’ve shown only to be here in bad faith.
I also don't think it's bad faith to say that your decisions were motivated by selling your product. That's a perfectly reasonable motivation. I don't think it's bad faith to say you are misleading people, I never implied that you wanted to. You literally said a few replies ago that you thought I had been mislead into thinking you called yourself FOSS when you didn't. Maybe I am just stupid, but I don't think it takes and idiot to read "open source-minded company" and conclude that you are doing something open source. (In fact, wouldn't it be bad faith to assume that I was lying about what you've said rather than just mistaken?)
I think it’s worth reading the announcement from 2019 when Sentry first switched to BUSL. The original article links to many such pieces.
Then release your software under a source available non-compete license with the caveat that it will become open source when you stop working on it. (Basically what you have already done.)
Don't pretend it's FOSS or that it has anything to do with open source because it isn't and it doesn't. You have not made the software open until you have relinquished it to the community at large to do whatever they wish with it. Open source developers dislike this kind of marketing because it muddies the waters of what isn't and isn't free. If someone contributes to your software thinking it's free, you have mislead them to profit off their work. I don't care what you do with your code, but don't mischaracterise it. Don't give big talk about how you "believe in open source" or whatever. Say that you are source-available, and that isn't FOSS, but say no more than that. Especially do not say that you are "The Future of Open Source". That is nothing but a lie an it's obvious why real open source developers giving their time for the public good would take offence to it.
Open source is like charity. Don't call yourself a charity or associate yourself with charity unless you actually are one.
Done.
Note that the license website is pretty clear that it is not Open Source. If you find a place where that is not true, you can open an issue on the website’s repo and we’ll address.
Then fix this one: https://open.sentry.io/
You have admitted that you aren't open source and that this is a blatant lie so remove it.