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Comment by bluish29 | Hacker News Reader

Just be careful that while it is self-hostable and the source is available, it is not open source [1,2]. If this is something important for your consideration before using it.

[1] https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE

[2] https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-...

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Per the license itself:

    Additional Use Grant: You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that
                          you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document
                          Service.

                          A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that
                          allows third parties (other than your employees and
                          contractors) to access the functionality of the
                          Licensed Work by creating teams and documents
                          controlled by such third parties.

Then you come across Trilium and drop the mic

[0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium

I just recently came back up from a deep dive through knowledge management systems, and Trilium is what I settled with. It might not look like much on the surface, especially compared to the bling and hype of the VC baked alternatives, but once the basics click (everything is a note, notes can have inheritable attributes, you build types of notes like in OOP inheriting from base notes by leveraging the hierarchy, instances are just notes that have a template relationship to the model notes and can be stored anywhere), it's a damn elegant and powerful tool.

Definitely underrated/highly recommended!

Trilium or Obsidian are not comparable to Outline, because they're single-user with no accounts or access control.

Outline is not comaparable to Trilium because you cannot extend Outline by simply writing your extension code as a document that is inherited.

Or maybe they are comparable because they have slightly different feature sets..

So if I understand this correctly, I have _no_ license to use the software until late 2027? Including installation and contribution instructions in the README seems deceptive, since neither can be done legally.

You cannot use it in production. I'm actually curious how this license works for them.

If they get a contribution without a CLA, then they themselves can hypothetically not use it in prod too?

Edit: you can actually use it for your own, but you can't compete with their offering until the date mentioned in the license:

> You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document Service. A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that allows third parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access the functionality of the Licensed Work by creating teams and documents controlled by such third parties.

I missed that, I guess that counts as a license. But it's fearfully short, even MIT is longer than that. But there's no grant for contributors, so you have to violate the copyright to make a contribution, even with a CLA (which is a license from the contributor to the rights-holder, not usually the other way round).

The license allows all use _except_ competing with the cloud offering – you can run in for personal use, or your company without issue. This style of BSL license has become fairly common to protect the business model that allows the software to remain under development.

I don’t think that’s right. You have no license to use it to host a commercial offering to third-parties, until the BSL rolls over to fully open source.

But the license explicitly allows free self-hosting for your own company / employees.

BSL can be quite open-source-like or extremely restrictive depending on the additional use grant. For example this project seem to allow most things besides offering a hosted version as a SaaS, but the BSL itself disallows any production use and "production" as a term is not defined.

I would be weary of even setting up a personal instance of BSL software for anything besides development or evaluation since it could be counted as "production".

I thought it is licensed under BSL 1.1 until 2027, after that it will become Apache 2. You can install and use it as long as you don't provide commercial service with it.

What an ambiguous mess.

> Change License: Apache License, Version 2.0

> 1. To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version

So which is it?

> 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

That text was was added in a commit on March 27, 2020. That commit also lists a change date of "2023-03-01". So when was the "first publicly available distribution"?

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Can we please just stop wasting each other's time with this nonsense? Clearly none of us is enjoying the exercise.

Developers laugh at lawyers who think they can write code, and lawyers laugh at developers who think they can write contracts.

The truth is there are probably more lawyers who can write good code than developers who can write good contracts.

The concept of a "good contract" can be argued to death. I don't think that argument needs to overwhelm my point: this is an incoherent contract. It doesn't require any expertise to say so.

If you ever find an IP attorney who studied engineering as an undergraduate (and was good at it), hang on to them, they are the best. Mine saved me from a single mistake that would've cost more than 100x what I paid him (and several other less-spectacular disasters).

is BSL frowned upon? is it a bad choice if I wanted to provide a service and make source code available for those who want to self-host for free?

Generally what's frowned upon is using phrases like "open source" or words like "open" and "free" to describe source-available licenses that are not open source per the Open Source Initiative definition[0] or libre (versus no-cost). There are lot of people (me included) who take a very pedantic view of these terms. Makers of proprietary software sometimes use these terms to unfairly exploit the goodwill associated with actual free/libre and open source software licenses.

A lot of people don't regard BSL-licensed (and other source-available licenses) as much different than any other proprietary license. There will always be the people who object to any proprietary licenses. You'll always offend those people by using a proprietary license. Using precise and correct language with a source-available license like the BSL won't offend those who take open source and free software terminology seriously however.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd/

Corporate bootlickers frown upon developers restricting corporate uses of their software.

The OSI is run by corporations, for corporations, and has successfully run propaganda campaigns to shit on source available licenses purely on the basis of them not being bootlicker enough.

No. There is absolutely nothing wrong with restricting how corporations can use your code. Fuck the OSI.

Some of us in "open source" are also interested in helping independent developers (including arrangements such as worker-owned cooperatives) gain access to the means of production they can also use to make a living from. BSL excludes small/independent/worker-owned orgs, not only the big and exploitative corporations. If everyone moves to BSL then only those who already have access to capital will be able to afford to build software on top of non-free foundations - a gap which widens with time and a kind of "pulling up the ladder behind you" practice deployed at scale

There are other interesting licenses for this issue that exclude exploitative corporate use without cutting out e.g. worker-owned cooperative use [0] but nothing currently in popular use, and these may be less desirable in "exvestment" opportunities such as linux where corporate investment has vastly contributed to public goods with values that are not represented by those corporations own goals and otherwise wouldn't exist given current society

[0] https://anticapitalist.software which encourages free reuse by for-profit (or otherwise) entities in markets, but excludes exploitative use. I just posted the link to discuss.

> 2. The User is one of the following: a. An individual person, laboring for themselves b. A non-profit organization c. An educational institution d. An organization that seeks shared profit for all of its members, and allows non-members to set the cost of their labor

> 3. If the User is an organization with owners, then all owners are workers and all workers are owners with equal equity and/or equal vote.

> 4. If the User is an organization, then the User is not law enforcement or military, or working for or under either.

I think you’re assuming things that I don’t actually believe.

The OSI are scum because of their incessant propaganda against source-available and constant attacks of developers that aren’t being bootlickers.

If a developer wants for their code to be free for corporate use. Fine. If they don’t, also fine.

I am for developers getting paid for their work that they want to be paid for, and if they believe that licensing to corporations differently helps them achieve that, then so be it.

I create source under both open source and source available licenses depending on what it is.

Sounds good

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