- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877059 (sentry FSL relicense)
- in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312686 (rugpull licensing still possible on future versions/contributions)
- Sentry's first relicense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466967
Looking back to the first relicense in particular, the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors, and the trend of companies trying to pretend they aren't doing exactly that sours me on basically any 'opencore'/required CLA project. I make rare exceptions for non-profits, but only those that are mature, well established, and not the sort of non-profit that puts most of their operation under a for-profit entity.
As woodruffw mentions, these implied-value-judgement labelings are really marketing terms designed to muddle the value and importance of what it means to be an open source product.
If it doesn't work for your business, fine, don't use an OSS license. But don't expect us to slurp up your peddling when you want to pretend its an OSS license, and don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors.
*EDIT*: I misspoke, my brain had thought that old Sentry licenses were GPL, they were more MITish as seen in the LICENSE file in older releases of Sentry. My mistake :\
FWIW, if Sentry had stayed MIT or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.)
My position in 2019 was that much these decisions are being driven by the VC money, and I believe that is still true today. If it weren't, they could have chosen options that served the wider community better. (I also think that wider community and the accessibility of such is what got sentry much of its initial draw, but TBH im not sure how much that bears out in reality. I haven't studied deeply enough to have a good idea of the numbers there.)