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Comment by whit537 | Hacker News Reader

[disclaimer: Sentry employee]

> don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors

This is ill-informed, for what it's worth. Our relicensing had essentially no effect on the ratio of commits from outside the company: it went from 3.5% to 3.4%. I wrote about this when OSI published the DOSP paper that we underwrote.

https://blog.sentry.io/nows-the-time-for-delayed-open-source...

> the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors

Since Sentry has always been built by Sentry, our relicensing wasn't a rugpull. I wrote about this when Redis relicensed most recently:

https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/relicensing-and-rug-p...

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I see your point about commit ratio, and that I admit is a correct view of the tangible contributions, but I also dont think those are what got Sentry its traction.

I will then ask, do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years? How do you value the various libraries of user interaction, issue submission, and other market intangibles?

For a product developer, that is an external cost/value to you (the theoretical 'you', in this case), insomuch as there's no contractual obligations there and its not exactly clearly recorded in valuations and balance sheets, I believe. That openness and availability over time builds up a body of goodwill that I believe is critical to the success of a longterm opensource product.

As for Redis, enough people cared about the license change that valkey (https://valkey.io/blog/hello-world/) got stood up essentially immediately, which also got significant amount of developer traction. I notice that you dont mention them at all in your writing about Redis. Why is that?

> do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years?

No.

> How do you value the various libraries of user interaction, issue submission, and other market intangibles?

Highly. Dirk Riehle has a post from 2009 where he talks about the business benefits of Open Source community. I quote from it in the Fair Source FAQ:

> Fair Source provides many of the same benefits for companies as Open Source, by helping to foster an engaged developer community around your software products.

https://fair.io/faq/

> I notice that you dont mention them at all in your writing about Redis. Why is that?

Because my blog post predates Valkey by a week. I've added an update.

I'm not OP, and not currently a sentry user (but I am a sentry fan. That said, my feelings here are the same for other MIT-like to BSL/Fair-source like transitions).

> I will then ask, do you think Sentry would have been able to get enough of a mass of users to justify getting the VC funding it did if it weren't a MITish licensed product in its early years?

I agree no they wouldn't, but I also think it's not realistic to look at the 2012 ecosystem from the lens of 2024. I'd wager that you'd find it very hard to get VC funding if you had an MIT licensed SAAS in 2024 that could be "jeff'ed". The reality is that Sentry's model worked for the first 6-7 years of it's life, and whether or not it would have survived the competition is something we'll never know.

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