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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

For those who were not familiar with the licence they have switched to: https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/functional-source-license-...

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For more context, the FSL was created by Sentry, who explain why it's been created and what problems it was trying to solve here: https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...

Is 2 years too little? The deep pocketed companies I know dont mind 5 year old software and I'll be okay with 2012 Redis or 2020 Postgres.

I think it is meant to be useable by them. It is meant to be unuseable by those who directly compete with liquibase.

The only closed source license I find acceptable is the BuSL "Business Source License" because it eventually becomes opensource. It guarantees you a 4 year moat on the code before it becomes open source, and it remains source available until then. This ought to be good enough for valid uses and prevents needless license proliferation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License

FSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too.

At this point, FSL appears to be more widespread than BSL. Adoption of BSL has waned; even its creators (MariaDB, for their MaxScale proxy product) recently stopped using it.

> FSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too.

I stand corrected. I hate license proliferation, but the naming and marketing is better. I hope the other former open-source companies consolidate on something.

> undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP). [1]

and that "DOSP" (Delayed Open Source Publication) is an OSI concept! [2]

But I cannot (yet) find what the timeframe for the DOSP is... because we don't want to wait 90 years for Mickey to be public domain.

[1] https://fair.io/about/

[2] https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication

That linked documented was sponsored by Sentry, who led the development of FSL. I don't believe it's accurate to call DOSP an "OSI concept" -- meaning, it's not something the OSI invented or coined. OSI also does not consider such licenses to be approved under their open source definition.

As for the timeframe, FSL uses a 2 year period.

edit to add: just to be clear, I'm a fan of FSL and Fair Source licensing, and do not consider lack of OSI endorsement to be a problem.

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