The source you link does not contain the quotes you cite.
3,659 karma · joined April 2, 2009
Some people choose to scratch their own itch and commit small bug fixes. For example, if you are running Sentry internally and you're monitoring a dozen software projects with ~50 users, it might be in your interest to fix some edge case you've hit that's causing your team grief. You could also open up a ticket on GitHub, or do nothing at all and just continue to use free software as-is without contribution.
It sounds like you aren't a user and have very little incentive to contribute. So I agree, don't!
I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors.
The license does not prevent you from the former. You could fork it and do what you want with it to monitor your own non-competing software.
And if your goal is the latter – to fork the project to compete with the original authors – why do you feel you should be allowed to do that? Sentry is developed by employees on its payroll, not from community contributions (with a caveat that there are many parts that are fully permissive OSS, licensed under Apache 2 or MIT, and those projects do have some community contributions). And yes, the license is meant to discourage this competing use – for 2 years.
The article explains that Sentry was licensed under a non-OSI license (the BUSL) for the last 4+ years. That license had more onerous terms than what it uses today. So if you believe this news means it has become proprietary today, you're ~4 years behind.
> when you are standing on the shoulders of free software components like Python or somehow python frameworks like Django. Sentry wouldn't even exist without free-riding.
Sentry has donated tens of thousands of dollars - probably over $100k over the years - to the PSF and Django. It is currently an acknowledged active sponsor of both [1,2].
This year alone Sentry gave $500,000 to open source foundations and maintainers [3].
Sentry itself was built as a Django ecosystem project, and anyone can use it according to the license terms (e.g. stand up a server and collect errors for their non-competing projects). And many organizations do that today.
Sentry (the company) additionally contributes many permissive OSS projects, like popular utility libraries and key parts of the Sentry project itself (e.g. getsentry/responses or the SDKs).
The issue is when competing entities take the source, produce purely commercial offerings with no upstream contributions / the source they produce is 100% closed. That’s free-riding.
[1] https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
[2] https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/corporate-members/
[3] https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-500-000-dollars-to-open-...
For example, at one point somebody operated sentry.otherdomain, reselling the service commercially as-is. In another case, a larger, better-capitalized software vendor explored bundling Sentry as part of a broader tools offering.
These efforts undermine the project because they did not contribute back to the project, either monetarily or with code contributions. Whereas when Sentry monetizes the work, the revenue earned pays the software developers who maintain and improve the work.
What you can’t do is leverage that source to compete against its authors, e.g. launch a competing monitoring service. (Please consult the license.)
They could choose to relicense future versions (i.e. they could stop future versions from becoming permissive, after 2 years). And if they did that, future changes wouldn’t propagate down (but it’d take 2 years to feel it).
> Every semi-open license/core tactic is just a rug-pull waiting to happen.
Note that everything you’re concerned about can also occur with permissive licensed OSS.
> Is there any functional difference between apache and MIT?
Apache 2.0 has an explicit patents clause, whereas MIT does not.
Better explanation here: https://opensource.com/article/18/2/apache-2-patent-license
1) It’s a license without any variable substitution (as the BUSL has).
2) It also has a firm change date to Apache 2.0 or MIT after 2 years (the BUSL default is 4, but this is also variable).
The BUSL has seen significant adoption but has a host of problems outlined in the article. But if you believe software should be an OSI-approved-license-or-nothing, this may not interest you.
The complication really just comes from the new capabilities we've added, and the dependencies that come with that. I suppose also our sophistication in hosting the platform has evolved (as the scale has increased), and so the tooling we use to manage it has become more complicated.
> The political staffer took the instructions from two developers in envelopes handed to him at a September, 2022 dinner hosted by BILD, the principal lobby group for the residential building industry.
This is not conjecture, but rather the determination of a newly released report from the province’s auditor general.[1]
This is also the same province that leased a major highway, the 150km-long 407, to a private corporation for 99 years for just $3b in 1999 (in a deal facilitated again by the Progressive Conservatives). It is estimated this highway is worth over $30 billion dollars today.[2]
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Now, the Stellaris and Volkswagen deals are a federal/provincial partnership, but my goal here was to highlight that Ontario has a history of self-owns.
[1] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ontario-auditor-general-unwraps-do...
[2] https://www.thespec.com/news/canada/birth-of-a-fiasco-how-th...
In the 20+ years Google has dominated search, who has come along and iterated a “better” version? Bing? Is the capital and scope required not approachable, as you suggest?
Similarly, since Tesla helped demonstrate a valid market for electric cars, how many automakers have released competitive (and to some, better) EVs? If the capital requirements and scope were too large, where did Rivian and Polestar and numerous other upstarts come from?
I won’t disagree re: SpaceX.
If you credit Musk directly for all the aforementioned things, why not them? And yes, Google bought some of those properties, but so did Musk. What’s the difference? Marketing?
(I don’t actually think Larry and Sergey “most benefitted humanity” or deserve a bunch of humanitarian awards, but I’m curious why they’re not credited with Google’s achievements in the way Musk is with his companies.)
A very important detail here is that Software Engineering is a specific specialization under the Engineering faculty. This figure does not include Computer Science graduates, for example, as that is a separate and much larger department.
So, this is a poll of 87 students (out of ~107) of a very specific graduating class. To put this in perspective, the Computer Science department at Waterloo is 4,000 undergraduate students.[2]
I'm not refuting that Canadian graduates often look to the US for better employment opportunities (full disclosure: I did that), but I think we owe ourselves to look at this topic objectively.
[1] https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf [2] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/about/quick-facts
Canada's official numbers do show that Q3 2022 was a record high for emigration (16.5k -- Q3 2018 was 15.5k), but other recent quarters (Q4 2022, Q1 2023, etc) are still lower than prior years. And you have a significantly higher population now than back then.[1]
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000...
Can you provide better citation, or point explicitly to the licensing requirements?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=license+f...
In part, this is because it’s too challenging to value and measure each person’s output, especially in orgs with a lot of different roles. It’s just easier to say, “well the market for a designer is X so let’s pay some % of that”.
The problem with that, often, is that folks don’t actually know how much output they might expect from a lot of roles. Is this designer performing? This PM? Unless you have a real breadth of experience in these roles (almost nobody does), you look to other metrics like “are my teams unblocked”, “did this product ship”, “do these slides seem reasonable”, etc. IMO those are also imperfect because a great team, a great project, etc. can sometimes easily mask someone’s meagre contributions.
I think some employees knowingly exploit this knowledge gap. I don’t think it’s common, but it happens. We’ve seen people post their own examples of doing that here on HN.
So, given they often lack experience evaluating output, some managers want to see their high-priced employees at work to even understand what they’re buying. You can call that onerous micromanaging, if you want. A less cynical take could be “managers want other signals to understand how their team members contribute.”
That’s my 2 cents, at least.
The parent comment said “every single person in adtech is complicit”.
Most employees do not possess that level of agency about what happens to their work.
I was an early employee at Disqus (YC S07). I helped build its 3rd party commenting plugin, because I had a blog and believed in distributed discussion. I genuinely believe the company did too (the founders, the employees, etc.). But eventually the rubber hits the road, and Disqus was sold years later to Zeta Global [1], a “data-driven marketing company”.
As long as you have a database in the cloud with a non-trivial amount of user data, you don’t really have control over what becomes of it.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/05/zeta-global-acquires-comme...
Aside, my personal anecdote is that this lack of decorum is why I rarely comment on HN anymore. So perhaps you are right.
As it is it remains conjecture.
(Aside, this thread now has 300 comments after just 2 hours. HN’s purported slowdown in the WFH era feels grossly exaggerated.)