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Introducing the Functional Source License: Freedom without Free-riding (blog.sentry.io)

submitted 1 year ago by pylapp to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Sentry has moved to a new license for its products called Functional Source License, and explains in this article the story of the licensing for these products and why they throw BSL for FSL.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I agree that it's better than the "open core" model because it limits by time rather than space, as they say, but it kinda misses the point of open-source software. The conflict of interest is that they effectively want to be the only ones who can profit off the software, while still benefiting from the free work of others, but commercial-use is within the open-source definition.

My real issue is that it seems like they're trying to spin it as a kind of "open-source", but it's not. If they were more up-front about that, I probably wouldn't care as much.

Also saying that it's less restrictive than copyleft is just outright false.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They do allow you to profit off the software though, by using it to host the service for yourself (even as a company), you just can’t offer hosting as a service to compete with them. Obviously this doesn’t offer as much freedom as just a straight MIT or Apache license, but I feel like it still qualifies as open-source; they are only really adding one restriction, and it could even be considered less restrictive than something like GPL (no requirement to open source derived software). I think this license makes a good compromise of being as open as they possibly can without AWS/GCP/Azure eating all of their business without doing any real engineering work.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The GPL is a fair play license as it offers everyone the same opportunities to use the software either for commercial purposes or otherwise. This license is a grants one party substantial rights over others, thus missing the main point of free software: free as in freedom, not free as in beer. That is also why free software organizations like the OSI won't accept licenses like this as "open".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and if you consider that "economic barrier to entry" can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup's code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code ...

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one's code.

"Coopetition" Bill Gates coined, where you "cooperate" with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sure, you can do all of that, fine by me. What you should not do is take that proprietary construct, slap the term "freedom" on in and try to muddy the waters of the FOSS licensing landscape neven further for your own gain.