Two people can compete. Tomatoes and people are complementary - it's nice to have both. Tapeworms and people are playing a game in which, if the people win, the tapeworms lose, and if the people lose, the tapeworms lose to.
I think for customers having different companies have their own approaches to solving this problem is vastly preferable to having different companies solve the same problem in exactly the same way.
Example: Our company self-hosts sentry, this license won't effect us at all, we're still free to use and modify the source. We only use it internally - we don't sell "access" to it.
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This is cropping up more and more with various software companies. They _want_ to keep their source open. But people take the source, and just start selling it (Looking at you amazon) without actually contributing. It's one of those, "This is why we can't have nice things"
You can provide Sentry-as-a-service but you can't do so commercially.
You can use the Sentry code commercially but you can't use it to provide Sentry-as-a-service commercially.
Words have meaning, and trying to change the meaning of open source to benefit corporations is not something I'm willing to get behind.
They are still open source because the source is open.
Not every open source lic is like MIT where you can do whatever you want.
That is not the definition of 'Open Source'. Using it interchangeably with 'open source' just adds confusion. And from the other uses of 'open source' in your comment, it seems you're using it in the same sense as 'Open Source'
> Not every open source lic is like MIT where you can do whatever you want.
No Open Source license allows you to "do whatever you want". Even the WTFPL, which comes close to that goal, is not an Open Source license. Being Open Source comes with a few requirements, which every Open Source license, licensor, and licensee must fulfill.
if it is not, then Sentry needs to consider whether it is important for them to stay Open Source or not.
and, if we see many more cases like this, then maybe it's time that we rethink what the Open Source definition should be.
it looks like neither Open Source, nor Free Software haver put much consideration to this problem yet, and it's time that we look at the implications.
my expectation is that any change in the definition of either will not meet much positive reaction, but i think the discussion is worth having.
If MongoDB were AGPL, both a company providing MongoDB-as-a-Service and a non-profit web app using MongoDB in the backend would equally need to publish their source code.
The BSL just says "you can't do this one specific thing for 36 months".
The AGPL is a more viral version of the GPL, which basically says "if your code uses this code, your code is now GPL licensed" and also "for all GPL licensed software you distribute, you must also make its source code available" (with the AGPL just redefining that "distribute" as "distribute or make accessible as a service").
If that's Sentry's opinion (and it seems like it is), that's fine, but that's not what "anti-competitive" means. The word for that is "competitive."
(The specifics depend on the jurisdiction, but the behavior described by the FTC is what's widely considered "anti-competitive": https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices)
The opposite of being anti-competitive is not simply competing, it's competing fairly.
It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another company, repackage it for money and contribute little or nothing in return.
The world is poorer when this happens because free-riders can freely have business models that "kill the host", that is, don't capture enough value to keep people working on the underlying product.
Perhaps the answer is "well it shouldn't have been an open source product then?" and then we all miss out.
Meanwhile Amazon celebrates turning off all their Oracle databases. Great! And they make a lot of money off the back of Postgres too. But try asking them for the code that bundles Postgres into a reliable managed database offering. Of course they won't share it. That's their IP.
I completely agree and I think you found the perfect word for it: free-riding. As you note, anti-competitive has a specialized meaning. My comment was simply that free-riding is not, on its own, considered an anti-competitive business practice.
Time for the rubber to meet the road. Pragmatism and revenue > philosophy. Can't pay the rent and groceries with platitudes about "open source" from a vocal minority while cloud providers reap what you've sown.
I don't really get what these growth startups are supposed to be and for people who contribute nothing back maybe buyer beware is fair.. But it is dishonest to create these company sponsored communities that convert after taking input from individual contributors. Plenty of people try to help a community with out considering that this kind of thing happens and these products compete directly with real open communities through this temporary branding.
Open source was never about "free as in beer", it was about "free as in speech", which even in the civil rights sense is not absolute. Communities and ideas evolve, and it does a disservice to those who have contributed in a material way to the non-commercial software space to color them as heretics for trying to protect themselves from competitors with effectively unlimited resources.
I stay away from anything hosted by a startup for exactly that reason, and just yesterday someone looked at me funny for saying so since the last example was being forgotten.
(AFA any commercial product, that is the whole point of looking for a REAL open source community where other individuals might drop out but Apache, Debian, etc isn't going to tell you that they don't like their 501c status anymore.)
No true scotsman. If it works for the stakeholders, it works, regardless of what you want to call the model, whether that's GNU/Linux, Redis, Elastic, or Sentry.
GPL exists partly to prevent this kind of conversion once the community is diverse and non-profit project hosting is a good place to look for a community. It would be nice if everyone knew that and kept it in mind, but clearly they do not.
Imperfect analogy: If Uber gave away every ride for free, that would be more "competitive" for some definition (lower fares = more competitive rate), but, Uber would go out of business within months.
That example isn't as strong as in this case though, but the general idea holds (price isn't as clear as business model). In this case Sentry is saying in order to survive as a company they can't sacrifice their only source of revenue completely, or they'd have no advantage. In doing so, they are keeping their own company alive, which increases competition against other companies in their area.
So it reduces competition of their own product against themselves, while it increases competition (by keeping them afloat) by making them stronger against their competitors. There's no real better way to phrase this, and I think the shorthand here works just fine. I don't see this as doublespeak or even lax phrasing, just choosing a frame that makes sense given Sentry is the one speaking.
On the flip side...now if Uber were to provide rides below cost with the intention of putting the competition out of business then that would be the textbook definition of "anti-competitive" behavior.
Sentry is actually exercising their government granted monopoly (aka copyright) to ensure that no competitor is able to use their codebase to directly compete against them which is the exact opposite of increasing competition.
I have no dog in this fight and am not judging what they're doing so...
A better analogy: T-Mobile will go out of business because they set poor terms on franchisees that let them exploit and take business from T-Mobile. Now T-Mobile is days away from folding. Here’s two scenarios:
1. They fail, both T-Mobile and franchisees go under.
2. They change the terms, killing the franchise model. Only T-Mobile survives.
In this case I see number 2 as better for the market. Better to have one bigger competitor in a nearly monopolized market than have none - it’s more competitive and you’d see lower prices for end users than if they failed. Same goes for Segment.
There is also an argument to be made that such an action by Amazon fits squarely into the "single firm conduct" category of your linked FTC resource.
In the end, this is precisely what the license change is trying to prevent. It's happened to several database companies at this point, and they're simply trying to hedge things off on competing SaaS providers (their commercial model).
I know some may not like less than "Open Source" licenses, but the reality and practicality of the real world does at time necessitate it.
I think more people are put off by perceived bait-and-switch or claims that a given piece of tech is open (with all the benefits that come from that) while making it not actually open.
If it’s a duck, call it a duck. If it’s a hunting decoy, don’t call it a duck.
Nor do I, but for slightly different reasons.
> it won’t change anyone’s ability to run Sentry at their company
I can't go up to a lawyer with years of experience trying and defending against BSL lawsuits and say "Is my usecase one Sentry can sue me for and win," because such a lawyer doesn't exist.
At least with other licenses, their actual legal limitations are well known, through case law and court rulings. The BSL in contrast is a legal liability that is probably not worth betting a small company on.
Sure, the Sentry of now might never do that - but if/when they're acquired for their patents and licenses that acquiring company may.
And the three year conversion window gives you cover there. It's a question of will the Sentry of the next three years do that.
I don't think this is accurate. It will ensure that Sentry is protected from its work being used in a competitive fashion. While the issues pointed out in the blog post are real, competing isn't "anti-competitive." The intent and the effect here is to reduce competition, not increase it.