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A comment on Re-Licensing Sentry. Parent comment

Re:Re-Licensing Sentry by toomuchtodo on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @05:34PM (#21468316)
A project can be relicensed at any time. This is a known quantity (just as a commercial product's price or availability can change without notice). To think that because it is open source, all future versions will be open source, is naive at best. To expect contributors and project owners to not be compensated for their work (or not enact controls through licenses to protect their ability to monetize pieces of their work) to support a belief system (absolute "open source") is downright unacceptable.

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.

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Re:Re-Licensing Sentry by yabadabadoes on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @05:45PM (#21468411)
A product can get additional licenses and members of a community can move to a fork under the additional license.. But as far as community, it's a little like going to a party only to discover it is a church meeting. Once or twice miscommunications happen but at some point you realize this miscommunication is the model.

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.)

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Re:Re-Licensing Sentry by toomuchtodo on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @06:12PM (#21468608)
> a REAL open source community

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.

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Re:Re-Licensing Sentry by yabadabadoes on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @06:21PM (#21468677)
That's silly, I've worked in a closed source community with cross company stakeholders and we had no trouble understanding we weren't open source Scotsmen. Sentry seems to know this too, and this unnotable change is strangely notable here.

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.

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