What’s up with these new not-open source licenses?

Re:What’s up with these new not-open source licenses? by chc on Thursday March 18, 2021 @06:47PM (#26508347)

I agree. My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition" arrangement is "private-use source license," but I wouldn't be so bold as to argue that's The Best Name. My point is just that I don't think broadening "open-source" is a good answer, because all that does is make it harder to talk about the differences in licenses.

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Re:What’s up with these new not-open source licenses? by bentlegen on Thursday March 18, 2021 @08:37PM (#26509114)

Disclosure: I work at Sentry.

> My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition"

Large companies are free to use Sentry. There are Fortune 50 companies running Sentry at scale internally without paying us a cent. That's totally cool.

You're also free to compete with Sentry. You're not free to repackage Sentry for the purposes of competing with us. There are lots of competing error and performance monitoring products out there that do perfectly fine without it.

I should also note that many components of Sentry are distributed with OSI-approved licenses that you are free to use to compete with us. For example, our Symbolication service (https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator) ships with an MIT license, and it's an important part of our business.

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Re:What’s up with these new not-open source licenses? by 8note on Thursday March 18, 2021 @09:19PM (#26509334)

What's sentry's incentive to not relicense in the future so those fortune 50 companies have to pay you instead?

That seems like an obvious growth opportunity when investors need to see numbers go up

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Re:What’s up with these new not-open source licenses? by bentlegen on Friday March 19, 2021 @08:12AM (#26512355)

The incentive is that running the infrastructure required to host Sentry is challenging and requires engineering resources. You can choose to use our hosted services for a fraction of the cost (engineers are expensive).

Aside, there seems to be confusion about what “relicensing” means. Even in this hypothetical scenario you’ve outlined, we can’t “relicense” already released software. Many users hosting Sentry internally are using years-old versions happily; they would continue to be able to do so. They could also choose to fork the last permissible version and maintain it themselves.

Personally, I think this scenario (relicensing such that self-hosted users could no longer do so) is incredibly unlikely. I don’t believe it would really do anything to grow the company.

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