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Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by helloguillecl on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @05:25AM (#29238933)
Outline looks fantastic. I prefer open source to build a Knowledge Base for my business. I would def not use a proprietary system.

IN my understanding the licence allows me to use it and do what I could do with a normal open source licence except that I cannot build another SaaS using the code?

https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE

Am I correct to understand that this licence says that the license changes to a fully open one after 2025? What's the catch?

Edit: A quick search took me here: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/. I imagine this license was created by MariaDB to stay "open" while at the same time prevent another corps to offer their software as a SaaS.

Could anyone confirm this?

Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by alibert on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @07:01AM (#29239573)
Yes. No catch. You can host it for you (personal) or your company but you can't host and sell it as SaaS.

Several others projects such as Sentry.io or Zerotier are using this license. Be aware that this license is not considered open source but is more like "source available".

Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by ensignavenger on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @11:43AM (#29242705)
You also can't pay some one else to host it for you. If you have to fork it for any reason, you will be stuck hosting it yourself, even if there is a large group of folks working together on the fork, everyone will have to host it themselves to use the fork, at least for several years until the code becomes open source. Beware vendor-lock-in.
Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by beagle3 on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @04:40AM (#29250816)
I don’t consider this vendor lock in; more other-vendor lock out. Which is not to say it is necessarily better or worse - it’s just different.

For a company with internal IT or IT capable people, that’s a small hurdle if running the software is not too hard.

For a company with all IT outsourced, this is a deal breaker.

It will likely stop the behemoths (AWS, GC, Azure) from capitalizing on that product though.

Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by helloguillecl on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @05:20AM (#29251107)
Thanks!

But does this prevent me from hosting it on say, an instance on Google Cloud?

What's the wording that would prevent that?

Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by SSLy on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @06:43AM (#29239443)
>What's the catch?

Only the code reachable from given git hash changes, not anything later.

Re:Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative by helloguillecl on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @05:20AM (#29251109)
Thanks!