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.
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.
I think this is a pretty reasonable compromise to stop big cloud companies from offering their service using their code. Putting the code under either Apache or MIT after 2 years seems like a good approach to me, I like it a lot more than the ‘open core’ scheme a lot of SaaS companies use.
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I agree that that would be excellent, but I think there is still a difference, like Linux they do allow a company to use (but not for anything, only for some things) and enhance their open source software instead of paying for their service without contributing it back.
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I wonder if this kind of license would be accepted by the rest of open-source communities. So far, SSPL is treated like a villain.
One difference (so far as I know, I’m not an expert on either situation) is that MongoDB requires copyright assignment for contributions seemingly because the license is so restrictive they can’t offer their own service under its terms (without open-sourcing all the software they use to host it). So far as I know Sentry does not require this (although the restriction against running a competing service does not affect them since they are the service, so I’m not sure this argument really holds up that well). Also the fact that that one encumbrance is released after two years helps their case a lot in my eyes.