License to thrill BSL refuseniks? Sentry introduces Functional Source License

Sentry has brought yet another software license into the world – the Functional Source License – in an effort to balance user freedom and developer sustainability. Sentry, a platform for error monitoring, adopted the Business Source License in 2019. While the company insisted at the time that the move was primarily to …

[b0llchit]

Sighs are too silent for this

...except economically undermine its producer through harmful free-riding.

Translation (yelled out loud): Your are minions. We are Boss. You pay. We profit. Now, give us your money!

Time to keep them at an extremely extended pole's length and adjust movements to manoeuvre them into the bottomless pit of oblivion.

[JessicaRabbit]

Re: Sighs are too silent for this

Not really, they're paying for the development costs and providing the product for free to end users. They just don't want Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al to take their work, package it up and re-sell it.

[klh]

Re: Sighs are too silent for this

Now look at the amount of (F)OSS these products are built on. What they are doing is spitting on the community to let their marketing people use the term "open source".

[JessicaRabbit]

Re: Sighs are too silent for this

Well maybe you're right but I'm struggling to see the issue. If they are using (F)OSS it's not GPL or the like because those licences would be incompatible with BSL. That only leaves licences like MIT where the author has explicitly decided to make their work available for commercial use. Besides the code does become genuinely (F)OSS after two years, I'm not sure you can really call that spitting on the community.

At the end of the day, developers are not free. If a FOSS alternative exists, by all means use that. If it doesn't then either there's no demand for it (unlikely given Sentry have built it) or nobody is willing to build it for free. Sentry has to at least pay for the developer's time, admin costs etc etc. It's not rational to expect them to just give it away, surely you don't truly believe they should? Except of course they are doing, more or less. You or I are free to build it, host it ourselves, make changes whatever. The only people really getting screwed by this licence are the cloud providers and I'm not exactly shedding tears over that.

Without hyperbole or the sort of emotive language you've used above, please explain what parts of of what I've written above you disagree with?

[Lost Neutrino]

Re: Sighs are too silent for this

That's the problem with yelling out loudly - one doesn't hear anything.

But why stop there? Why limit the "bottomless pit of oblivion" to Sentry, the company named in the article? Let's throw everybody who applies a source-available license with non-compete/non-monetisation clause into the pit, too. The more, the merrier!

... until only the closed source dinosaurs like Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Workday, OpenAI, etc. were left to roam the landscape.

Ooops, perhaps not OpenAI - they just misstepped and accidentally fell into the pit by all by themselves...