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Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

src.sourcegraph.com

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Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#21

Post by vitno »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #16
vitno wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fair.io/ It's made by them as well. It most certainly is not libre/free software. I'm guessing it has minimal legal ability to stand up in court. It is a bastardization of what open source is about... really it's more of a disclosed source setup.

Open source is about the source being open plus certain benefits. Free and open source software, a la Richard Stallman, is a totally different thing with a philosophy akin to how a virus operates. A glance at fair.io shows an interesting attempt to provide OSS under a proprietary model. Many businesses are fine with whatever gets the job done with main benefits of OSS being reviewing, extending, or just fixing things…

> Curious, do you write comments like this whenever...

Uh.. I actually often do. I would more, but it generally isn't appreciated and is off topic of the main thread. Here, the software license is a key component of the release seeing as it is a unique component of it.

>Open source is about the source being open plus certain benefits.

It's more than that. The key intent of OSS is the right to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. The source code is just a prereq for that ability.

I did initially use stallman-esque language, since it's terminology most people are familiar with in this field, but I'll approach it from a different point since I personally have problems with strong copy-left licenses.

The primary thing this license doesn't do is allow distribution in the OSS spirit. This is really just a pervasive license, actually in some ways similar to the Stallman-esque virality except with a corporate intent. It simply masquerades as OSS.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#23

Post by sulam »

I've been talking to these guys and using their stuff in various forms for over a year now. I worked on developer tooling for years at Twitter, and had been feeling like this space (code discovery / review / nav ) was ripe for an evolutionary leap for a long, long time. I was really excited to meet the team at Sourcegraph and learn they not only had the same vision, they were executing on it at a very high level. I'm really curious to see how the world uses their stuff, and I hope it lights a fire under the asses of all the other people working in this area. :)

The fact that the source is publicly available (with a license that, I think, is just as evolutionary in that space as their product is in its space) is the cherry on top of a really tasty sundae.

(Full disclosure: I invested in their team as soon as I was able to. So I have a financial interest in the company doing well, although my primary interest is in seeing products of this sort continue to evolve and develop in a direction that will give greater leverage to developers everywhere. I am also a total fanboy, but that follows from the above. ;-0)

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#24

Post by sulam »

Somasis wrote: post #7
sqs wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sourcegraph CEO here. :) We released Sourcegraph under the Fair Source License ( https://fair.io/ ), which we worked with a well-known open-source lawyer to draft. TLDR is that it lets us create the best product for developers by having a sustainable business. Full info at https://fair.io : > Fair Source allows companies to both share a product’s source code and charge for that product. Releasing a product’s source c…

You would be better off selling services akin to what GitLab does for sustenance.

Completely disagree. Services models seem to very much limit what companies like this can achieve. It also creates a perverse incentive for the company to make a product that needs service contracts to manage. They tend to produce more closed-source "addons" as well.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#25

Post by digikata »

sqs wrote: post #5
Somasis wrote: post #4

What on earth is that license?

Sourcegraph CEO here. :) We released Sourcegraph under the Fair Source License ( https://fair.io/ ), which we worked with a well-known open-source lawyer to draft. TLDR is that it lets us create the best product for developers by having a sustainable business. Full info at https://fair.io : > Fair Source allows companies to both share a product’s source code and charge for that product. Releasing a product’s source c…

When you go to the source link at https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph and look at the LICENSE file, it says: "Use Limitation: 15 users" That implies that the project there is the full Enterprise version?

Is there a separate link or some dividing line to the Core source? Or how does one build or access just the core features to abide by the licensing terms if you're a team larger than 15 and want to evaluate Core Sourcegraph?

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#27

Post by sulam »

vitno wrote: post #6
Somasis wrote: post #4

What on earth is that license?

https://fair.io/ It's made by them as well. It most certainly is not libre/free software. I'm guessing it has minimal legal ability to stand up in court. It is a bastardization of what open source is about... really it's more of a disclosed source setup.

It's definitely not GNU OSS. If that's your ideology, this is not going to appeal to you. IANAL, but my understanding of the license is that it's trying to build a new economic model for OSS contributors. I'm pretty excited to see if it takes off, since I think OSS could use some new thinking in this area.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#28

Post by sulam »

TACIXAT wrote: post #22

Regarding the semantic search, does this / could this have the capability to do multi instruction queries? Example, show me variables that are incremented, not validated (ie. don't appear in an if statement), and used in an allocation?

I think you could do that with srclib, the underlying library that powers the product.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#29

Post by CCoffie »

sulam wrote: post #27
vitno wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fair.io/ It's made by them as well. It most certainly is not libre/free software. I'm guessing it has minimal legal ability to stand up in court. It is a bastardization of what open source is about... really it's more of a disclosed source setup.

It's definitely not GNU OSS. If that's your ideology, this is not going to appeal to you. IANAL, but my understanding of the license is that it's trying to build a new economic model for OSS contributors. I'm pretty excited to see if it takes off, since I think OSS could use some new thinking in this area.

Okay explain to how forking would work with this license. Forking a project is a huge part of creating a OSS community. Would licensing have to go to both parties? I don't see any explanation of how it would work for this license.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#30

Post by trashcan »

sqs wrote: post #18
jayeshsalvi wrote: post #12

Great stuff. I was hoping somebody would integrate source code cross referencing with Git. Hopefully Github will integrate your tool with all their repos and it will be seamless for end users.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Unfortunately, GitHub makes this impossible. It's closed source and offers limited ways to integrate—primarily via external, rate-limited external API clients on their proprietary platform. It's too bad the most popular code platform is closed. We believe developers deserve to have a hackable, extensible platform for their code, so it can be more deeply integrated with the best other dev tools.…

Have you considered integrating with Gitlab?
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