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FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#121

Post by growse »

zogrodea wrote: post #98
growse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. This is nit-picking pedantry. The term "free-riders" appears six times on this site https://fsl.software/ , but my bad for using a slightly different term that has the same meaning. From your very public announcement and linking to the text, it's pretty clear what you think of some of your users. > Our users are free to use the softwar…

Would you mind explaining why you have a problem with a clause stating "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us"? It sounds reasonable to me and the opposite which you are defending sounds unsustainable and harmful to the open source ecosystem. (There was a talk given at Strange Loop titled The Economic of Programming Languages by the creator of Elm about this and it sounds like he's…

In brief: "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us" doesn't define "us" (you now, or for all perpetuity? What if you get bought by a large litigious-happy database vendor?) or "compete" (same market segment? Geographical area? Product type? Specific use-case?).

The clause is not written in good faith. It's designed to essentially make it enormously risky to use in any serious environment, because the actual ambition by the clause author is that no-one else uses their software.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#122

Post by etothepii »

geerlingguy wrote: post #62
growse wrote: post #48

The definition of "harmful free-riding" is not good, and its use to justify the license is problematic. > Consequently, the common pool resource may be under-produced, overused, or degraded. Additionally, it has been shown that despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature (a prosocial behaviour), the presence of free-riders causes cooperation to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem.” Soft…

I don't understand the philosophy of wanting to use open source and gain the community / benefits of it... but using a proprietary sales model. It just doesn't work, and once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" (whether or not you use that word), you've lost the whole concept of why most of us care about true open source. We can use it, we can learn fr…

There's an issue about size here too. When you are a small tech company there is a very real risk you will not exist in one-year.

Open source code is a much better protection for your customers than an escrow because all kinds of events can occur that don't quite trigger this escrow but which the customer could never have allowed to be risks if they'd been itemised.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#123

Post by atq2119 »

jorams wrote: post #35

I might be missing something here, but this doesn't seem compatible with the bazaar model at all. You say > It also enables contributions by the community for the latest version and not old source code. But you will not be able to accept such contributions without an additional license, because you yourself would be unable to use them for a Competing Use (running your service). This makes it much closer to a cathedra…

There could be a contributor licensing agreement in place that effectively transfers copyright. But yeah, this is a potentially sticky point. It's inherent to the license that one party is special

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#124

Post by zogrodea »

growse wrote: post #121
zogrodea wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind explaining why you have a problem with a clause stating "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us"? It sounds reasonable to me and the opposite which you are defending sounds unsustainable and harmful to the open source ecosystem. (There was a talk given at Strange Loop titled The Economic of Programming Languages by the creator of Elm about this and it sounds like he's…

In brief: "use our product however you wish, as long as it is not to compete with us" doesn't define "us" (you now, or for all perpetuity? What if you get bought by a large litigious-happy database vendor?) or "compete" (same market segment? Geographical area? Product type? Specific use-case?). The clause is not written in good faith. It's designed to essentially make it enormously risky to use in any serious environ…

I don't think you're right to assert bad faith. Look at Sentry's track record allowing users to self-host, and this as a step that makes their work more permissive than what they previously had (for example, the shorter duration).

I don't challenge that the license may have shortcomings, but I think better evidence is needed before bad faith can be asserted.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#125

Post by arp242 »

sgift wrote: post #92
tedivm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you believe pursuing additional licensing mechanisms means we're destroying OSS, there is probably little I can do to disavow you of that notion. Speaking of disingenuous, every time the sentry people come in here to talk it's always strawmen. My issue is with sentry trying to redefine open source, not your creation of new licenses. If you want to put out proprietary or shared source licenses I'm cool with t…

> Speaking of disingenuous, every time the sentry people come in here to talk it's always strawmen. Good that I'm not the only one who feels that way. Every comment by Sentry people I've read here so far was basically a mix of straw man, word lawyering ("We didn't say this. We said something that means the same to anyone who doesn't actively try to think of some fringe interpretation, but OBVIOUSLY that means you mis…

Most comments I've seen are just clarifications, and they're usually pointing towards a good-faith reading of what was said, rather than a "what evil plot for world domination does this hide?"-reading.

Let's not pretend the "feedback" on these types of things is generally less than stellar, and often quite toxic. Some people are convinced this is part of some dark and sinister plot and will use even the slightest hint to "prove" this. The dynamic here is not the easiest to navigate.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#126

Post by arp242 »

cxr wrote: post #114
arp242 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Sentry objects to is people setting up "super-error-reporting.com" with an unmodified copy of the Sentry software without contributing anything back, which undercuts their SaaS business model. This is not a "user" in any common-sense definition of the term. And yes, these people are "getting a free ride" (i.e. "free riding") because they get software with zero cost to them. That's on its own is not really a bad…

> Simple saying "your business model sucks then", as the previous poster did Their comment doesn't say that. Did they edit their post, or are you just shamelessly throwing around made up quotes?

Eh?

> the "harmful freeloading" problem is not the license, it's a badly-thought-through business model.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#127

Post by etothepii »

James_K wrote: post #95
bentlegen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentry was already using BUSL (Business Source License) for 4+ years with a non-competitive Additional Use Grant. So we had already been doing this for a long time. The new license actually allows for more competition, because it has a shorter change date to permissive OSS than the aforementioned prior license (2 years vs 3 years). So another read of this is: the business model is going great, so much so that we're c…

So why don't you switch to a fully progressive license? What you're saying here is "we're putting our competitors at slightly less of a disadvantage, and that's good", so why not release under a free license and not put your competitors at any disadvantage? Either you want competition or you don't. What's offensive about this to some people is that you're trying to have the best of both worlds. Pretend that you welco…

> Why don't you switch to a fully progressive license?

Because the users who pay / use the software as the developer intended are to be rewarded with new features sooner.

> Either you want competition or you don't

Customers want competition. To a first order approximation businesses don't. No one want competition for SEO which is essentially what is being suggested here. If the product can be taken and spun up instantly on any new release all the "competition" is on who can make page 1 of Google. As we have all seen with stack overflow content this is not ideal.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#128

Post by James_K »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #79
James_K wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because freeloading competitors are stuck with two year old code, putting them at a disadvantage, or compelling then to invest in that old code (some of which might find its way into the original branch). This makes no sense though. If you don't want competition, why give your source away? If you do want competition, why put it at a disadvantage? That's why I am so negative about this license. It's just someone try…

> If you don't want competition, why give your source away? Why not? I mean you're literally arguing against the business decision we are making. We believe in Open Source, we believe in funding Open Source, we are trying to find a balance that is possible to walk for a SaaS business. I'm surprised people generally take the binary view that "either Open Source with no protection or go proprietary completely". > Also,…

> We believe in Open Source

But you don't believe in it enough to do it.

> I'm surprised people generally take the binary view that either Open Source with no protection or go proprietary completely

Because FOSS is about community contributions. People contribute to something owned by the community for the good of the community. Yet here you have claimed the near-exclusive right to profit from the code. FOSS is saying that you expect some of your users to contribute to your code, so you are effectively saying: "contribute to my code for my benefit, and I might let you use it in some circumstances" which is antithetical to the FOSS saying "contribute to public code for public benefit".

> Nothing, you can do that!

Then why not let people free-load of the current version? The answer is because you want to be the only ones who profit from this software. This license exists to keep you as the soul or primary beneficiary of the code for the duration of time you are developing it, unless you make a decision so fundamentally bad that people are willing to wait two years to fix it. I'd wager you don't think you'll make such a decision.

FOSS is explicitly about letting anyone do anything they want with your code, even if you don't like it[1].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary

> More generally, a license that limits who can use a program, or for what, is not a free software license.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#129

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

frognumber wrote: post #89
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's concerning, though, is that it's completely unclear that the author understands why this license makes sense, so it's liable to be misused. It feels more accidentally-stumbled-upon. The author of the post (me) was part of the group at Sentry that created that license. I can’t dispel your interpretation that my writing is “confused” but I can assure you that a lot of thought went into the license. That blog p…

> I can’t dispel your interpretation that my writing is “confused” but I can assure you that a lot of thought went into the license. That doesn't contradict what I wrote. The thought shows. What it doesn't show is understanding or (and I don't mean this aggressively, but I'm worried it will read as such) competence. To give an analogy, if a lawyer came learned programming and wrote a very clever piece of code, but wi…

It's very hard to read your comment and take anything away but a "holier-than-thou" attitude. If you take issue with Open Source developers having opinions about Open Source licenses and similar ones, then I'm afraid you will run into many more folks like me.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#130

Post by bentlegen »

James_K wrote: post #120
bentlegen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is covered in the article.

I don't think it is.

I don’t feel “given you already have a proprietary license, why wouldn’t you just make it freely permissive” needs much explaining. We develop the software; the exclusivity period helps us monetize the work (vs giving it away to someone else who would).

I think it’s worth reading the announcement from 2019 when Sentry first switched to BUSL. The original article links to many such pieces.

https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/

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