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FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

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

#171

Post by bentlegen »

James_K wrote: post #167
arp242 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open source" is not a charity and you don't donate to Sentry. People have come out of Guantanamo Bay less tortured than that analogy. > Asking people to be clear about what is and isn't FOSS is a basic consequence of that. You are throwing around wild accusations bordering on the conspiratorial and making demands that are just beyond reason. The simple good-faith reading is that the Sentry people want to be as "open…

Go to this link https://open.sentry.io/ and explain how it is made clear that Sentry isn't actually open source. You can't. No amount of good faith turns "We're Open Source and we don't feel the need to qualify that statement" into "we aren't open source but we'd like to be close to". They are even directly asking in that page for help (for people to volunteer their time). The title of that page is a lie and they mak…

Re: open.sentry.io, some of the language should probably be more clear. We’ll take a look at it.

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

#172

Post by growse »

arp242 wrote: post #169
growse wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everyone I know in the industry uses the definition of "open" defined by the OSI, in relation to "open source": https://opensource.org/ It's not a new term. > They're not dishonest. That you're unwilling or unable to accept anything other than a black/white worldview is not their problem. You can't be "a little bit open source". You are or you aren't. Some people might not accept that the definition is cl…

> You can't be "a little bit open source". You are or you aren't. Of course you can. There are 10 bullet points on the OSD. If you meet 9 then it's 90% there. This is obvious better than 80%, which is better than 50%, which is better than 0%. > Pretty much everyone I know in the industry uses the definition of "open" defined by the OSI, in relation to "open source" OpenLinux, OpenDOS, OpenGL, OpenBSD, OpenStep, X/Ope…

> Of course you can. There are 10 bullet points on the OSD. If you meet 9 then it's 90% there. This is obvious better than 80%, which is better than 50%, which is better than 0%.

Way may just have to agree to disagree then. I find it interesting that the only time anyone talks about "mostly" or "nearly" open source is in the context of a company looking to get the marketing benefit of association, and maybe some people to do some free contributions for them, without being bound by the social contract at the heart of the FOSS values. But maybe that's just me.

> To lay claim on not just the phrase "Open Source" but the very adverb "Open" is not just historically incorrect but also hugely unreasonable.

So this is my bad, I should have been clearer. When I said "'but-for-one' is not open by definition,", I meant in the context of FOSS, and specifically the definitions the OSI maintains. "But-for-one" violates criteria #5 & #6.

And yes, the word "open" has existed for a long time, but that's sort of why the OSI standardized the term. This has been a solved problem for decades, and efforts to dilute what it means are only ever looked upon with extreme skepticism.

If people think the OSI definition is bad or incomplete, then that's an argument worth having out in the open. But that's not what I see.

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

#173

Post by arp242 »

k__ wrote: post #81
bentlegen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people we're concerned about are not the hundreds of thousands of Sentry users, including those that self-host. We're concerned about people who have taken the software for the purposes of competing directly against us, that hinders our ability to monetize the work. Monetizing the work helps us continue improving the software and distribute it for free use, benefitting those aforementioned real users (e.g. https:…

There seems some kind of dissonance for me. You create a new license to keep competitors artificially in check. Doesn't this hint to a flawed business model?

A few days ago there was a story about some lady creating a new kind of coat-hanger that you can fold so it takes up less space.[1] Pretty simple idea once you see the finished product, but getting all the details right so it actually works well isn't always easy, and it took her about three years(!) Presumably she wasn't working on it full-time for 3 years, but clearly a lot of effort went in to this "simple" idea.

But now that the idea is "out there" everyone can produce it, perhaps even cheaper. Actually, all other things being equal they will always be cheaper because they don't have three years of development costs.

Does this mean that selling these coat hangers is a "flawed business model" because cheap Chinese knock-offs can undercut her (small) business?

I know lots of people here don't have a lot of love for patents, and neither do I, but these kind of protections do exist for a reason. That doesn't mean I think that our current systems of patents is the best solution, but it also doesn't mean we shouldn't have any protections. And "be better at marketing" strikes me as a very poor answer.

My point here is that "produce something, but take a bit of protection against being exploited" is fairly reasonable in many cases. I also don't think it's "artificially" because under more traditional EULA-type software you're not allowed to do anything except "run it, but only in the way we want".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38292915

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

#174

Post by James_K »

bentlegen wrote: post #171
James_K wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to this link https://open.sentry.io/ and explain how it is made clear that Sentry isn't actually open source. You can't. No amount of good faith turns "We're Open Source and we don't feel the need to qualify that statement" into "we aren't open source but we'd like to be close to". They are even directly asking in that page for help (for people to volunteer their time). The title of that page is a lie and they mak…

Re: open.sentry.io, some of the language should probably be more clear. We’ll take a look at it.

Thank you. I hope to see this quickly amended to reflect that your software is source-available. I would also advise that you are very careful around this in the future. As you can see, I and many other developers are very passionate about this topic and any perceived miscommunication could be disastrous for Sentry's reputation.

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

#175

Post by MaxBarraclough »

antipurist wrote: post #77
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is contradictory. > less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts This gives the impression you support sticking to truly Free and Open Source software licences. > the code is free for non-commercial use A licence that explicitly forbids commercial use in this way is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence, by definition. > I wonder if anyone has already implem…

You and Symbiote are technically correct, what I'm suggesting wouldn't match The Open Source Definition [1]. But being "correct" matters little to me, what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software. > Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. [2] I believe you'd agree that everything-as-a-service an…

> what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software

It's not a mere technicality, it's an important point of principle.

The FSF used to use the term semifree for such licences, but now just call them proprietary or nonfree. [0]

Similarly the OSI page you linked shows that the OSI considers non-commercial restrictions to breach criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.

> you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code

Tivoization was addressed in GPLv3. The SASS point is less clear-cut as it's not obvious how to define the relevant boundaries, but roughly speaking the AGPL addresses this.

Not all problems can be addressed by software licences though.

> a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it

The point remains that if they adopt a licence that prohibits commercial use, the project is no longer Free and Open Source software. There's certainly a place for formal organisations though, and there are many of them in the FOSS world: FSF and GNU, OSI, SFLC, Linux Foundation, Apache, Mozilla, Eclipse Foundation.

There's also TideLift which seems to be doing well raising funds for FOSS contributors while also improving software quality. [1]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

[1] https://medium.com/general-catalyst-amplified/introducing-ti... (I would link to their official About page but it's pretty uninformative)

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

#176

Post by ic_fly2 »

WJW wrote: post #113
jen20 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of the source being available but software not being “free” is fine by me. I want the source so I can fix bugs instantly instead of trying to convince some mid-tier product manager having gone through 5 tiers of support. That is a huge benefit over source-unavailable proprietary software, or (heaven help us) SAAS.

"I could fix it myself if needed" quite often comes up on HN and other programmer forums but I honestly have to wonder how many people could actually fix deep issues in production grade software. For example, there are plenty of bugs open on the issue trackers of (say) postgres or kubernetes yet despite the source of those being available I'm willing to bet a vanishingly small amount of users would be willing or capa…

Yeah, happens quite a bit. Also just being able to dig and figure out why something is doing a weird thing happens all the time. I’d say about once a month in my team of three people, and we’re not even doing fancy stuff.

Most recent examples I can remember: polars data conversion errors, batch sizing in azure service bus sdk, some weird validation thing in pydantic and the performance monitoring in sentry not working as expected. The pydantic bug got a patch / note in the docs that was actually already merged.

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

#177

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

James_K wrote: post #168
bentlegen wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then release your software under a source available non-compete license with the caveat that it will become open source when you stop working on it. (Basically what you have already done.) Done. Note that the license website is pretty clear that it is not Open Source. If you find a place where that is not true, you can open an issue on the website’s repo and we’ll address. https://fsl.software/

> Note that the license website is pretty clear that it is not Open Source Then fix this one: https://open.sentry.io/ You have admitted that you aren't open source and that this is a blatant lie so remove it.

That page links to fully open source projects.

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

#178

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

benj111 wrote: post #153
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At FSL-GPL artifact would raise very interesting legal questions I don’t want to explore :)

I don't think it's that complicated. If I release software under the gpl and to someone to integrate in a closed source application. You don't have gpl code in a closed source application. You have code with 2 licenses. This is perfectly ok, the two pieces of software can coexist. This would be the same, if correctly structured. The only nit would be that code would be forever dual licenced. Some evil company could b…

A today FSL artifact is an amalgamation of Apache/MIT licensed stuff and FSL licensed stuff. This amalgamation would not be possible with GPL per the GPLs license terms.

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

#179

Post by zeeg »

James_K wrote: post #170
zeeg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/getsentry You suggesting we are anything but what we are just makes you look like you have an agenda at best, or foolish at worst. All you're doing is harming the broader community by arguing about nonsense which is factually proven to be untrue. You came in here trolling as best you could, making false statements without reading or educating yourself on any components. Making statements as if you'…

1. Then call yourself "mostly open source" instead of "open source" 2. I know. I type one because it is shorter. As cool of a pedantic ad-hominem as this is, my arguments all hold up when you replace FOSS with open source. So imagine I have done this. 3. Irrelevant. 4. Irrelevant. 5. Irrelevant. Stop calling everyone who disagrees with you toxic. Stop lying about being open source on your website https://open.sentry.…

Sentry releases a large variety of software. Some of it is licensed under OSS (which, yes, I will be pedantic about, because OSS is one less character than FOSS, and I do not believe in copyleft).

Several of our core services are licensed under the FSL (previously the BUSL). Some of that code was open source a _long_ time ago, some was never open source. Most of our projects are licensed under permissive licenses, including many projects which other companies rely on _to directly compete with us_. When I say "the majority of Sentry is open source" I mean that literally, both with many older versions of our software being more free than any copyleft license would make it, as well as many of our "hard" technologies being open by default.

None of my points are irrelevant beause you're all over this thread suggesting bad faith by Sentry, by our employees, by others in the community. You seem to have an awful lot to say about how harmful Sentry is, and how harmful some of our employees are who have been contributing in significant ways for their entire career. That is definitionally toxic, and exactly why HN has such a bad reputation.

Is the messaging on that URL you found misleading? Yes, and we will improve upon that, but that doesn't make you right. You just continue to look like someone with a grudge who is wildly misinformed, making demands as Anonymous Internet User #67.

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

#180

Post by James_K »

zeeg wrote: post #179
James_K wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Then call yourself "mostly open source" instead of "open source" 2. I know. I type one because it is shorter. As cool of a pedantic ad-hominem as this is, my arguments all hold up when you replace FOSS with open source. So imagine I have done this. 3. Irrelevant. 4. Irrelevant. 5. Irrelevant. Stop calling everyone who disagrees with you toxic. Stop lying about being open source on your website https://open.sentry.…

Sentry releases a large variety of software. Some of it is licensed under OSS (which, yes, I will be pedantic about, because OSS is one less character than FOSS, and I do not believe in copyleft). Several of our core services are licensed under the FSL (previously the BUSL). Some of that code was open source a _long_ time ago, some was never open source. Most of our projects are licensed under permissive licenses, in…

> Is the messaging on that URL you found misleading? Yes, and we will improve upon that

Will you improve on the rest of your messaging? For instance, the FSL is not "closer to open source than source available". It is just source available. You seem to view "that URL" as something external to your organisation – a little slip-up in an otherwise clean record – but I see it as a logical continuation of a long process of making yourselves seem as close to open source as possible. Every communication I've seen has been worded to downplay the ways FSL is not open source. You start by calling it a "not OSI approved" license instead of just source available, then you move on to an "eventually open" license then a "mostly open" license then a "more open than not" licence. Dropping the qualification is just the end point of all this. If you had started with the attitude "this isn't open source, we wish it could be but we can't manage that", you would not have eventually told a full blown lie. A lie is just what happens when you keep permitting half-truths. It's the exact reason I'm so pedantic about this and view even the small missteps as so important. You have seen here the direct consequence of them.

Real improvement on this matter will require you to change a lot more than the most obvious failure.

> you're all over this thread suggesting bad faith by Sentry, by our employees, by others in the community. You seem to have an awful lot to say about how harmful Sentry is

I believe that communicating you are open source when you aren't or attempting to create ambiguity in the definition of open source is harmful. It doesn't matter who's doing it. Doing unrelated good deeds isn't an excuse. You could be curing cancer or creating world peace for all I care, I would still insist that you do not associate this source available license with open source. I have accused you of doing this to improve sales, which is bad faith as it may be you had some other reason, but also an important point to make – these kinds of misrepresentation may influence people to pay you money and hence have real stakes. People in this very thread have said they bought your software under the impression it had some of the favourable aspects of open source which are impeded by the FSL.

> That is definitionally toxic, and exactly why HN has such a bad reputation.

Maybe people would reply to you in a less "toxic" manor if you didn't make every attempt possible to insult them and every community they are a part of. Just a passive-aggressive suggestion.

> You just continue to look like someone with a grudge who is wildly misinformed, making demands as Anonymous Internet User #67.

So you admit to being incorrect, and to having lied in a number of aspects, but you still want to keep insulting me? And you think I will come out of this looking bad? Maybe you should apologise for your mistakes instead of demeaning me and and the entirety of the open source community and HN. A simple "you are correct" would have sufficed even if you couldn't manage a "sorry".

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