Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
O'saasy License Agreement
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? This strikes me as somewhat contrived. Like yeah, if you're gonna do some weird button-pushing thing, it's not worth it, steer clear, keep this product off your platform, easy. Is a piece of software really only of v…
> Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed? It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed , as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn…
I understand that it's not open source. I just see it as like, a spot where a company that would normally make a closed source product wanted to make it more open and hackable and did actually put the code up and take contributions, which should be a kind of good thing, but it's automatically assumed to be the worst, a rugpull, etc. What if I operated in an ethical gray area right around this pretty reasonably worded term?
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#23I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license? To get eyes on it before-hand?
Also how does this work with contributor contributions? Does the owning SaaS get the benefit of contributor work instantly while everyone else has to wait 2 years? What about the contributers themselves?
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people feel entitled to profitting off the work of others?
It's not entitlement, it's the entire purpose of OSS. You are free to modify, distribute, and profit from other people's code. If you can't do any of these things, then the project is NOT OSS. Simple as that. Entitlement is when you expect that OSS contributors must provide you with a warranty or a certain feature you need for your business activity. They are not.
Nowhere in the license does it claim that it’s an Open Source™ license.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#25I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
> you were still not fully in control and someone else exploits the economic value without investing
O'Sassy came up recently in one of the forums I lurk in [0], and as discussed there, I tend to agree with Adam Jacob (SystemInit) and others that FSL is definitely one way out but doesn't totally solve the commercialization aspect, because the code & all that IP is still readily available.
Adam, in this talk [1], argues that like RedHat (and unlike Canonical), Open Source businesses must learn to separate source license from distribution license and if they do so, the money is there to be made (in a b2b setting, at least).
> What I have found interesting in the years since is that many companies are wrestling with the same problem, but feel that the two year head start the FSL gives is too aggressive.
... if the companies conflate Open Source and business models, rather it being merely a Go-To-Market (like open core).
Especially true for dev/infra upstarts competing with incumbents (PostHog v Amplitude; GitLab v GitHub [2]), and lately for AI labs (DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama v GPT/Gemini/Claude). In a role reversal, BigTech also uses Open Source to commodotize its competition's advantages (Android v iOS; k8s v Swarm; Firefox/Chrome v IE) [3].
[0] https://forum.fossunited.org/t/6878
[1] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/watch?v=rmhYHzJpkuo / Summary: https://gemini.google.com/share/e21cd1bacff6 (mirror: https://archive.vn/Jzhk3)
[2] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... / https://archive.vn/jQh27
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#26I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
The end of life problem can be solved by source code escrow, with a clause putting the code under an open source license and published in case of the demise of the owning cpmpany.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#27I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license? To get eyes on it before-hand? Also how does this work with contributor contributions? Does the owning SaaS get the benefit of contributor work instantly while everyone else has to wait 2 years? What about the contributers themselves?
> Why not just release the software
You may want to allow certain uses (self-hosting, etc) even before it transitions to a fully open-source license. Having access to the source code can also help SaaS users debug certain situations.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#28I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc.
But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#29I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license? To get eyes on it before-hand? Also how does this work with contributor contributions? Does the owning SaaS get the benefit of contributor work instantly while everyone else has to wait 2 years? What about the contributers themselves?
presumably because a) it still allows the source code to be available and used for the 'permitted purposes' (i.e. anything that's not directly competing), and b) it represents a concrete commitment to open up, not just a pinkie promise (even if they were to have a license or contract which promised it, it would not be as easy to rely on as actually having the source code published. Companies have reneged on such promises before).
And yeah, by my reading essentially people can contribute code or publish patches (with just a plain MIT license in principle), just the original and derivatives still can't be used for non-permitted purposes until the timer is up.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not entitlement, it's the entire purpose of OSS. You are free to modify, distribute, and profit from other people's code. If you can't do any of these things, then the project is NOT OSS. Simple as that. Entitlement is when you expect that OSS contributors must provide you with a warranty or a certain feature you need for your business activity. They are not.
Nowhere in the license does it claim that it’s an Open Source™ license.
People who use it claim it's Open Source