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O'saasy License Agreement

osaasy.dev

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Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#31

Post by mechsy »

bberenberg wrote: post #18
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #3

I 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?

If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust. With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering. If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#32

Post by orra »

xigoi wrote: post #24
mirzap wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

The page summarises the license as “Basically… the MIT do-whatever-you-want license”. The MIT license is of course one of the most popular permissive open source licenses.

This is an incredibly misleading comparison. The subsequent clause is a complete contradiction, not a subtle clarification.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#33

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mythz wrote: post #21

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.

> ARR

This is not a "real" (i.e. GAAP or accounting standards) metric, so that would seem like a bad idea.

The trouble is that lots of even the accounting metrics are gameable, but a comptent auditor(s) probably won't let the metric divulge too much from "reality" (i.e. conformance with accounting standards).

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#34

Post by homebrewer »

mechsy wrote: post #31
bberenberg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this…

This may very well be caused by my incompetence, but Sentry's docker-compose setup has never survived for more than a few months under my control. Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work. I tried updating it regularly, tried never updating it, getting the same treatment either way.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#35

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #12
tzahifadida wrote: post #4

I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose: A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it. I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like sh…

Yes obviously big tech knows how to profit from open source they (AWS) profitted so hard from redis and elasticsearch that they had to literally change their licenses similar to O'sassy's and even then people forked redis to create valkey and AWS engineers started working on it Both redis and elasticsearch got so much backlash because "not open source" when in reality, they were trying to make ends meet but also sinc…

> In the end, both of these had to revert switching to AGPL licenses.

AGPL seems like the most battle tested solution here, though.

You'd need a CLA from day 1, but if you have that then you can sell commercial licenses to people who won't meet the criteria for the real license.

So I think it's important to differentiate between open source and free software, here.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#36

Post by unsungNovelty »

mythz wrote: post #21

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.

> Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS

Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters.

All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#37

Post by bberenberg »

mechsy wrote: post #31
bberenberg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this…

I did not intend to be critical of their work. They're doing OSS as best as they can and good for them. I am just saying that it's a different beast if Sentry is OSS vs a much simpler to operate OSS product. Licensing matters less when the operational cost acts as an inhibitor to adoption of your OSS offering.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#38

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

bberenberg wrote: post #18
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #3

I 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?

> Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this?

That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#39

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

cobertos wrote: post #23
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #3

I 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 after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license?

That requires trust that the company will do this. The FSL is irrevocable and comes with a future promise.

> Also how does this work with contributor contributions?

The same way as any other thing with a CLA works. If you don't have a CLA, then you have a bit of a mess.

Re: O'saasy License Agreement

#40

Post by imtringued »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #12
tzahifadida wrote: post #4

I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose: A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it. I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like sh…

Yes obviously big tech knows how to profit from open source they (AWS) profitted so hard from redis and elasticsearch that they had to literally change their licenses similar to O'sassy's and even then people forked redis to create valkey and AWS engineers started working on it Both redis and elasticsearch got so much backlash because "not open source" when in reality, they were trying to make ends meet but also sinc…

I personally find it questionable when people argue that the GPL/AGPL is less free because of the code sharing requirement.

On the Rust subreddit you can see people make arguments that can essentially be paraphrased as "Get a real job".

Somehow the people selling primary energy, food and raw materials are allowed to make money, the hardware manufacturers to run the code on are allowed to make money, cloud providers to run code on are allowed to make money, people using your software in their business are allowed to make money and even people who have been hired at a company to submit patches and pull requests to contribute to your project are allowed to make money but you, the original maintainer/developer who kick-started the project and paid the initial investment? Suddenly you're no longer allowed to make money. You're expected to work a "real job" (see list above). You're supposed to spend time not working on the project to earn enough money so you can donate your time and money to work on the project to people who most likely couldn't care less about you and your sacrifice and since it is just plain business sense to minimize costs, you should do the same and stop working on the project.

The strangest part by far is that if you'd you made your code proprietary from the get go, there wouldn't be any complaints about your GPL code not being free enough. It's a surprisingly pro proprietary code stance.

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