O'saasy License Agreement
osaasy.dev
O'saasy License Agreement
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Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#2It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license.
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?
Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the copyright discussions there.)
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#3I 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.
Our way of dealing with this was delayed open source publication. That led to the FSL [1], and later to bootstrapping the Fair Source initiative [2] to establish an umbrella term that does not conflict with Open Source. 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.
I actually still find that surprising. I would like to know whether this is a legitimate concern that two years is not enough, or mostly a perceived one. To me, moving to an Apache 2 or MIT license after a relatively short period is a much stronger statement than a license that risks the project effectively ending if the commercial entity is unwilling to relicense it more openly at the end of its life such as the O'saasy license.
[2]: https://fair.io/
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#4I 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 shared protocols, libraries, etc...)
Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it, essentially paying to keep it on your turf. Reasons for not stealing: 1) Security CVEs and patches. No serious company will use it without these. 2) Bugs, if I take it I will have to fix it. 3) Merging changes. If the source is branched, I will have to get people to move to my project. Otherwise, I will have to employ people just to merge the changes all day. 4) Authority. I would argue that if you do not control the narrative of the project it is essentially similar to abandonware of the project. What would a customer/client prefer more? to use the original product or some copy of it? If you are the Authority that inspire people, they will not go to the competition.
I remember in the past the open source were thought of as communists. I think that we are far from that, and big capitalist companies knows how to profit from open source (even Apache 2.0 and MIT).
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#5People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0.
If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#6It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license. 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? Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the…
> 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 value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?
There's a million ways to get value out of source code that don't involve pushing the envelope. I've accepted every EULA ever without reading and never once worried I would get in trouble with any of them, it's generally pretty easy if you're not trying to invent ways to do so.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#7People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0. If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
> If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part
No the problem is that it cant compete on the hardware part sometimes
Lets face it even if it something is open source, chances are that the most contributions/time are still spent by the person making it or the saas provider in this industry.
Imagine that someone goes ahead and launches a cheaper version of their saas and people go use that, since that person isnt having his time invested in the software as much as the original person and thus is willing to undercut him because his investment/returns expectations are very minimal whereas for the original saas it can be very high (writing good quality software which costs some developers real time and even real money)
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#8I 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…
> Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it
But that's evidently not true. Amazon has co-opted plenty of open source projects and put the squeeze on the original maintainer's SaaS offering.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#9Very cute but I am pessimistic about the battle tested nature of the second clause. Licenses are like mythical swords in fantasy stories: the famous ones are famous because they are not only objectively well made, but also because they survived in battle. Imagine some blacksmith presenting King X with GoblinsbaneY touting it as the greatest sword ever yet having only a blank face when asked what battles it has won. He’d be laughed out of court.
Or maybe an analogy closer to home (Anduril notwithstanding) would be cryptography code. New ideas are cheap compared to code that has been to hell and back in the wild and remained unbroken.
(I assume this license is novel and untested. I’ve not heard of it before. Happy to hear otherwise, of course.)
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#10I 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…
To be fair, when people worry about "stealing" their FOSS work, they don't mean someone forking their project, they mean someone outcompeting them on offering commercial infrastructure for their own project, typically launching a competing SaaS service.
Of course, this is explicitly permitted and even encouraged by FOSS licenses, so calling it "stealing" is quite absurd. But it is also a real problem for a company trying to make money by selling its FOSS software.
Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software. You either create a consulting company and push yourself as the expert on some free software that people want to use (what RedHat did, and to a much lesser degree of success, MySQL) or the free software has to be some enabler for your real business (like Linux is to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all of these other cloud companies and most of the internet, or like Java was to Sun).