Introducing the Functional Source License: Freedom without Free-riding
blog.sentry.io
Sentry has moved to a new license for its products called Functional Source License, and explains in this article the story of the licensing for these products and why they throw BSL for FSL.
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I agree that it's better than the "open core" model because it limits by time rather than space, as they say, but it kinda misses the point of open-source software. The conflict of interest is that they effectively want to be the only ones who can profit off the software, while still benefiting from the free work of others, but commercial-use is within the open-source definition.
My real issue is that it seems like they're trying to spin it as a kind of "open-source", but it's not. If they were more up-front about that, I probably wouldn't care as much.
Also saying that it's less restrictive than copyleft is just outright false.
They do allow you to profit off the software though, by using it to host the service for yourself (even as a company), you just can’t offer hosting as a service to compete with them. Obviously this doesn’t offer as much freedom as just a straight MIT or Apache license, but I feel like it still qualifies as open-source; they are only really adding one restriction, and it could even be considered less restrictive than something like GPL (no requirement to open source derived software). I think this license makes a good compromise of being as open as they possibly can without AWS/GCP/Azure eating all of their business without doing any real engineering work.