Introducing the Functional Source License: Freedom without Free-riding
Introducing the Functional Source License: Freedom without Free-riding
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later…
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.
I think this is a pretty reasonable compromise to stop big cloud companies from offering their service using their code. Putting the code under either Apache or MIT after 2 years seems like a good approach to me, I like it a lot more than the ‘open core’ scheme a lot of SaaS companies use.
I wonder if this kind of license would be accepted by the rest of open-source communities. So far, SSPL is treated like a villain.
One difference (so far as I know, I’m not an expert on either situation) is that MongoDB requires copyright assignment for contributions seemingly because the license is so restrictive they can’t offer their own service under its terms (without open-sourcing all the software they use to host it). So far as I know Sentry does not require this (although the restriction against running a competing service does not affect them since they are the service, so I’m not sure this argument really holds up that well). Also the fact that that one encumbrance is released after two years helps their case a lot in my eyes.
FSL is better than strait proprietary and if a company had to choose between the two I hope they choose FSL. All that said it just doesn't feel like there is a real hope here for the eventual Open source fork here. It's just a fail safe for people still on legacy systems and even then 2 years of potentially no new updates ... Could be killer for security flaws. With tons of paradigm shifts between then too.
It almost needs a SLA that says if it isn't maintained to a certain level then it is also opensourced.