Yet another software license is vying for the attention of SaaS companies seeking to align themselves with the open source realm without compromising their commercial efforts.
Guardan application performance monitoring (APM) company that helps companies like Disney, Microsoft, and Cisco track and resolve laggy or buggy apps carried its main product in a new license he designed called the Functional Source License (FSL). The company’s head of open source Chad Whitacre says the license is intended for any SaaS company that wishes to “provide freedom without harmful free-riding.”
“There is a long history of companies with deeper pockets and more resources taking advantage of traditional open source companies,” Whitacre told TechCrunch via email. “Open source companies, regardless of license or pedagogic definition, are increasingly dependent on being venture-backed, for-profit, or most importantly supported by the companies that build on their code.”
Switch
Recent history is full of examples of companies that grew out of open source projects, but later abandoned those roots to protect their commercial interests. In 2021 Rubber switch Elasticsearch from an Apache 2.0 license to a pair of licenses available in source, a move designed to prevent third parties like AWS from effectively selling their own version of Elasticsearch “as a service” without contributing much back to the original project . More recently, HashiCorp did something similar with Terraform, while Element (with Matrix) and Grafana transferred from permissive open source licenses to so-called “copyleft” licenses, effectively forcing users to maintain open source derivative works or pay to license the product.
As for Sentry, the San Francisco-based company started more than a decade ago under a permissive BSD 3-Clause License, one that comes with a few limitations. Similar to the other aforementioned companies, Sentry has re-licensed its core product back to 2019 to counter what co-founder and CTO David Cramer called “funded businesses that plagiarize or copy our work to directly compete with Sentry.
“This includes downloading marketing content from our website, plagiarizing our documentation and framing it as their own, or directly copying/pasting our product graphics,” Cramer wrote at the time. “Their defense? “Well, it’s free and open source, and we can do that.” These businesses are not using Sentry to improve the way they develop software. they’re lifting the code and its assets to build their closed-source products to compete directly with us.”
Thus, Sentry moved to the Business Source License (BSL), a freely available source that allows unrestricted use in most non-commercial scenarios. In particular, BSL-licensed products are time-limited and automatically revert to an open-source Apache license after four years — this is designed to discourage commercial competitors from taking advantage of a project in the short term. However, Whitacre argues that four years is too long and does not align with the spirit of open source.
“The default non-compete period is four years, which is a very long time in the software world,” Whitacre wrote in a blog post the manufacture. “This can make it feel like the eventual shift to Open Source is just a token effort. It could be almost 100 years.”
While Sentry had indeed shortened its BSL license to three years, Whitacre said it was still too long. In addition, the BSL license has other flaws, such as “additional use grant“, which allows project owners to define specific conditions under which their code can be used commercially
“The additional use subsidy is the biggest problem,” Whitacre writes. “It’s a huge supplement that essentially means each BSL is a different licence.”
This variability means that BSL-licensed products are often difficult for companies’ compliance departments to approve, as they must consider each license individually.
“It also makes it difficult for companies to adopt BSL for their own products because they have to make decisions and write custom language for it,” Whitacre continued. “We want to widely promote the values that brought us to BSL and to that end we want to fix the friction, with FSL.”
Sentry calls FSL “an evolution of BSL” that balances user freedom and developer viability. There is no additional usage grant, and the time limit has been reduced to two years, after which the relevant products will automatically switch to an Apache 2.0 or MIT license.
“For companies using FSLs, the two years provide protection against competition, but also act as an incentive to continue to innovate,” Whitacre wrote. “For the user community, two years provides substantial protection in case the driving company drops the ball.”
However, Thierry Carezgeneral manager at Open Infrastructure Foundation and vice president at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which manages the definition of open source software, said Sentry is just the latest in a line of companies building their reputations on the back of open source and then “abandoning the model that made them successful in the first place.”
“Releasing another license variant that takes away developers’ autonomy over their technical choices is nothing new – it’s still about removing basic freedoms from the entire software ecosystem in order to clearly claim ownership of their proprietary software and the use they’re allowed to make.” you do this,” Carrez said. “This isn’t open source: it’s a proprietary concierge wrapped in laundered clothes.”
