Thanks for the links. I read those and some more from your blog. I've also been to a Chad Whitacre talk about Sentry's OSS approach at a conference this year.
I don't think we're disagreeing at all. I quoted Adam to drive the point that tech shops that value collaboration will tend to prefer OSI-approved licenses. That doesn't seem to be the case for Sentry:
[Sentry is] single-source. That is, [the Company behind it] are the authors and maintainers of the software, and [does] not expect the community to provide us with contributions. We still allow it, and are thankful, but we consider it our duty to develop our software.
At the other end of the "single-source" spectrum is SQLite which is closed to collaboration but is dedicated to public domain and requests a fee for "Warranty": https://sqlite.org/copyright.html
It does seem like Sentry wants control over distribution, but by the way of license? Adam proposes something similar (and I guess that's the reason he's okay with "Fair Source", like a few others too who want to unchain the idea and go beyond OSI / Open Source [0]):
[Sentry wants] to allow people to self-host our software.
> I also respect Adam, but last I understood it the model they were going after sounded pretty similar to trademark protection (which doesnt work).
A counter example: The Android Open Source Project is OSS, and is firmly gate-kept by Google via trademark and other collaborative arrangements like the Open Handset Alliance and Linaro. That said, this is the happy case. Sentry clearly had a different experience with bigger tech shops (GitLab?) trying to monetize its offering without contributing anything back, which (tbh) sounds super terrible.
To me, there seem to be pathways to both succeed & fail with OSI-approved licenses (probably you'd argue... one'd fail more than succeed), and these licenses on their own are neither the only condition nor a sufficient one for business build around them to stumble and falter. That said, I get your point that "Fair Source" gives "single-source" projects a fighting chance, like it did for Sentry. I'd also have thought that the OSI-approved AGPLv3 (your reservations about copyleft notwithstanding) is enough to keep big shops from leeching from other high-quality mostly single-source projects... but may be I was mistaken (given MongoDB / Elastic / Redis / CockroachDB didn't think so; even if, Elastic & Redis switched back to including OSI-approved license, specifically the AGPLv3).
I don't think we're disagreeing at all. I quoted Adam to drive the point that tech shops that value collaboration will tend to prefer OSI-approved licenses. That doesn't seem to be the case for Sentry:
At the other end of the "single-source" spectrum is SQLite which is closed to collaboration but is dedicated to public domain and requests a fee for "Warranty": https://sqlite.org/copyright.htmlIt does seem like Sentry wants control over distribution, but by the way of license? Adam proposes something similar (and I guess that's the reason he's okay with "Fair Source", like a few others too who want to unchain the idea and go beyond OSI / Open Source [0]):
> I also respect Adam, but last I understood it the model they were going after sounded pretty similar to trademark protection (which doesnt work).A counter example: The Android Open Source Project is OSS, and is firmly gate-kept by Google via trademark and other collaborative arrangements like the Open Handset Alliance and Linaro. That said, this is the happy case. Sentry clearly had a different experience with bigger tech shops (GitLab?) trying to monetize its offering without contributing anything back, which (tbh) sounds super terrible.
To me, there seem to be pathways to both succeed & fail with OSI-approved licenses (probably you'd argue... one'd fail more than succeed), and these licenses on their own are neither the only condition nor a sufficient one for business build around them to stumble and falter. That said, I get your point that "Fair Source" gives "single-source" projects a fighting chance, like it did for Sentry. I'd also have thought that the OSI-approved AGPLv3 (your reservations about copyleft notwithstanding) is enough to keep big shops from leeching from other high-quality mostly single-source projects... but may be I was mistaken (given MongoDB / Elastic / Redis / CockroachDB didn't think so; even if, Elastic & Redis switched back to including OSI-approved license, specifically the AGPLv3).
[0] as indicated here (linked to from one of your blog posts): https://medium.com/@nayafia/i-hate-the-term-open-source-a65f... / https://archive.vn/K7CHs