I 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.
Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky.
They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust.
With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering.
If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.
This may very well be caused by my incompetence, but Sentry's docker-compose setup has never survived for more than a few months under my control. Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work. I tried updating it regularly, tried never updating it, getting the same treatment either way.
I did not intend to be critical of their work. They're doing OSS as best as they can and good for them. I am just saying that it's a different beast if Sentry is OSS vs a much simpler to operate OSS product. Licensing matters less when the operational cost acts as an inhibitor to adoption of your OSS offering.
True, opportunity cost is a factor, sorry if my reply sounded a bit brash. IMHO they are one of the few orgs who got this model right compared to lots of others who went the open core or support/consulting contract required OSS route.
> Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this?
That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.
Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc.
But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.
The end of life problem can be solved by source code escrow, with a clause putting the code under an open source license and published in case of the demise of the owning cpmpany.
Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license? To get eyes on it before-hand?
Also how does this work with contributor contributions? Does the owning SaaS get the benefit of contributor work instantly while everyone else has to wait 2 years? What about the contributers themselves?
presumably because a) it still allows the source code to be available and used for the 'permitted purposes' (i.e. anything that's not directly competing), and b) it represents a concrete commitment to open up, not just a pinkie promise (even if they were to have a license or contract which promised it, it would not be as easy to rely on as actually having the source code published. Companies have reneged on such promises before).
And yeah, by my reading essentially people can contribute code or publish patches (with just a plain MIT license in principle), just the original and derivatives still can't be used for non-permitted purposes until the timer is up.
You may want to allow certain uses (self-hosting, etc) even before it transitions to a fully open-source license. Having access to the source code can also help SaaS users debug certain situations.
> you were still not fully in control and someone else exploits the economic value without investing
O'Sassy came up recently in one of the forums I lurk in [0], and as discussed there, I tend to agree with Adam Jacob (SystemInit) and others that FSL is definitely one way out but doesn't totally solve the commercialization aspect, because the code & all that IP is still readily available.
Adam, in this talk [1], argues that like RedHat (and unlike Canonical), Open Source businesses must learn to separate source license from distribution license and if they do so, the money is there to be made (in a b2b setting, at least).
> 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.
... if the companies conflate Open Source and business models, rather it being merely a Go-To-Market (like open core).
Especially true for dev/infra upstarts competing with incumbents (PostHog v Amplitude; GitLab v GitHub [2]), and lately for AI labs (DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama v GPT/Gemini/Claude). In a role reversal, BigTech also uses Open Source to commodotize its competition's advantages (Android v iOS; k8s v Swarm; Firefox/Chrome v IE) [3].
It 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.)
> 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.
> Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?
It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed, as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn't be open source and it is going to be license-incompatible with many projects anyways.
That said, I find it preposterous to accept this notion even ignoring that point. You shouldn't have to take it on faith that what you're doing is allowed by the copyright license—the whole point of the license is to make that clear. Everybody always shrugs off the risk of a malicious owner until Oracle acquires their dependencies.
I understand that it's not open source. I just see it as like, a spot where a company that would normally make a closed source product wanted to make it more open and hackable and did actually put the code up and take contributions, which should be a kind of good thing, but it's automatically assumed to be the worst, a rugpull, etc. What if I operated in an ethical gray area right around this pretty reasonably worded term?
I was trying to make the point that "unfree" software is not really useful at all to the "open source" community, and not because of terminology nitpicking but because of the consequences that has.
But anyway, my problem with a license like this is indeed the existence of gray areas. Open source licenses are in some ways clever attempts to make a social contract into a legal obligation. It isn't perfect, but the side effect is that you don't have to take it on faith that people will follow it: people can be sued for violating it, and depending on how that Vizio case goes, it's not just the copyright holders who are eligible.
But that's a two way street. In return, I shouldn't have to take in on faith that my use case is legal according to the copyright license: it should be clear as day with no room for interpretation. If it's not, then my best hope is to simply never get sued. That is not good. Hope is not a strategy here, not for individuals and not for corporate users.
Business/"fair" licenses seem to offer a good compromise, but it's a mirage: the software still has to be treated a bit like toxic waste in Linux packaging, won't be compatible with strong copyleft licenses, and ultimately, presents an uneven playing field for contributors.
There isn't much to be excited about from a hacking PoV.
With projects like these, you're probably already going to be submitting your code under an unconditional CLA, which essentially forfeits your rights as a contributor, then if it's this license, you also are giving the original copyright owner more rights to use your contribution than you even have.
I don't think this is a good or healthy status quo at all.
The only upside of this is that it protects someone's business model from competition. Well good for them.
But making the license look like MIT is just a bit of cosplay, yet another attempt to try to push something as being open source when it's not. This cognitive dissonance can't go unnoticed; it really does trick people if they don't fully think through the consequences. You're better off going with a license that makes no attempt to pass itself off as open source.
Very 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.)
I used the MIT license for https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna mainly because the challenge is usually in product velocity and direct sales/distribution. Blocking from SaaS is explicitly entirely redundant.
Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO
I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO.
Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
> Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS
Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters.
All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?
What are they exploiting? Are they violating the terms of the license? The point of OSS is that there aren't arbitrary restrictions to its use; you can do what you like with it and the open source maintainer has absolutely zero obligations to continue supporting the software, or implement any of your requests.
This is not a "real" (i.e. GAAP or accounting standards) metric, so that would seem like a bad idea.
The trouble is that lots of even the accounting metrics are gameable, but a comptent auditor(s) probably won't let the metric divulge too much from "reality" (i.e. conformance with accounting standards).
I 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).
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).
> Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software
If that is so the case, what about source available licenses similar to O'saasy.
Do they work?
Because personally, although I love foss, its a compromise and I am willing to make it for some of my projects if it means that I can get enough funding to work on it full time basically.
I don't think we know yet if these work, at least for more than 5-10 years. Mongo and Elastic are still kicking, so perhaps they do. But it's very unclear if they would have gotten where they are had they started with the current licenses.
Yes obviously big tech knows how to profit from open source
they (AWS) profitted so hard from redis and elasticsearch that they had to literally change their licenses similar to O'sassy's
and even then people forked redis to create valkey and AWS engineers started working on it
Both redis and elasticsearch got so much backlash because "not open source" when in reality, they were trying to make ends meet but also since it allowed external contributions, people who contributed felt rug pulled
In the end, both of these had to revert switching to AGPL licenses.
Technically I am sure that people are still competing against these servers even with AGPL because it does have freedom 0 but I think that they kind of realized that backlash was very high
My opinion on the matter personally is, I value source code because I can work around it, I can see the code and audit it/ have a peace of mind.
But even now, open source is severely underfunded and I think we should do something about it. We cant really expect developers to write code in any license that you want, its their code and their wish (originally) and I think these are just means where someone wants to open source but he also wants to profit from his creation just enough so that he/she can maybe work full time on it/have more employees working on it and just have it grow better which for the end users does feel better.
I believe AGPL3 with CLA is the worst in 2025. Code can be recreated fast in 2025 especially with genAI getting better and better. The problem you'll have is the ownership of the code from day one. Today, people have concerns signing a CLA, so I am not sure redis is repeatable in that regard (though we have n8n). With Apache 2.0, if you are redis, you could have closed source the code in a few months and bury the competition. Why? because you need upgrades, you need CVE fixes, features, documentation, HA, etc... If you don't have a CLA you cannot close source AGPL3.0.
Of course I am taking the stance of the company not the users here :)
The table have turned, I believe in 2025 the users should insist on using AGPL3 without signing CLA. But again, with enough cash, the code can be recreated with genAI, it is just a matter of resources.
I personally find it questionable when people argue that the GPL/AGPL is less free because of the code sharing requirement.
On the Rust subreddit you can see people make arguments that can essentially be paraphrased as "Get a real job".
Somehow the people selling primary energy, food and raw materials are allowed to make money, the hardware manufacturers to run the code on are allowed to make money, cloud providers to run code on are allowed to make money, people using your software in their business are allowed to make money and even people who have been hired at a company to submit patches and pull requests to contribute to your project are allowed to make money but you, the original maintainer/developer who kick-started the project and paid the initial investment? Suddenly you're no longer allowed to make money. You're expected to work a "real job" (see list above). You're supposed to spend time not working on the project to earn enough money so you can donate your time and money to work on the project to people who most likely couldn't care less about you and your sacrifice and since it is just plain business sense to minimize costs, you should do the same and stop working on the project.
The strangest part by far is that if you'd you made your code proprietary from the get go, there wouldn't be any complaints about your GPL code not being free enough. It's a surprisingly pro proprietary code stance.
I don't think it's strange at all - the "pure freedom" licenses intentionally don't have safeguards against exploitation of the system, which attracts those who want to take but not give back, which lines up well with proprietary software.
Look at the caveat. If you cannot control the nerrative, you are done. Code is nothing in 2025, when a few 100$ can recreate a code base. AWS could have just recreated the code if they wanted, they just didn't have to. And, with their money, they could have bought redis labs if it was too difficult. I think people are looking at it the wrong way. The license wasn't the thing holding them back, they have the cash.
People 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, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Oh, your bootstrapped team can’t simultaneously develop from scratch and support the new open source software project AND outcompete a multi-billion dollar business who decided to offer your service as a below-cost addon to their offering used by millions of people on day one? Tough luck, greedy bastard, you should have stayed in your cubicle.
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)
It's not entitlement, it's the entire purpose of OSS. You are free to modify, distribute, and profit from other people's code. If you can't do any of these things, then the project is NOT OSS. Simple as that.
Entitlement is when you expect that OSS contributors must provide you with a warranty or a certain feature you need for your business activity. They are not.
The page summarises the license as “Basically… the MIT do-whatever-you-want license”. The MIT license is of course one of the most popular permissive open source licenses.
This is an incredibly misleading comparison. The subsequent clause is a complete contradiction, not a subtle clarification.
I 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.
[1]: https://fsl.software/
[2]: https://fair.io/
Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust. With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering. If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.
This may very well be caused by my incompetence, but Sentry's docker-compose setup has never survived for more than a few months under my control. Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work. I tried updating it regularly, tried never updating it, getting the same treatment either way.
I did not intend to be critical of their work. They're doing OSS as best as they can and good for them. I am just saying that it's a different beast if Sentry is OSS vs a much simpler to operate OSS product. Licensing matters less when the operational cost acts as an inhibitor to adoption of your OSS offering.
True, opportunity cost is a factor, sorry if my reply sounded a bit brash. IMHO they are one of the few orgs who got this model right compared to lots of others who went the open core or support/consulting contract required OSS route.
> Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this?
That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.
Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc.
But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.
The end of life problem can be solved by source code escrow, with a clause putting the code under an open source license and published in case of the demise of the owning cpmpany.
If the company is sold for its assets is the code released to the public? Or removed from escrow and kept private?
That's the gritty stuff which must be spelled out in the terms.
Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license? To get eyes on it before-hand?
Also how does this work with contributor contributions? Does the owning SaaS get the benefit of contributor work instantly while everyone else has to wait 2 years? What about the contributers themselves?
> Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license?
That requires trust that the company will do this. The FSL is irrevocable and comes with a future promise.
> Also how does this work with contributor contributions?
The same way as any other thing with a CLA works. If you don't have a CLA, then you have a bit of a mess.
presumably because a) it still allows the source code to be available and used for the 'permitted purposes' (i.e. anything that's not directly competing), and b) it represents a concrete commitment to open up, not just a pinkie promise (even if they were to have a license or contract which promised it, it would not be as easy to rely on as actually having the source code published. Companies have reneged on such promises before).
And yeah, by my reading essentially people can contribute code or publish patches (with just a plain MIT license in principle), just the original and derivatives still can't be used for non-permitted purposes until the timer is up.
> Why not just release the software
You may want to allow certain uses (self-hosting, etc) even before it transitions to a fully open-source license. Having access to the source code can also help SaaS users debug certain situations.
> you were still not fully in control and someone else exploits the economic value without investing
O'Sassy came up recently in one of the forums I lurk in [0], and as discussed there, I tend to agree with Adam Jacob (SystemInit) and others that FSL is definitely one way out but doesn't totally solve the commercialization aspect, because the code & all that IP is still readily available.
Adam, in this talk [1], argues that like RedHat (and unlike Canonical), Open Source businesses must learn to separate source license from distribution license and if they do so, the money is there to be made (in a b2b setting, at least).
> 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.
... if the companies conflate Open Source and business models, rather it being merely a Go-To-Market (like open core).
Especially true for dev/infra upstarts competing with incumbents (PostHog v Amplitude; GitLab v GitHub [2]), and lately for AI labs (DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama v GPT/Gemini/Claude). In a role reversal, BigTech also uses Open Source to commodotize its competition's advantages (Android v iOS; k8s v Swarm; Firefox/Chrome v IE) [3].
[0] https://forum.fossunited.org/t/6878
[1] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/watch?v=rmhYHzJpkuo / Summary: https://gemini.google.com/share/e21cd1bacff6 (mirror: https://archive.vn/Jzhk3)
[2] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... / https://archive.vn/jQh27
[3] https://gwern.net/complement / https://archive.vn/QITxC
It 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.)
> 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.
> Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?
It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed, as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn't be open source and it is going to be license-incompatible with many projects anyways.
That said, I find it preposterous to accept this notion even ignoring that point. You shouldn't have to take it on faith that what you're doing is allowed by the copyright license—the whole point of the license is to make that clear. Everybody always shrugs off the risk of a malicious owner until Oracle acquires their dependencies.
I understand that it's not open source. I just see it as like, a spot where a company that would normally make a closed source product wanted to make it more open and hackable and did actually put the code up and take contributions, which should be a kind of good thing, but it's automatically assumed to be the worst, a rugpull, etc. What if I operated in an ethical gray area right around this pretty reasonably worded term?
I was trying to make the point that "unfree" software is not really useful at all to the "open source" community, and not because of terminology nitpicking but because of the consequences that has.
But anyway, my problem with a license like this is indeed the existence of gray areas. Open source licenses are in some ways clever attempts to make a social contract into a legal obligation. It isn't perfect, but the side effect is that you don't have to take it on faith that people will follow it: people can be sued for violating it, and depending on how that Vizio case goes, it's not just the copyright holders who are eligible.
But that's a two way street. In return, I shouldn't have to take in on faith that my use case is legal according to the copyright license: it should be clear as day with no room for interpretation. If it's not, then my best hope is to simply never get sued. That is not good. Hope is not a strategy here, not for individuals and not for corporate users.
Business/"fair" licenses seem to offer a good compromise, but it's a mirage: the software still has to be treated a bit like toxic waste in Linux packaging, won't be compatible with strong copyleft licenses, and ultimately, presents an uneven playing field for contributors.
There isn't much to be excited about from a hacking PoV.
With projects like these, you're probably already going to be submitting your code under an unconditional CLA, which essentially forfeits your rights as a contributor, then if it's this license, you also are giving the original copyright owner more rights to use your contribution than you even have.
I don't think this is a good or healthy status quo at all.
The only upside of this is that it protects someone's business model from competition. Well good for them.
But making the license look like MIT is just a bit of cosplay, yet another attempt to try to push something as being open source when it's not. This cognitive dissonance can't go unnoticed; it really does trick people if they don't fully think through the consequences. You're better off going with a license that makes no attempt to pass itself off as open source.
Very 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.)
I used the MIT license for https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna mainly because the challenge is usually in product velocity and direct sales/distribution. Blocking from SaaS is explicitly entirely redundant.
Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO
I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO.
https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/
Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
> I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
They will find a way of gaming the metric.
For example, they run the software through a subsidiary that makes $900m ARR.
> Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS
Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters.
All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?
What are they exploiting? Are they violating the terms of the license? The point of OSS is that there aren't arbitrary restrictions to its use; you can do what you like with it and the open source maintainer has absolutely zero obligations to continue supporting the software, or implement any of your requests.
> ARR
This is not a "real" (i.e. GAAP or accounting standards) metric, so that would seem like a bad idea.
The trouble is that lots of even the accounting metrics are gameable, but a comptent auditor(s) probably won't let the metric divulge too much from "reality" (i.e. conformance with accounting standards).
So basically Big Time Public License. https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2
Too complicated, should be simple like O'sassy, i.e. modified MIT with a clause where it doesn't extend to oligopoly cloud corps.
This is a very compelling SaaS license.
I 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).
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).
> Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software
If that is so the case, what about source available licenses similar to O'saasy.
Do they work?
Because personally, although I love foss, its a compromise and I am willing to make it for some of my projects if it means that I can get enough funding to work on it full time basically.
I don't think we know yet if these work, at least for more than 5-10 years. Mongo and Elastic are still kicking, so perhaps they do. But it's very unclear if they would have gotten where they are had they started with the current licenses.
Yes obviously big tech knows how to profit from open source
they (AWS) profitted so hard from redis and elasticsearch that they had to literally change their licenses similar to O'sassy's
and even then people forked redis to create valkey and AWS engineers started working on it
Both redis and elasticsearch got so much backlash because "not open source" when in reality, they were trying to make ends meet but also since it allowed external contributions, people who contributed felt rug pulled
In the end, both of these had to revert switching to AGPL licenses.
Technically I am sure that people are still competing against these servers even with AGPL because it does have freedom 0 but I think that they kind of realized that backlash was very high
My opinion on the matter personally is, I value source code because I can work around it, I can see the code and audit it/ have a peace of mind.
But even now, open source is severely underfunded and I think we should do something about it. We cant really expect developers to write code in any license that you want, its their code and their wish (originally) and I think these are just means where someone wants to open source but he also wants to profit from his creation just enough so that he/she can maybe work full time on it/have more employees working on it and just have it grow better which for the end users does feel better.
> In the end, both of these had to revert switching to AGPL licenses.
AGPL seems like the most battle tested solution here, though.
You'd need a CLA from day 1, but if you have that then you can sell commercial licenses to people who won't meet the criteria for the real license.
So I think it's important to differentiate between open source and free software, here.
I believe AGPL3 with CLA is the worst in 2025. Code can be recreated fast in 2025 especially with genAI getting better and better. The problem you'll have is the ownership of the code from day one. Today, people have concerns signing a CLA, so I am not sure redis is repeatable in that regard (though we have n8n). With Apache 2.0, if you are redis, you could have closed source the code in a few months and bury the competition. Why? because you need upgrades, you need CVE fixes, features, documentation, HA, etc... If you don't have a CLA you cannot close source AGPL3.0.
Of course I am taking the stance of the company not the users here :) The table have turned, I believe in 2025 the users should insist on using AGPL3 without signing CLA. But again, with enough cash, the code can be recreated with genAI, it is just a matter of resources.
> the code can be recreated with genAI, it is just a matter of resources.
Can it though? Most interesting things (for my values of interesting at least), cannot be re-created with generative AI.
Every time I try to do anything a little bit out of distribution, they fall apart (and they're not great at in-distribution stuff either).
> I believe AGPL3 with CLA is the worst in 2025
I think that you mean best, as with both of these one can sell commercial licenses while remaining open.
Again, from the company's point of view you get both nerd-cred and a viable business (this is what MySQL did, I believe).
You don't get that with BSD/MIT.
I personally find it questionable when people argue that the GPL/AGPL is less free because of the code sharing requirement.
On the Rust subreddit you can see people make arguments that can essentially be paraphrased as "Get a real job".
Somehow the people selling primary energy, food and raw materials are allowed to make money, the hardware manufacturers to run the code on are allowed to make money, cloud providers to run code on are allowed to make money, people using your software in their business are allowed to make money and even people who have been hired at a company to submit patches and pull requests to contribute to your project are allowed to make money but you, the original maintainer/developer who kick-started the project and paid the initial investment? Suddenly you're no longer allowed to make money. You're expected to work a "real job" (see list above). You're supposed to spend time not working on the project to earn enough money so you can donate your time and money to work on the project to people who most likely couldn't care less about you and your sacrifice and since it is just plain business sense to minimize costs, you should do the same and stop working on the project.
The strangest part by far is that if you'd you made your code proprietary from the get go, there wouldn't be any complaints about your GPL code not being free enough. It's a surprisingly pro proprietary code stance.
I don't think it's strange at all - the "pure freedom" licenses intentionally don't have safeguards against exploitation of the system, which attracts those who want to take but not give back, which lines up well with proprietary software.
> 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.
Look at the caveat. If you cannot control the nerrative, you are done. Code is nothing in 2025, when a few 100$ can recreate a code base. AWS could have just recreated the code if they wanted, they just didn't have to. And, with their money, they could have bought redis labs if it was too difficult. I think people are looking at it the wrong way. The license wasn't the thing holding them back, they have the cash.
People 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, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Oh, your bootstrapped team can’t simultaneously develop from scratch and support the new open source software project AND outcompete a multi-billion dollar business who decided to offer your service as a below-cost addon to their offering used by millions of people on day one? Tough luck, greedy bastard, you should have stayed in your cubicle.
> 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)
Okay, I've imagined that. Am I supposed to sympathise with the end users in this scenario or?..
Why do people feel entitled to profitting off the work of others?
It's not entitlement, it's the entire purpose of OSS. You are free to modify, distribute, and profit from other people's code. If you can't do any of these things, then the project is NOT OSS. Simple as that.
Entitlement is when you expect that OSS contributors must provide you with a warranty or a certain feature you need for your business activity. They are not.
Nowhere in the license does it claim that it’s an Open Source™ license.
The page summarises the license as “Basically… the MIT do-whatever-you-want license”. The MIT license is of course one of the most popular permissive open source licenses.
This is an incredibly misleading comparison. The subsequent clause is a complete contradiction, not a subtle clarification.
People who use it claim it's Open Source