“we want to look open source to appease our community” and “we need to capture revenue our investors expect.”
…
The thing is, the companies that created licenses that actually got adopted broadly (like MariaDB with BSL, Sentry with FSL) had those licenses drafted by established open source attorneys like Heather Meeker and submitted them for community review. The licenses were designed to be reusable across projects, not bespoke to one company’s needs.
We are NOT trying to “look” OSS. It’s been a proprietary license for the past 3 years.
What we’re trying to do is honor the OSS ethos, with something that actually works. I worked on our licenses directly with Bruce Perens (the co-founder of open source and the OSI) as well as several SME software license attorneys.
We’re trying to continue to honor that with a Grant that continues to give our software away for free to almost ALL of our users. We’re doing something novel that doesn’t fit with existing licenses, and are writing something that works well for that goal.
Try to understand that there is a lot of gray between pure OSS/MIT and paid closed-source enterprise software.
Existing licenses don’t do exactly what they want (meaning existing licenses don’t let them restrict usage in the specific way their business model requires), so they write their own. And every single time, the custom license is more restrictive than what it replaced, never less. Regardless of how Ben spins it.
I’m trying really hard to explain our thinking. It’s unfortunate that you can only see this as a “spin” and not our best attempt to build something premium but sustainable.
Do you have any recommendations or constructive thoughts here? Did you read my comments on WHY this change is happening? Offer some suggestions that solve those problems.
So the MSCL is not that. The name itself tells you it’s not intended as a community standard. It’s a proprietary legal instrument wearing open source clothing. It exists to serve Monospace Inc’s interests and nobody else’s.
Nothing is a standard… until it is. It seems like I’m wasting my breath trying to speak with you about this, since you don’t seek to understand what/why we’re doing things… but are comfortable saying we’re only serving our own interests and no one else’s.
That’s your honest opinion? That our free grant for almost all users, our free tier, being source available, source convert to true OSS… it’s all just a big marketing ploy?
So about your question, why was a license change needed? I know exactly what you’re getting at, and I think the writing is on the wall. The BSL they’re already using converts to GPL… that’s its whole design. If GPL conversion was the only goal, they could just stay on the BSL and refine the usage grant. They don’t need a new license for GPL conversion.
Maybe read this and then let me know if you still think that…
What the BSL doesn’t have that the FCL does is the license key enforcement mechanism and the non-compete clause. The GPL conversion isn’t the reason for the new license, it’s just the justification for the new license. It’s the part that sounds good while the parts that actually matter (non-compete, software-enforced feature gating) get smuggled in underneath.
No smuggling. I can’t be more clear here.
YES. Protecting the registration key system is one of the MAIN reasons for this change. That’s why we had to move away from BSL, since it does’t protect that.
So if none of the “standard” licenses that are out there work for these requirements… what are we to do except create one that does?