9 ms·

What's not open about it? I see the source, I see instructions to build from source, I see a license that seems to say I can copy and make derivative works out

by omni 3y ago

What's not open about it? I see the source, I see instructions to build from source, I see a license that seems to say I can copy and make derivative works out of it. Can you try to make a more substantive comment?

dsrw 3y ago
It's a weird license that seems to say "you can use this as long as you don't compete with us", with an automatic switchover to Apache 2.0 in 5 years. Definitely better than closed source, but probably not Open Source by the OSI definition.
- romange 3y ago
  BSL license is more company-friendly than AGPL.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Being company-friendly is a separate point from being open source.
- kakwa_ 3y ago
  Restricting Usage or Distribution makes it de-facto not OSS. It's actually a slightly different form of an old debate. I'm thinking in particular about the Crockford license (the MIT-like one with "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." bit). It was determined to be non-free quite a while back due to such restrictions. That being said, it hard to be a commercially successful software editor with an OSS model (RethinkDB comes to mind). I do understand why BSL exists, but it feels to me like an unsatisfactory compromise.
geewee 3y ago
The license comes with restrictions on what you can use your derivative works for - e.g. not creating an in-memory datastore service. It's essentially an Apache 2 with a "Also AWS can't just steal it and sell it as a service when it gets huge" Is it open-source? Well, depending on your definition probably not. Is it a fair license? Yeah I'd think so.
- akvadrako 3y ago
  It is open-source, no question. What you might mean is that it isn't free/libre as in FOSS.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    That’s the Stallman kind of point of view. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source section "Open" versus "free" versus "free and open" But to a lot of us, “open source” has a specific meaning as well. > Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. https://opensource.org/osd/ https://opensource.org/osd/
    - exelib 3y ago
      From my point of view, for example, GPL is not "open" at all. And yet it is on the list. In my opinion, BSL is even more "open" than GPL. Feel free to have a different view.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ksec 3y ago
Open Source as defined by OSI, which means BSL is not considered as Open Source. Open Source as defined by majority of programmers on Internet, which means either GPL, MIT, or Apache and their derivatives. Open Source as defined by HN, depending on which timeline you join HN, it could be MIT, BSD only all the way to AGPL only. Open Source as defined by layman, anything I can see its source is considered as Open. Open Source in its literal sense.
- romange 3y ago
  DragonflyDB cofounder here. I am not shy about our choice of license. Like with software design, everything is about trade-offs. Folks here voiced reasons why we chose BSL. I am sure you perfectly aware about all this. I do not know personally you but I noticed that you posted the link to the announcement. I am guessing you are passionate about the technology and innovation. Dragonfly is much more than the licensing choice we made. I wish HN discussions here were about how fibers work in Dragonfly and how SSD tiering is gonna be implemented and how we provide atomicity for lua scripts while running many of them in parallel etc. Btw, Dragonfly relies on an io-engine called helio (roughly equivalent to tokio) that has been developed by me and open sourced under Apache 2.0.
  - ensignavenger 3y ago
    While technical discussion about those details would be interesting, HN is also a strong entrepreneurial community and your license choice has a big impact on whether or not a business would choose to depend on your product. I would not choose to build on a BSL licensed foundation for my product because of real business concerns with vendor lock-in. I would also not choose to contribute to a BSL licensed code base because the CLA means I am not free to use the code base on equal grounds with other contributors (DragonflyDB Ltd in this case). Because of these two things, I didn't spend a lot of time looking into the technical details and therefore can't really say much on them. By all means it sounds like a very interesting piece of technology- but the license makes it useless to me.
    - exelib 3y ago
ensignavenger 3y ago
It is not open to use as you please. For example, I cannot pay the supplier of my choosing to provide services using the code.

by omni 3y ago

dsrw 3y ago

It's a weird license that seems to say "you can use this as long as you don't compete with us", with an automatic switchover to Apache 2.0 in 5 years. Definitely better than closed source, but probably not Open Source by the OSI definition.

romange 3y ago
BSL license is more company-friendly than AGPL.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Being company-friendly is a separate point from being open source.
kakwa_ 3y ago
Restricting Usage or Distribution makes it de-facto not OSS. It's actually a slightly different form of an old debate. I'm thinking in particular about the Crockford license (the MIT-like one with "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." bit). It was determined to be non-free quite a while back due to such restrictions. That being said, it hard to be a commercially successful software editor with an OSS model (RethinkDB comes to mind). I do understand why BSL exists, but it feels to me like an unsatisfactory compromise.

geewee 3y ago

The license comes with restrictions on what you can use your derivative works for - e.g. not creating an in-memory datastore service. It's essentially an Apache 2 with a "Also AWS can't just steal it and sell it as a service when it gets huge" Is it open-source? Well, depending on your definition probably not. Is it a fair license? Yeah I'd think so.

akvadrako 3y ago
It is open-source, no question. What you might mean is that it isn't free/libre as in FOSS.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  That’s the Stallman kind of point of view. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source section "Open" versus "free" versus "free and open" But to a lot of us, “open source” has a specific meaning as well. > Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. https://opensource.org/osd/ https://opensource.org/osd/
  - exelib 3y ago
    From my point of view, for example, GPL is not "open" at all. And yet it is on the list. In my opinion, BSL is even more "open" than GPL. Feel free to have a different view.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ksec 3y ago

Open Source as defined by OSI, which means BSL is not considered as Open Source. Open Source as defined by majority of programmers on Internet, which means either GPL, MIT, or Apache and their derivatives. Open Source as defined by HN, depending on which timeline you join HN, it could be MIT, BSD only all the way to AGPL only. Open Source as defined by layman, anything I can see its source is considered as Open. Open Source in its literal sense.

romange 3y ago
DragonflyDB cofounder here. I am not shy about our choice of license. Like with software design, everything is about trade-offs. Folks here voiced reasons why we chose BSL. I am sure you perfectly aware about all this. I do not know personally you but I noticed that you posted the link to the announcement. I am guessing you are passionate about the technology and innovation. Dragonfly is much more than the licensing choice we made. I wish HN discussions here were about how fibers work in Dragonfly and how SSD tiering is gonna be implemented and how we provide atomicity for lua scripts while running many of them in parallel etc. Btw, Dragonfly relies on an io-engine called helio (roughly equivalent to tokio) that has been developed by me and open sourced under Apache 2.0.
- ensignavenger 3y ago
  While technical discussion about those details would be interesting, HN is also a strong entrepreneurial community and your license choice has a big impact on whether or not a business would choose to depend on your product. I would not choose to build on a BSL licensed foundation for my product because of real business concerns with vendor lock-in. I would also not choose to contribute to a BSL licensed code base because the CLA means I am not free to use the code base on equal grounds with other contributors (DragonflyDB Ltd in this case). Because of these two things, I didn't spend a lot of time looking into the technical details and therefore can't really say much on them. By all means it sounds like a very interesting piece of technology- but the license makes it useless to me.
  - exelib 3y ago

ensignavenger 3y ago

It is not open to use as you please. For example, I cannot pay the supplier of my choosing to provide services using the code.