19 ms·

Sourcegraph is no longer open source

444 points by CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
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CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
License was changed almost 3 weeks ago, 5.1.0 release blog post skips this information. There's still no official announcement. It seems like the author of Sourcegraph OSS containers announced that his release train is now dead https://github.com/jensim/sourcegraph-release-train/ https://github.com/jensim/sourcegraph-release-train/
kissgyorgy 3y ago
The title might be a bit misleading. Released code can't not be open source anymore, only future development.
- caiusdurling 3y ago
  "no longer" suggests it was, but now isn't, which appears to match reality?
- bayindirh 3y ago
  > Released code can't not be open source anymore... It can be. You can release under a "source available" license barring it from being used (even compiled), derived, incorporated into other works, making it basically "for eyes only, or we sue you to oblivion". Many people consider licenses as window decorations, but they are not.
  - tkfu 3y ago
    Parent poster is saying that the already-released versions, which were released under an open source license, are still open source.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Yes you can't retroactively change licenses, but it's also important to know that just because you can read a source file, the file in question is bona-fide open source or free software. Many people lack this knowledge from my experience.
      - bandrami 3y ago
        We had a Windows CE dev license back in the Cambrian Era which included visibility of the source tree, but God help you if you tried to change it and make your own build.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Solely being able to view source code without other rights absolutely doesn’t make it open source. In general if something isn’t under an open source license it isn’t. ADDED Unless it’s public domain and then it effectively is.
  - arlcode 3y ago
    Further distribution can be put under any license they want but any copy anyone received in the past that was Apache 2 licensed remains such and can be used as before. So if anyone wants to put a past release online they are free to do so (unless there are parts of the code that were restricted before). It would be prudent to remove branding where possible but that's mainly a precaution.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Well licenses are window decorations when it comes to personal use.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Well, no. Personal use doesn't free you the obligations GPL brings, for example.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Assuming you or a company doesn’t redistribute it, copyleft doesn't matter.
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > doesn’t redistribute it Well sure, but that's a really big caveat.
        ghaff 3y ago
        I would assume personal use doesn’t involve redistribution. Probably true for most company software for internal use as well.
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      Does this vary by jurisdiction maybe?
      - ilyt 3y ago
        nope. If something in jurisdiction would make license invalid that would not mean you can do what you want with the code, that would mean that you can't use that license.
        anticensor 3y ago
        If a jurisdiction releases you but does not prevent you from performing an obligation, licences do not typically consider that a reason for invalidation of the licence.
  - mort96 3y ago
    If the code was under a restrictive source-available license, it wasn't open source...
  - bjord 3y ago
    I think most people don't consider viewable source projects to be truly open source
- bdcravens 3y ago
  I think most understand the idea that a project can change its license at any point, but that doesn't apply to previous version. (In this case, any version prior to 5.1.0)
sixhobbits 3y ago
https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/commit/3cd931ef54407c966fc3a5940a06f0b95a7aadd0 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/commit/3cd931ef54... has some additional information, but not a lot.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  One would expect announcement regarding license change to precede implementation of said changes :/
caiusdurling 3y ago
https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu... appears to be a comment from someone in the project laying out why they've changed.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  A few months back they removed free enterprise license that allowed 10 dev seats, some smaller companies were holding back the updates and looking at the OSS version - I guess, not anymore
- bogwog 3y ago
  So it seems like nobody was using the OSS version, and they didn’t want to maintain two versions if nobody was using it. It also says they offer a free self hosted version for individuals, but I couldn’t find that on their site.
  - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
    First they offered a Free Enterprise tier for 10 seats, they've removed this a few months back, their OSS lacked even some basic things as language support, building it was impossible due to lack of documentation/breakage in the build process for several months and they didn't offer sourcegraph-oss images. At some point, one individual on Github managed to get it working and his images got 10k+ pulls on DockerHub. That's hardly "nobody". Also, some people removed telemetry from OSS version so Sourcegraph didn't even know that anyone is using it. Also, they were open-closed-open-closed in the last 5 years. Their website is a mess, even employees on github are providing contradicting information. Original commit message that relicensed bunch of stuff had errors in it regarding what exactly will be closed source now.
  - smarx007 3y ago
    I am using the version you can install via `brew install sourcegraph`, though they seem to have abandoned it to make people install Cody (which requires an account even for local use). I will probably use the Brew version for as long as it works. The major pain point is that it seems to have a timeout for repo discovery at 5s, so you can't just clone all of your GH starred repos and search them this way. P.S. Started a discussion regarding the Homebrew package, but pretty sure it's canned: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/discussions/54589 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/discussions/54589
deng 3y ago
Did anyone actually use the open version? I dimly remember that I looked into it like 2-3 years ago, but all the really interesting stuff was not included in that. The pricing for enterprise was absolutely bonkers, something like 100$ per month&developer, which already made it clear that they are obviously only targeting big players with infinite budget. Seems the pricing is now changed, and it "starts at 5k/year" for some "Enterprise Starter" edition, but despite lots of bullet points it is very unclear to me what the limitations really are. I'm actually really interested in this product and it might be a good addition to our tool set, it's a shame the pricing is so opaque.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  OSS version didn't have official Docker images prebuilt, you had to build them yourself and for a long time the OSS build was broken. A year or two ago they promised they'll fix it or even provide official OSS image, this didn't happen. One person finally created a working release train on github and was releasing OSS containers, Docker Hub reports it as 10k+ pulls, which is a lot for unofficial image. I tend to stay away from any 3rd party tool that's not really a main part of infrastructure and requires sales contacts. It's wasting my company time to deal with sales when it comes to a few licenses, just give me a number input and buy button. I also lost some confidence regarding Sourcegraph, as it seems they change their direction, pricing and rules multiple times per year
  - deng 3y ago
    Yes, I remember the Docker thing, but I also remember that at least the language parsers we were interested in were only supported through some kind of plugin mechanism, which the OSS version did not support, so it was useless for us, so I didn't ever bother testing it.
    - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
      So basically their "open source" offering wasn't really open source, it wasn't even open core, as you had to build it yourself, the build wasn't working for a long time and even if you managed that, some languages were enterprise-only. Nice. How to get free marketing by strapping Open Source to your product and writing a bunch of announcements.
nullcipher 3y ago
It was open first. Then closed. Then open again. So, now it's closed again...
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  That's how you build confidence in your company and executive decisions. Let's see if we get the same amount of upvotes their post got when they open sourced the thing.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 3y ago
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jmclnx 3y ago
I am getting: > This blob took too long to generate. But you can view the raw file.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  It was working when I posted it, if you click view raw file it will take you to the changelog.
gigatexal 3y ago
Their product basically got sherlocked by Microsoft when they released Github Copilot, no?
- imjonse 3y ago
  Sourcegraph has recently released Cody which is the more direct competitor to Copilot. And it's free for individual developers.
  - itake 3y ago
    I think Cody is based on OpenAI tech. They haven’t built their own model yet (as of 8 weeks ago)
    - ar-jan 3y ago
      They're using Anthropic by default, but it's possible to connect it to the OpenAI API as well.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  Their main product is Code Search, Cody is a new thing.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Code Search seems a limited market so I would be surprised if their plan wasn't to go after deeper code tooling in the future. Otherwise I don't see how their $2.6 billion valuation made sense. They likely thought that an iterative approach based on human encoded code understanding would allow them to build better systems. Pretty reasonable assumption 1+ years ago. Then GPT3/4 proved that you could just dump data into an AI and probably get an even better result.
    - smarx007 3y ago
      But that makes no sense. If AI is the future, you'd leave Code Search open-source and make the AI assistant closed-source.
breadwinner 3y ago
If a web-based code search engine is what you need here's one: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/ https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/
williamDafoe 3y ago
Never found a startup on the premise that someone else's product will be inadequate forever. The recent rewrite of github search has probably made sourcegraph irrelevant. If you may recall, original github search used almost the most horrible algorithm possible. It dropped all punctuation and spacing and just searched for identifiers. No patterns allowed, no quoting allowed. One of the only meta-arguments was filename:xyz. Now that github has improved its basic search functionality, sourcegraph might be doomed. I used sourcegraph at Lyft which (at the time) had unlimited money to waste on software tools, and installed the open-source version at Databricks but nobody cared.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I still regularly download gh repos just to grep them because while less bad it still somehow sucks...
  - thunky 3y ago
    Me too, but usually after I already have 15 GH tabs open and have wasted a bunch of time.
  - ta988 3y ago
    Yep I have a small shell script that caches a repo with only the last commit files and runs ripgrep on it. I'll give a go at live grep that's discusses above, that look exciting.
  - woadwarrior01 3y ago
    I’m curious to know, have you tried their dedicated search site? cs.github.com Their default search still sucks, IMO. But the one I mentioned is comparable to Google’s internal CS.
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      Why do that have a good search that's not part of the main site?
philipwhiuk 3y ago
If they've accepted contributions from third parties they can't relicense those contributions, right?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  As a general rule with open source projects it basically depends on whether they had a contributor licence agreement. Sourcegraph appear to have had one: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/blob/main/CONTRIB... https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-/blob/dev/CLA.txt https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-... It includes a grant of copyright licence so I guess this is nailed down.
  - j1elo 3y ago
    And that's why I believe that requesting a mandatory CLA should drive contributions down in OSS projects. Otherwise, you're basically providing free labor without the counterpart's promise of keeping the code free, which is (should?) be the reason one is making their contributions to start with.
    - dolmen 3y ago
      Except that external contributions to a full product are usually minuscule (mostly typos) compared the codebase.
  - sdesol 3y ago
    I also don't believe they receive many non-employee contributions (probably because the software is more advanced than most open source projects). You can get a breakdown of their contributions at: https://imgur.com/a/UCJ6y9r https://imgur.com/a/UCJ6y9r The interesting one is he second image which filters by code contributors that have contributed more than 500 lines of code churn. Note, I'm not taking into consideration if code contributions were merged or not, just that somebody created a pull request/commit.
- kbumsik 3y ago
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I installed and ran Sourcegraph on my laptop a year or so ago. It was cool, but I didn’t keep it around. There is a lot of competing technology now, from GitHub’s improved search to new open source LangChain and LlamaIndex support for better document chunking of source code in several languages.
- eurekin 3y ago
  Whoa, first time I'm reading about Llama Index... How does it work? Where can I learn more?
  - mark_l_watson 3y ago
    You can search for LlamaIndex docs, or you can read my short book for free online https://leanpub.com/langchain/read https://leanpub.com/langchain/read
- phillipcarter 3y ago
  That's part of the impetus behind their Cody product. It uses the code search system as a semantic index. It actually works very well in my experience.
rbanffy 3y ago
I remember having used a Red Hat (?) tool back in 2002 for understanding the source code of the Brazilian voting machine so we could more easily port it to Windows CE (the 2002 model ran on it initially, then on Linux from 2004-ish). It had a very Motif-like interface. Does anyone else remember its name?
- mechanicker 3y ago
  > I remember having used a Red Hat (?) SourceNav (Source Navigator) by any chance? I used it quite a lot before completely moving to Emacs.
isityouyesitsme 3y ago
Their support in the demo period sucked, their complex C++ support was lacking, they didn't integrate into modern C++ build systems well, and their prices were insane. They kept trying to push this "campaign" feature on us, which is an overly-complex auto-refactoring tool that couldn't even support our non-proprietary, well-known build system. For the cost of their license, we instead hired two developers for code refactors, who then went on to make other tooling, and we didn't need to hire someone to babysit their crappy service integration. I would not say that they had found their niche when speaking to us. Perhaps it has gotten better.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  2 devs for the price of the license?! How expensive are we talking about here?
  - chefandy 3y ago
    If it's true, I'd love to hear how many devs their marketing people say you'd have to hire to replace the functionality.
  - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
    It was 100USD per month per seat some time ago, with a high number of devs it may actually be beneficial to roll something on your own.
  - isityouyesitsme 3y ago
    We hired 2 junior developers for maybe 20K more total, in total compensation, than their original quote. But you (and child) comment made me realize that I don't remember the terms of the proposal, whether it was per year or for 2 years. So it might have been a 1:1, not 1:2. In the end, their product was just completely insufficient for our needs, and it was clearly just gluing open source tools together. The part we couldn't do as well was the front end, and they clearly put a lot of effort into it. It looked and worked nicely. But that didn't help us when they couldn't parse the code to populate it.
- 3y ago
asdf4life 3y ago
WizardCoder is free
- smarx007 3y ago
  It's not a code search tool. This discussion is not about Cody but the Sourcegraph search.
deleted 3y ago
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rattray 3y ago
If anyone's looking for an open-source search tool for grepping across repos (or even one large repo) at insane speed, I highly recommend livegrep: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep Demo at https://livegrep.com/search/linux https://livegrep.com/search/linux We used it at Stripe and it was quite popular; often, searching even a single repo was faster on livegrep than with ripgrep locally. A post reviewing it: https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/faster-code-search-livegrep/ https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/faster-code-search-livegrep... A post by its creator, nelhage, on its impact: https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/ https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/ and another on its architecture: https://blog.nelhage.com/2015/02/regular-expression-search-with-suffix-arrays/ https://blog.nelhage.com/2015/02/regular-expression-search-w...
- synergy20 3y ago
  https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ is open source and very good at huge source base, e.g. for the whole android and linux kernel together, fast and useful.
  - smarx007 3y ago
    Any guides on deploying it, preferably with ready-made Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files? I looked into it a while ago and all I found was quite outdated.
    - synergy20 3y ago
      it took me about one hour in the past to install it, no docker though, not really that difficult and I feel it's really worthwhile once it starts to run.
  - mynonameaccount 3y ago
    too bad it is associated with Oracle
    - 3y ago
moneywoes 3y ago
What’s the use case? Finding useful libraries?
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  Global code search across hundreds of repos even if they are hosted at different SCMs
deleted 3y ago
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smarx007 3y ago
What is a good open-source system for code search if I want to plug 100 or so git repos into it and have it available over the web? GH search is not desirable because it would search too broadly and would not cover repos on Gitlab etc. I looked at the Debian code search [1] in the past, but for some reason thought it required a bit too much effort and didn't complete my investigation of it. Though [2] looks pretty approachable. Sourcegraph mentioned Zoekt [3], but I am not sure how usable it is. If it was pretty good, why did Sourcegraph OSS exist? Finally, from all the discussion how Sourcegraph OSS was very behind in the past few years, I guess there is no serious plan to fork it? Edit: GCS release [4] seems to have been open-sourced without a frontend. Edit2: Livegrep [5] and Opengrok [6] were recommended higher in the thread. Quite excited to try them out but if someone has working Docker Compose configs, I would be very thankful for the head start. Edit3: there is also Eureka [7]. Seems less powerful but easier to deploy. [1]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs https://github.com/Debian/dcs [2]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/main/howto/building.md https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/main/howto/building.md [3]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt [4]: https://github.com/google/codesearch https://github.com/google/codesearch [5]: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep [6]: https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ [7]: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka
- __float 3y ago
  [4] is not really a usable 'product'. Livegrep (https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep) was inspired by it and is very usable. [3] used to be a Google open source project as well, but it fell out of maintenance, and Sourcegraph took it over. It powers most of the basic regex/literal search in Sourcegraph. Mozilla's code is searchable in Searchfox (https://searchfox.org/ https://searchfox.org/) which uses the indexer from Livegrep, combined with their own Git indexer and language-specific cross reference databases. OpenGrok (https://github.com/oracle/opengrok https://github.com/oracle/opengrok) is also rather well known, but I have found it to have a slightly worse UI than alternatives.
- smarx007 3y ago
  There is also Hound [8]. [8]: https://github.com/hound-search/hound https://github.com/hound-search/hound
xer0x 3y ago
Sourcegraph explanation for the change: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu...
that_guy_iain 3y ago
I fundamentally believe that open-source is a model that doesn't lend itself to sustainability. We all know that lots of companies that can afford to pay for software don't because it's free and open-source. I fundamentally believe that the decision to give away software results in less revenue and therefore less money for developers to work on the product and make it better. In the ecommerce world there is Magento, Shopware, and Spryker. Magento is open-source and massive. Shopware is open-source and very good and reliable. And then there is Spryker a closed-source platform which is very good from a product point of view. I feel if you look at the product development from those three Spryker is far ahead of the open-source options. I think we all like the benefits of grabbing a library/tool and using it for free for personal use or when we're starting out and can't really afford to pay so want things to be open-source. But I really think the future is source-available that mixes the ability to use something for free but when they have the money to require a commercial license. This is why I choose to go with the Business Source License - which allowed for additional grants as well as allowing free use for non-production uses. I added in an additional grant for if they're generating very little revenue. As a small independent developer who is developing a billing system it seems fair that people generating revenue start to pay for a license. While it allows those who are just starting out to use it for free and pay when they start making money. As I grow I'll be increasing the amount the additional grant allows. For me this seems the best of both worlds. One where those who can't afford can use it for free and those who can pay help fund future development. We keep seeing companies going from open-source to a source-available approach for a reason. [1] - https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE
- ikiris 3y ago
  Yeah Linux will never last against Novell.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Speaking of which... I've been looking for an open source equivalent of the old NetWare Client. Anybody know of one? Specifically interested in the "runs scripts at login" aspect.
sqs 3y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. Sourcegraph is now 2 separate products: code search and Cody (our code AI). Cody remains open source (Apache 2) in the client/cody* directories in the repository, and we're extracting that to a separate 100% OSS repository soon. Our licensing principle remains to charge companies while making tools for individual devs open source. Very few individual devs (or companies) used the limited-feature open-source variant of code search, so we decided to remove it. Usage of Sourcegraph code search was even more skewed toward our official non-OSS build than in other similar situations like Google Chrome vs. Chromium or VS Code vs. VSCodium. Maintaining 2 variants was a burden on our engineering team that had very little benefit for anyone. You can see more explanation at https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu.... The change was announced in the changelog and in a PR (all of our development occurs in public), and we will have a blog post this week after we separate our big monorepo into 2 repos as planned: the 100% OSS repo for Cody and the non-OSS repo for code search. You can still use Sourcegraph code search for free on public code at https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com and on our self-hosted free tier on private code (which means individual devs can still run Sourcegraph code search 100% for free). Customers are not affected at all.
- sqs 3y ago
  Also, I appreciate all the comments here and find them fair and thoughtful, including the critical stuff. You can join our Discord at https://discord.gg/rDPqBejz93 https://discord.gg/rDPqBejz93 to chat more after this goes off the HN frontpage. And if anyone wants to chat with me directly to share feedback or complaints, let me know (and we can share the recording publicly if you're OK with it).
- sensibleduck 3y ago
  Are you planning on continuing all development in public, or will you make the code private?
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  Sourcegraph only provided non-OSS images and the build process was difficult and broken for a long time, the application itself was frequently broken in OSS version as well, searching issues for a few minutes brings up quite a few results. [1] [2] [3] [4] It's no wonder, that the usage of OSS version was pretty low, when few were able to build it and even if they managed that, the resulting application was broken every few releases. Both VS Code and Chromium are easy to build, due to their nature and popularity, they are available prebuilt from many sources. I would install "unofficial" Chromium build from my distribution's repository, I wouldn't keep my code in unofficial Sourcegraph build from some random person on Github. Comparing them is rather unfair, but there's another issue that stopped OSS adoption. For a long time, official Sourcegraph Docker image came with a 10 seat free license, which suited many people and they weren't looking for alternatives like OSS build. I would argue that announcing license change and closing of your product as a small block in change log file or when someone mentions the problem in Github Issues is not adequate for such a change. Not using open-first principles, restricting the product by using enterprise only plugins, which others mentioned under this post, not providing open source builds and changing license without preceding announcement, while previously using open source terminology for some feel-good free marketing leaves a bitter taste. Especially with so many companies doing this right now due to interest rates. https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43231 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43231 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43203 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43203 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6790 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6790 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6783 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6783
josephcsible 3y ago
Yet another concrete example of why copyleft licenses are better than pushover ones and why CLAs are bad. It would have been illegal for them to do this if the old license were copyleft and they accepted contributions without a CLA.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  I don't understand your comment. What do you think would have happened if it was GPL instead of Apache? That a person would come out of nowhere willing to rewrite all the SourceGraph owned code in the repo?
  - trasz4 3y ago
    [dead]
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    No. If it were GPL instead of Apache, and it had contributions from other people without a CLA, then Sourcegraph wouldn't have been legally allowed to change the license, so nobody would have had to rewrite anything.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      Sourcegraph would still be able to relicense tbe contributions made by their employees.
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        Yes, but they'd have had to rip out everything from all of the external contributors, and that'd be a big enough deal that it'd probably change their mind.
Pet_Ant 3y ago
Fun Fact: Steve Yegge, famous blogger, is Head of Engineering there (or at least was recently) https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge
- swyx 3y ago
  still vocally is! https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/all-you-need-is-cody https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/all-you-need-is-cody
sourcegrift 3y ago
They were grifters from the very beginning, squatting langserver.org and making it seem like they it was their creation, mentioning microsoft exactly once (or was it zero times initially?)
zomglings 3y ago
I've never in general been a fan of "open core" products. As someone who builds things, it feels like poor craftsmanship to put obstacles in front of your users and limit the extent to which they can use your work. It also feels like decisions to hamper how people use a product are driven purely by greed. Let's imagine a world in which Sourcegraph were completely free software. They would probably still have enterprise customers pay them to securely host Sourcegraph on-premise. They wouldn't be able to charge per seat. They would have to make sure their product was cheap enough that their customers wouldn't save a ton of $$ by hiring engineers to maintain Sourcegraph on premise themselves. I am curious if they (or anyone else running an open core business) has estimates for: 1. How many customers they would lose if they went fully free. 2. How much revenue they would lose if they went fully free. Building free software and charging people to host it can be the foundation for a sustainable business, but it's unlikely to give VCs the kind of outcomes they want from a successful investment. To be honest, I think it's fine for infrastructure to be closed/proprietary. There are good reasons to do this if you are writing programs for which security is important - releasing your infrastructure code freely gives attackers a lot of ammunition to work with. If we believe in the power of automation and in building high quality software, it is possible to build free software that: 1. Is easy for you to deploy and maintain securely on customer infrastructure. 2. Requires very little operational overhead from its you as the host (in terms of support). 3. For which the infrastructure code is proprietary. This can lead to a very solid business. Why don't we see more businesses like this?
return_to_monke 3y ago
Hey dang, you might want to point to this comment instead: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu...
egberts1 3y ago
Whew. Got confused with SourceTrail C++ code viewer made by yet another Google intern, Eberhard Gräther of CoatiSoftware. https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/discontinue_sourcetrail/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourc...
anotherhue 3y ago
If you find yourself needing to search a large (xGB) codebase you should at least try some CLI tools first: fl() { # find line rg "$@" . --color=always --line-number --no-heading --smart-case | fzf --preview-window='top:60%:+{2}+3/2' \ --preview='bat --style=full --color=always --highlight-line {2} {1}' \ --delimiter=':' -n 3.. \ --bind "enter:execute(vim {1} +{2})" } Obviously not the same, but I often find it enough. Short demo https://imgur.com/a/hsyINjS https://imgur.com/a/hsyINjS
- aseipp 3y ago
  Not really comparable, honestly. "Gigabytes" has nothing to do with it. Sourcegraph can e.g. index multiple repositories across multiple languages and link them together at large scale. You're doing an extremely easy case where 99% of the "meaty parts" are written in a single language (Nix) in a single repository (nixpkgs) with a very formulaic structure, where the answer you're looking for is also in that same repository. Finding like 90% of things isn't actually hard for that reason. I love Nix, I love that, but it is a fraction of the cases these tools handle. The hard case is this simple extension of your example: I found the definition of X package in Nixpkgs. Now how do you find all the users of X, across, say, 10 other repositories? Or all of GitHub? That isn't theoretical; if you make a backwards-incompatible API change to a NixOS module, you might want to know that. So suddenly you need a lot more things in place to make this work. Now change X so that it's something like an RPC interface defined in protobufs, and then change your query to "What clients are using this interface and what servers define it", and keep in mind these can all be in different languages in different repositories. That is not so easy with Ripgrep, but tools like Kythe or SourceGraph can handle them with far, far greater ease. Also, for many cases, you actually need language aware search and the search engine needs to understand more structure than just utf8 bytes to answer you. Ripgrep won't help you find the definition of that fucked up thing that was defined by a template instantiation that was hidden by a macro in C++ from a header that was generated at build time, that you are only looking up because it was barfed out from some huge stack trace that came from production. SourceGraph can answer that instantly with no false positive (assuming you have SCIP indexing as part of your build system.) Yes, ripgrep is nice and I use it when writing nixpkgs patches all the time. But something like SourceGraph, Kythe, OpenGrok etc are all really a completely different class of tools. And the "X gigabytes" fact isn't really that impressive when you realize all the weight is in the .git/ directory of Nixpkgs; ripgrep will instantly filter that out and never even search it, so it isn't actually searching a working set of that size. The actual pkgs directly is in contrast about 300MB. It still is crazy fast though, no doubt.
pluto_modadic 3y ago
Gosh... Cloud9, Elastic, Sourcegraph, CockroachDB, what is it with companies making things closed source?
lallysingh 3y ago
I've worked at more than one place that considered sourcegraph and decided it was too expensive (and these were software shops with money to spend on good tooling). With language servers working so well now, I think SG may have already missed the boat and this looks like an early part of their death spiral.
elzbardico 3y ago
The crude reality is that development tools cost real money to be developed and we no longer are in a environment where VCs are showering companies with bags of money without some really down-to-earth, concrete plan for profitability. Companies like Microsoft and Google can have themselves the luxury of keeping projects like VSCode and Golang open source. The economics make sense for them. Not all companies can do that, especially small startups. I remember a time when buying a C compiler cost money, real money. I don’t think we are ever going back to that, but I also think that paid tools with enterprise pricing are back. I don’t care about the morality of that and I am arguing pro neither against it. It is a just a fact, a seismic shift that we can’t really stop.
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Luckily you can create the biggest of things with just a compiler and a text editor. A repl helps but is gravy. Devs have gotten drunk on devtool sugar imo.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    Yes. Tools like sourcegraph are cool, but it is not like they are going to make you X times more productive.
    - whateveracct 3y ago
      The marginal efficiency gain over the free ripgrep is so small

444 points by CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

License was changed almost 3 weeks ago, 5.1.0 release blog post skips this information. There's still no official announcement. It seems like the author of Sourcegraph OSS containers announced that his release train is now dead https://github.com/jensim/sourcegraph-release-train/ https://github.com/jensim/sourcegraph-release-train/

kissgyorgy 3y ago

The title might be a bit misleading. Released code can't not be open source anymore, only future development.

caiusdurling 3y ago
"no longer" suggests it was, but now isn't, which appears to match reality?
bayindirh 3y ago
> Released code can't not be open source anymore... It can be. You can release under a "source available" license barring it from being used (even compiled), derived, incorporated into other works, making it basically "for eyes only, or we sue you to oblivion". Many people consider licenses as window decorations, but they are not.
- tkfu 3y ago
  Parent poster is saying that the already-released versions, which were released under an open source license, are still open source.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Yes you can't retroactively change licenses, but it's also important to know that just because you can read a source file, the file in question is bona-fide open source or free software. Many people lack this knowledge from my experience.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      We had a Windows CE dev license back in the Cambrian Era which included visibility of the source tree, but God help you if you tried to change it and make your own build.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Solely being able to view source code without other rights absolutely doesn’t make it open source. In general if something isn’t under an open source license it isn’t. ADDED Unless it’s public domain and then it effectively is.
- arlcode 3y ago
  Further distribution can be put under any license they want but any copy anyone received in the past that was Apache 2 licensed remains such and can be used as before. So if anyone wants to put a past release online they are free to do so (unless there are parts of the code that were restricted before). It would be prudent to remove branding where possible but that's mainly a precaution.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Well licenses are window decorations when it comes to personal use.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Well, no. Personal use doesn't free you the obligations GPL brings, for example.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Assuming you or a company doesn’t redistribute it, copyleft doesn't matter.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > doesn’t redistribute it Well sure, but that's a really big caveat.
        ghaff 3y ago
        I would assume personal use doesn’t involve redistribution. Probably true for most company software for internal use as well.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Does this vary by jurisdiction maybe?
    - ilyt 3y ago
      nope. If something in jurisdiction would make license invalid that would not mean you can do what you want with the code, that would mean that you can't use that license.
      - anticensor 3y ago
        If a jurisdiction releases you but does not prevent you from performing an obligation, licences do not typically consider that a reason for invalidation of the licence.
- mort96 3y ago
  If the code was under a restrictive source-available license, it wasn't open source...
- bjord 3y ago
  I think most people don't consider viewable source projects to be truly open source
bdcravens 3y ago
I think most understand the idea that a project can change its license at any point, but that doesn't apply to previous version. (In this case, any version prior to 5.1.0)

sixhobbits 3y ago

https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/commit/3cd931ef54407c966fc3a5940a06f0b95a7aadd0 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/commit/3cd931ef54... has some additional information, but not a lot.

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
One would expect announcement regarding license change to precede implementation of said changes :/

caiusdurling 3y ago

https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu... appears to be a comment from someone in the project laying out why they've changed.

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
A few months back they removed free enterprise license that allowed 10 dev seats, some smaller companies were holding back the updates and looking at the OSS version - I guess, not anymore
bogwog 3y ago
So it seems like nobody was using the OSS version, and they didn’t want to maintain two versions if nobody was using it. It also says they offer a free self hosted version for individuals, but I couldn’t find that on their site.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  First they offered a Free Enterprise tier for 10 seats, they've removed this a few months back, their OSS lacked even some basic things as language support, building it was impossible due to lack of documentation/breakage in the build process for several months and they didn't offer sourcegraph-oss images. At some point, one individual on Github managed to get it working and his images got 10k+ pulls on DockerHub. That's hardly "nobody". Also, some people removed telemetry from OSS version so Sourcegraph didn't even know that anyone is using it. Also, they were open-closed-open-closed in the last 5 years. Their website is a mess, even employees on github are providing contradicting information. Original commit message that relicensed bunch of stuff had errors in it regarding what exactly will be closed source now.
- smarx007 3y ago
  I am using the version you can install via `brew install sourcegraph`, though they seem to have abandoned it to make people install Cody (which requires an account even for local use). I will probably use the Brew version for as long as it works. The major pain point is that it seems to have a timeout for repo discovery at 5s, so you can't just clone all of your GH starred repos and search them this way. P.S. Started a discussion regarding the Homebrew package, but pretty sure it's canned: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/discussions/54589 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/discussions/54589

deng 3y ago

Did anyone actually use the open version? I dimly remember that I looked into it like 2-3 years ago, but all the really interesting stuff was not included in that. The pricing for enterprise was absolutely bonkers, something like 100$ per month&developer, which already made it clear that they are obviously only targeting big players with infinite budget. Seems the pricing is now changed, and it "starts at 5k/year" for some "Enterprise Starter" edition, but despite lots of bullet points it is very unclear to me what the limitations really are. I'm actually really interested in this product and it might be a good addition to our tool set, it's a shame the pricing is so opaque.

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
OSS version didn't have official Docker images prebuilt, you had to build them yourself and for a long time the OSS build was broken. A year or two ago they promised they'll fix it or even provide official OSS image, this didn't happen. One person finally created a working release train on github and was releasing OSS containers, Docker Hub reports it as 10k+ pulls, which is a lot for unofficial image. I tend to stay away from any 3rd party tool that's not really a main part of infrastructure and requires sales contacts. It's wasting my company time to deal with sales when it comes to a few licenses, just give me a number input and buy button. I also lost some confidence regarding Sourcegraph, as it seems they change their direction, pricing and rules multiple times per year
- deng 3y ago
  Yes, I remember the Docker thing, but I also remember that at least the language parsers we were interested in were only supported through some kind of plugin mechanism, which the OSS version did not support, so it was useless for us, so I didn't ever bother testing it.
  - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
    So basically their "open source" offering wasn't really open source, it wasn't even open core, as you had to build it yourself, the build wasn't working for a long time and even if you managed that, some languages were enterprise-only. Nice. How to get free marketing by strapping Open Source to your product and writing a bunch of announcements.

nullcipher 3y ago

It was open first. Then closed. Then open again. So, now it's closed again...

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
That's how you build confidence in your company and executive decisions. Let's see if we get the same amount of upvotes their post got when they open sourced the thing.
1letterunixname 3y ago
[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jmclnx 3y ago

I am getting: > This blob took too long to generate. But you can view the raw file.

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
It was working when I posted it, if you click view raw file it will take you to the changelog.

gigatexal 3y ago

Their product basically got sherlocked by Microsoft when they released Github Copilot, no?

imjonse 3y ago
Sourcegraph has recently released Cody which is the more direct competitor to Copilot. And it's free for individual developers.
- itake 3y ago
  I think Cody is based on OpenAI tech. They haven’t built their own model yet (as of 8 weeks ago)
  - ar-jan 3y ago
    They're using Anthropic by default, but it's possible to connect it to the OpenAI API as well.
CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
Their main product is Code Search, Cody is a new thing.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Code Search seems a limited market so I would be surprised if their plan wasn't to go after deeper code tooling in the future. Otherwise I don't see how their $2.6 billion valuation made sense. They likely thought that an iterative approach based on human encoded code understanding would allow them to build better systems. Pretty reasonable assumption 1+ years ago. Then GPT3/4 proved that you could just dump data into an AI and probably get an even better result.
  - smarx007 3y ago
    But that makes no sense. If AI is the future, you'd leave Code Search open-source and make the AI assistant closed-source.

breadwinner 3y ago

If a web-based code search engine is what you need here's one: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/ https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/

williamDafoe 3y ago

Never found a startup on the premise that someone else's product will be inadequate forever. The recent rewrite of github search has probably made sourcegraph irrelevant. If you may recall, original github search used almost the most horrible algorithm possible. It dropped all punctuation and spacing and just searched for identifiers. No patterns allowed, no quoting allowed. One of the only meta-arguments was filename:xyz. Now that github has improved its basic search functionality, sourcegraph might be doomed. I used sourcegraph at Lyft which (at the time) had unlimited money to waste on software tools, and installed the open-source version at Databricks but nobody cared.

ilyt 3y ago
I still regularly download gh repos just to grep them because while less bad it still somehow sucks...
- thunky 3y ago
  Me too, but usually after I already have 15 GH tabs open and have wasted a bunch of time.
- ta988 3y ago
  Yep I have a small shell script that caches a repo with only the last commit files and runs ripgrep on it. I'll give a go at live grep that's discusses above, that look exciting.
- woadwarrior01 3y ago
  I’m curious to know, have you tried their dedicated search site? cs.github.com Their default search still sucks, IMO. But the one I mentioned is comparable to Google’s internal CS.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Why do that have a good search that's not part of the main site?

philipwhiuk 3y ago

If they've accepted contributions from third parties they can't relicense those contributions, right?

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
As a general rule with open source projects it basically depends on whether they had a contributor licence agreement. Sourcegraph appear to have had one: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/blob/main/CONTRIB... https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-/blob/dev/CLA.txt https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-... It includes a grant of copyright licence so I guess this is nailed down.
- j1elo 3y ago
  And that's why I believe that requesting a mandatory CLA should drive contributions down in OSS projects. Otherwise, you're basically providing free labor without the counterpart's promise of keeping the code free, which is (should?) be the reason one is making their contributions to start with.
  - dolmen 3y ago
    Except that external contributions to a full product are usually minuscule (mostly typos) compared the codebase.
- sdesol 3y ago
  I also don't believe they receive many non-employee contributions (probably because the software is more advanced than most open source projects). You can get a breakdown of their contributions at: https://imgur.com/a/UCJ6y9r https://imgur.com/a/UCJ6y9r The interesting one is he second image which filters by code contributors that have contributed more than 500 lines of code churn. Note, I'm not taking into consideration if code contributions were merged or not, just that somebody created a pull request/commit.
kbumsik 3y ago

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I installed and ran Sourcegraph on my laptop a year or so ago. It was cool, but I didn’t keep it around. There is a lot of competing technology now, from GitHub’s improved search to new open source LangChain and LlamaIndex support for better document chunking of source code in several languages.

eurekin 3y ago
Whoa, first time I'm reading about Llama Index... How does it work? Where can I learn more?
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  You can search for LlamaIndex docs, or you can read my short book for free online https://leanpub.com/langchain/read https://leanpub.com/langchain/read
phillipcarter 3y ago
That's part of the impetus behind their Cody product. It uses the code search system as a semantic index. It actually works very well in my experience.

rbanffy 3y ago

I remember having used a Red Hat (?) tool back in 2002 for understanding the source code of the Brazilian voting machine so we could more easily port it to Windows CE (the 2002 model ran on it initially, then on Linux from 2004-ish). It had a very Motif-like interface. Does anyone else remember its name?

mechanicker 3y ago
> I remember having used a Red Hat (?) SourceNav (Source Navigator) by any chance? I used it quite a lot before completely moving to Emacs.

isityouyesitsme 3y ago

Their support in the demo period sucked, their complex C++ support was lacking, they didn't integrate into modern C++ build systems well, and their prices were insane. They kept trying to push this "campaign" feature on us, which is an overly-complex auto-refactoring tool that couldn't even support our non-proprietary, well-known build system. For the cost of their license, we instead hired two developers for code refactors, who then went on to make other tooling, and we didn't need to hire someone to babysit their crappy service integration. I would not say that they had found their niche when speaking to us. Perhaps it has gotten better.

mardifoufs 3y ago
2 devs for the price of the license?! How expensive are we talking about here?
- chefandy 3y ago
  If it's true, I'd love to hear how many devs their marketing people say you'd have to hire to replace the functionality.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  It was 100USD per month per seat some time ago, with a high number of devs it may actually be beneficial to roll something on your own.
- isityouyesitsme 3y ago
  We hired 2 junior developers for maybe 20K more total, in total compensation, than their original quote. But you (and child) comment made me realize that I don't remember the terms of the proposal, whether it was per year or for 2 years. So it might have been a 1:1, not 1:2. In the end, their product was just completely insufficient for our needs, and it was clearly just gluing open source tools together. The part we couldn't do as well was the front end, and they clearly put a lot of effort into it. It looked and worked nicely. But that didn't help us when they couldn't parse the code to populate it.
3y ago

asdf4life 3y ago

WizardCoder is free

smarx007 3y ago
It's not a code search tool. This discussion is not about Cody but the Sourcegraph search.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rattray 3y ago

If anyone's looking for an open-source search tool for grepping across repos (or even one large repo) at insane speed, I highly recommend livegrep: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep Demo at https://livegrep.com/search/linux https://livegrep.com/search/linux We used it at Stripe and it was quite popular; often, searching even a single repo was faster on livegrep than with ripgrep locally. A post reviewing it: https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/faster-code-search-livegrep/ https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/faster-code-search-livegrep... A post by its creator, nelhage, on its impact: https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/ https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/ and another on its architecture: https://blog.nelhage.com/2015/02/regular-expression-search-with-suffix-arrays/ https://blog.nelhage.com/2015/02/regular-expression-search-w...

synergy20 3y ago
https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ is open source and very good at huge source base, e.g. for the whole android and linux kernel together, fast and useful.
- smarx007 3y ago
  Any guides on deploying it, preferably with ready-made Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files? I looked into it a while ago and all I found was quite outdated.
  - synergy20 3y ago
    it took me about one hour in the past to install it, no docker though, not really that difficult and I feel it's really worthwhile once it starts to run.
- mynonameaccount 3y ago
  too bad it is associated with Oracle
  - 3y ago

moneywoes 3y ago

What’s the use case? Finding useful libraries?

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
Global code search across hundreds of repos even if they are hosted at different SCMs

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

smarx007 3y ago

What is a good open-source system for code search if I want to plug 100 or so git repos into it and have it available over the web? GH search is not desirable because it would search too broadly and would not cover repos on Gitlab etc. I looked at the Debian code search [1] in the past, but for some reason thought it required a bit too much effort and didn't complete my investigation of it. Though [2] looks pretty approachable. Sourcegraph mentioned Zoekt [3], but I am not sure how usable it is. If it was pretty good, why did Sourcegraph OSS exist? Finally, from all the discussion how Sourcegraph OSS was very behind in the past few years, I guess there is no serious plan to fork it? Edit: GCS release [4] seems to have been open-sourced without a frontend. Edit2: Livegrep [5] and Opengrok [6] were recommended higher in the thread. Quite excited to try them out but if someone has working Docker Compose configs, I would be very thankful for the head start. Edit3: there is also Eureka [7]. Seems less powerful but easier to deploy. [1]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs https://github.com/Debian/dcs [2]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/main/howto/building.md https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/main/howto/building.md [3]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt [4]: https://github.com/google/codesearch https://github.com/google/codesearch [5]: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep [6]: https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ [7]: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka

__float 3y ago
[4] is not really a usable 'product'. Livegrep (https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep) was inspired by it and is very usable. [3] used to be a Google open source project as well, but it fell out of maintenance, and Sourcegraph took it over. It powers most of the basic regex/literal search in Sourcegraph. Mozilla's code is searchable in Searchfox (https://searchfox.org/ https://searchfox.org/) which uses the indexer from Livegrep, combined with their own Git indexer and language-specific cross reference databases. OpenGrok (https://github.com/oracle/opengrok https://github.com/oracle/opengrok) is also rather well known, but I have found it to have a slightly worse UI than alternatives.
smarx007 3y ago
There is also Hound [8]. [8]: https://github.com/hound-search/hound https://github.com/hound-search/hound

xer0x 3y ago

Sourcegraph explanation for the change: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu...

that_guy_iain 3y ago

I fundamentally believe that open-source is a model that doesn't lend itself to sustainability. We all know that lots of companies that can afford to pay for software don't because it's free and open-source. I fundamentally believe that the decision to give away software results in less revenue and therefore less money for developers to work on the product and make it better. In the ecommerce world there is Magento, Shopware, and Spryker. Magento is open-source and massive. Shopware is open-source and very good and reliable. And then there is Spryker a closed-source platform which is very good from a product point of view. I feel if you look at the product development from those three Spryker is far ahead of the open-source options. I think we all like the benefits of grabbing a library/tool and using it for free for personal use or when we're starting out and can't really afford to pay so want things to be open-source. But I really think the future is source-available that mixes the ability to use something for free but when they have the money to require a commercial license. This is why I choose to go with the Business Source License - which allowed for additional grants as well as allowing free use for non-production uses. I added in an additional grant for if they're generating very little revenue. As a small independent developer who is developing a billing system it seems fair that people generating revenue start to pay for a license. While it allows those who are just starting out to use it for free and pay when they start making money. As I grow I'll be increasing the amount the additional grant allows. For me this seems the best of both worlds. One where those who can't afford can use it for free and those who can pay help fund future development. We keep seeing companies going from open-source to a source-available approach for a reason. [1] - https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE

ikiris 3y ago
Yeah Linux will never last against Novell.
- salawat 3y ago
  Speaking of which... I've been looking for an open source equivalent of the old NetWare Client. Anybody know of one? Specifically interested in the "runs scripts at login" aspect.

sqs 3y ago

Sourcegraph CEO here. Sourcegraph is now 2 separate products: code search and Cody (our code AI). Cody remains open source (Apache 2) in the client/cody* directories in the repository, and we're extracting that to a separate 100% OSS repository soon. Our licensing principle remains to charge companies while making tools for individual devs open source. Very few individual devs (or companies) used the limited-feature open-source variant of code search, so we decided to remove it. Usage of Sourcegraph code search was even more skewed toward our official non-OSS build than in other similar situations like Google Chrome vs. Chromium or VS Code vs. VSCodium. Maintaining 2 variants was a burden on our engineering team that had very little benefit for anyone. You can see more explanation at https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu.... The change was announced in the changelog and in a PR (all of our development occurs in public), and we will have a blog post this week after we separate our big monorepo into 2 repos as planned: the 100% OSS repo for Cody and the non-OSS repo for code search. You can still use Sourcegraph code search for free on public code at https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com and on our self-hosted free tier on private code (which means individual devs can still run Sourcegraph code search 100% for free). Customers are not affected at all.

sqs 3y ago
Also, I appreciate all the comments here and find them fair and thoughtful, including the critical stuff. You can join our Discord at https://discord.gg/rDPqBejz93 https://discord.gg/rDPqBejz93 to chat more after this goes off the HN frontpage. And if anyone wants to chat with me directly to share feedback or complaints, let me know (and we can share the recording publicly if you're OK with it).
sensibleduck 3y ago
Are you planning on continuing all development in public, or will you make the code private?
CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
Sourcegraph only provided non-OSS images and the build process was difficult and broken for a long time, the application itself was frequently broken in OSS version as well, searching issues for a few minutes brings up quite a few results. [1] [2] [3] [4] It's no wonder, that the usage of OSS version was pretty low, when few were able to build it and even if they managed that, the resulting application was broken every few releases. Both VS Code and Chromium are easy to build, due to their nature and popularity, they are available prebuilt from many sources. I would install "unofficial" Chromium build from my distribution's repository, I wouldn't keep my code in unofficial Sourcegraph build from some random person on Github. Comparing them is rather unfair, but there's another issue that stopped OSS adoption. For a long time, official Sourcegraph Docker image came with a 10 seat free license, which suited many people and they weren't looking for alternatives like OSS build. I would argue that announcing license change and closing of your product as a small block in change log file or when someone mentions the problem in Github Issues is not adequate for such a change. Not using open-first principles, restricting the product by using enterprise only plugins, which others mentioned under this post, not providing open source builds and changing license without preceding announcement, while previously using open source terminology for some feel-good free marketing leaves a bitter taste. Especially with so many companies doing this right now due to interest rates. https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43231 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43231 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43203 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/43203 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6790 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6790 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6783 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/6783

josephcsible 3y ago

Yet another concrete example of why copyleft licenses are better than pushover ones and why CLAs are bad. It would have been illegal for them to do this if the old license were copyleft and they accepted contributions without a CLA.

charcircuit 3y ago
I don't understand your comment. What do you think would have happened if it was GPL instead of Apache? That a person would come out of nowhere willing to rewrite all the SourceGraph owned code in the repo?
- trasz4 3y ago
  [dead]
- josephcsible 3y ago
  No. If it were GPL instead of Apache, and it had contributions from other people without a CLA, then Sourcegraph wouldn't have been legally allowed to change the license, so nobody would have had to rewrite anything.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Sourcegraph would still be able to relicense tbe contributions made by their employees.
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      Yes, but they'd have had to rip out everything from all of the external contributors, and that'd be a big enough deal that it'd probably change their mind.

Pet_Ant 3y ago

Fun Fact: Steve Yegge, famous blogger, is Head of Engineering there (or at least was recently) https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge

swyx 3y ago
still vocally is! https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/all-you-need-is-cody https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/all-you-need-is-cody

sourcegrift 3y ago

They were grifters from the very beginning, squatting langserver.org and making it seem like they it was their creation, mentioning microsoft exactly once (or was it zero times initially?)

zomglings 3y ago

I've never in general been a fan of "open core" products. As someone who builds things, it feels like poor craftsmanship to put obstacles in front of your users and limit the extent to which they can use your work. It also feels like decisions to hamper how people use a product are driven purely by greed. Let's imagine a world in which Sourcegraph were completely free software. They would probably still have enterprise customers pay them to securely host Sourcegraph on-premise. They wouldn't be able to charge per seat. They would have to make sure their product was cheap enough that their customers wouldn't save a ton of $$ by hiring engineers to maintain Sourcegraph on premise themselves. I am curious if they (or anyone else running an open core business) has estimates for: 1. How many customers they would lose if they went fully free. 2. How much revenue they would lose if they went fully free. Building free software and charging people to host it can be the foundation for a sustainable business, but it's unlikely to give VCs the kind of outcomes they want from a successful investment. To be honest, I think it's fine for infrastructure to be closed/proprietary. There are good reasons to do this if you are writing programs for which security is important - releasing your infrastructure code freely gives attackers a lot of ammunition to work with. If we believe in the power of automation and in building high quality software, it is possible to build free software that: 1. Is easy for you to deploy and maintain securely on customer infrastructure. 2. Requires very little operational overhead from its you as the host (in terms of support). 3. For which the infrastructure code is proprietary. This can lead to a very solid business. Why don't we see more businesses like this?

return_to_monke 3y ago

Hey dang, you might want to point to this comment instead: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issuecomment-1594967818 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/53528#issu...

egberts1 3y ago

Whew. Got confused with SourceTrail C++ code viewer made by yet another Google intern, Eberhard Gräther of CoatiSoftware. https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/discontinue_sourcetrail/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourc...

anotherhue 3y ago

If you find yourself needing to search a large (xGB) codebase you should at least try some CLI tools first: fl() { # find line rg "$@" . --color=always --line-number --no-heading --smart-case | fzf --preview-window='top:60%:+{2}+3/2' \ --preview='bat --style=full --color=always --highlight-line {2} {1}' \ --delimiter=':' -n 3.. \ --bind "enter:execute(vim {1} +{2})" } Obviously not the same, but I often find it enough. Short demo https://imgur.com/a/hsyINjS https://imgur.com/a/hsyINjS

aseipp 3y ago
Not really comparable, honestly. "Gigabytes" has nothing to do with it. Sourcegraph can e.g. index multiple repositories across multiple languages and link them together at large scale. You're doing an extremely easy case where 99% of the "meaty parts" are written in a single language (Nix) in a single repository (nixpkgs) with a very formulaic structure, where the answer you're looking for is also in that same repository. Finding like 90% of things isn't actually hard for that reason. I love Nix, I love that, but it is a fraction of the cases these tools handle. The hard case is this simple extension of your example: I found the definition of X package in Nixpkgs. Now how do you find all the users of X, across, say, 10 other repositories? Or all of GitHub? That isn't theoretical; if you make a backwards-incompatible API change to a NixOS module, you might want to know that. So suddenly you need a lot more things in place to make this work. Now change X so that it's something like an RPC interface defined in protobufs, and then change your query to "What clients are using this interface and what servers define it", and keep in mind these can all be in different languages in different repositories. That is not so easy with Ripgrep, but tools like Kythe or SourceGraph can handle them with far, far greater ease. Also, for many cases, you actually need language aware search and the search engine needs to understand more structure than just utf8 bytes to answer you. Ripgrep won't help you find the definition of that fucked up thing that was defined by a template instantiation that was hidden by a macro in C++ from a header that was generated at build time, that you are only looking up because it was barfed out from some huge stack trace that came from production. SourceGraph can answer that instantly with no false positive (assuming you have SCIP indexing as part of your build system.) Yes, ripgrep is nice and I use it when writing nixpkgs patches all the time. But something like SourceGraph, Kythe, OpenGrok etc are all really a completely different class of tools. And the "X gigabytes" fact isn't really that impressive when you realize all the weight is in the .git/ directory of Nixpkgs; ripgrep will instantly filter that out and never even search it, so it isn't actually searching a working set of that size. The actual pkgs directly is in contrast about 300MB. It still is crazy fast though, no doubt.

pluto_modadic 3y ago

Gosh... Cloud9, Elastic, Sourcegraph, CockroachDB, what is it with companies making things closed source?

lallysingh 3y ago

I've worked at more than one place that considered sourcegraph and decided it was too expensive (and these were software shops with money to spend on good tooling). With language servers working so well now, I think SG may have already missed the boat and this looks like an early part of their death spiral.

elzbardico 3y ago

The crude reality is that development tools cost real money to be developed and we no longer are in a environment where VCs are showering companies with bags of money without some really down-to-earth, concrete plan for profitability. Companies like Microsoft and Google can have themselves the luxury of keeping projects like VSCode and Golang open source. The economics make sense for them. Not all companies can do that, especially small startups. I remember a time when buying a C compiler cost money, real money. I don’t think we are ever going back to that, but I also think that paid tools with enterprise pricing are back. I don’t care about the morality of that and I am arguing pro neither against it. It is a just a fact, a seismic shift that we can’t really stop.

whateveracct 3y ago
Luckily you can create the biggest of things with just a compiler and a text editor. A repl helps but is gravy. Devs have gotten drunk on devtool sugar imo.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Yes. Tools like sourcegraph are cool, but it is not like they are going to make you X times more productive.
  - whateveracct 3y ago
    The marginal efficiency gain over the free ripgrep is so small