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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if you had donated to a "charitably minded" organisation, then later discovered that they were only an "almost charity". I don't think you would be pleased with that. This is how someone donating their time and code to FSL projects might feel. They are not "quite upfront" about the fact that they aren't FOSS [1].

Open source is constantly under attack from various corporate entities, so it makes sense that we should guard our image. Asking people to be clear about what is and isn't FOSS is a basic consequence of that. FSL is a source available license, and I am simply asking that its users make this fact clear instead of trying to associate themselves with FOSS. That is not unreasonable. That is not toxic. That is simply asking that people don't obfuscate the truth.

[1] https://open.sentry.io/

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"Open source" is not a charity and you don't donate to Sentry. People have come out of Guantanamo Bay less tortured than that analogy.

> Asking people to be clear about what is and isn't FOSS is a basic consequence of that.

You are throwing around wild accusations bordering on the conspiratorial and making demands that are just beyond reason. The simple good-faith reading is that the Sentry people want to be as "open as possible" without compromising their business to the point of being unviable. There is nothing I know in the entire context and history of Sentry that would dispute that, and you've certainly provided zero evidence of it.

Quite frankly it amazed me that the people at Sentry even try in the face of complete rubbish that's being thrown around here by various people.

Go to this link https://open.sentry.io/ and explain how it is made clear that Sentry isn't actually open source. You can't. No amount of good faith turns "We're Open Source and we don't feel the need to qualify that statement" into "we aren't open source but we'd like to be close to". They are even directly asking in that page for help (for people to volunteer their time). The title of that page is a lie and they make no attempt to clarify it. I can't think of any good faith reason why they wouldn't just write "We're Source Available" since that is a more accurate description of what they are and they've been repeatedly told this. It's obviously less misleading not to over promise when you don't actually know the truth of the matter. The only justifications I can imagine for that title are that they either don't understand that they aren't open source, or that they want to appear open source to attract customers. Given they've had it explained to them repeatedly and even members of their company admit in this thread admit that they aren't open source (but claim they don't say that they are which is a lie) and that the page in question is advertising their product, I can only conclude the latter justification. That they are doing this to move product rather than to inform people.

> People have come out of Guantanamo Bay less tortured than that analogy.

A charity is an organisation of people can donating money or doing volunteer work to contribute to a cause they see as in the common good. An open source project is an organisation of people donating money or doing volunteer work to contribute to a piece of software for the common good of its users. They are more than a little similar. Even if they aren't, people deserve to know where their work goes if they are doing it for free.

Re: open.sentry.io, some of the language should probably be more clear. We’ll take a look at it.

Thank you. I hope to see this quickly amended to reflect that your software is source-available. I would also advise that you are very careful around this in the future. As you can see, I and many other developers are very passionate about this topic and any perceived miscommunication could be disastrous for Sentry's reputation.

https://github.com/getsentry/team-ospo/issues/211 ftr

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