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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

> It's also ironic to me that this software is being built on top of git, and thus is a business model entirely dependent upon FOSS, while wanting to differentiate and build a business on top of it with a moat but still sharing the code in a way that protects them

To be fair (no pun intended), they could build it on top of two-year-old Git just the same. I rather fear that two years of DOSP are too short to be attractive for many companies that might otherwise adopt that license model.

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When we really think about it, what's the real fear behind 2-year vs 4-year DOSP? Is it that users will choose the 2-year OSS version over the latest version, or that it encourages more viable competition? The former sounds like a value problem, and the latter sounds like an adoption problem, and those share a root problem.

The BUSL with a 4-year delay has shown to work, so why wouldn't the FSL with a 2-year delay also work? I personally feel like 2 years is a good enough head start i.r.t. competition, while providing users with more viable options to recover a lost or sunken ship.

The longer a product/service exists, the easier it is to compete with it based on the version two years prior, in particular if the source of the current version is also available (even if you can’t use it verbatim — but you can build your own variant of newer features, possibly even with a fully compatible API).

Sure, but the same can be said for the 4-year delay, too. I don't really see a big difference, and I'm using the FCL [0] which is also 2-year DOSP.

If the author is no longer improving the product in 2-year cycles, they deserve to be usurped.

[0]: https://fcl.dev

I’m assuming that they do keep improving the product, but the longer the product exists, the lesser that improvement will be, relative to what was achieved cumulatively in the years before. A moat is built up by keeping accumulating years of improvement, not by only retaining a constantly diminishing lead.

This will probably be the biggest weakness with the FSL.

Some companies will say, "it's FSL 1.1, but three years." Or, "it's FSL 1.1, but four years." Or, "it's FSL 1.1, but only if we go bankrupt." And on and on.

FSL is strict on two years. We certainly would not promote a version that’s variable. You could make one, but it’s our job as a community to say “no!”

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