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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
dsrw|2 years ago
kakwa_|2 years ago
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.
romange|2 years ago
geewee|2 years ago
Is it open-source? Well, depending on your definition probably not. Is it a fair license? Yeah I'd think so.
akvadrako|2 years ago
What you might mean is that it isn't free/libre as in FOSS.
ksec|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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