If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust. With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering. If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.

Earlier discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725815

I'm personally on the fence how much of it is intentional... from the_mitsuhiko's side it probably isn't, but "the purpose of a system is what it does" and all.

Don't believe the salesmen, self hosting Sentry has been the most liberating feeling in a long while. Buy a cheap dedicated server with 64 gigs of RAM from Hetzner, run their install script and it's literally up and running. I'm processing volumes that would bankrupt me on their managed service without breaking a sweat.

Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc.

But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.

> Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this?

That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.

With O'Sassy specifically, the end of life problem solves itself. If the original vendor stops offering the software, a third party offering the software is not competing with the original vendor. Thus, the third party can offer paid hosting for the software if the original vendor does not.

Or am I reading it wrong? I am not a lawyer.

If the company is sold for its assets is the code released to the public? Or removed from escrow and kept private?

> Why not just release the software after your set threshold of time versus opening it up with such a license?

That requires trust that the company will do this. The FSL is irrevocable and comes with a future promise.

> Also how does this work with contributor contributions?

The same way as any other thing with a CLA works. If you don't have a CLA, then you have a bit of a mess.

presumably because a) it still allows the source code to be available and used for the 'permitted purposes' (i.e. anything that's not directly competing), and b) it represents a concrete commitment to open up, not just a pinkie promise (even if they were to have a license or contract which promised it, it would not be as easy to rely on as actually having the source code published. Companies have reneged on such promises before).

And yeah, by my reading essentially people can contribute code or publish patches (with just a plain MIT license in principle), just the original and derivatives still can't be used for non-permitted purposes until the timer is up.

> Why not just release the software

You may want to allow certain uses (self-hosting, etc) even before it transitions to a fully open-source license. Having access to the source code can also help SaaS users debug certain situations.

The issue is these are mostly academic points of view. Sentry’s model on the FSL (and previously the BUSL) has shown to be working just fine at scale.

Whereas, for example, trademark protections have shown to fail easily.

So people can argue it doesn’t work, but so far we only have evidence to the contrary and Sentry is quite successful.