Update
from @chadwhitacre
The Story So Far
A year and change ago, Sentry bought Codecov. Eight months ago, we published it under BUSL-1.1. Our headline said "Codecov is now Open Source," which set off a vigorous discussion about the meaning of the term Open Source, out of which emerged this proposal from @adamhjk:
I think the way forward here is to make what I suspect is a loose confederation of folks using non-compete licenses to actually get together and draft their own set of values. To then brand that. And stand behind it proudly.
We started a repo at getsentry/loose-confederation with discussions about overall goals as well as brand naming. We also started writing a new license, FSL, which we shipped five months ago. The loose-confederation repo has been downscoped to focus on that.
Meanwhile, Software Commons emerged as a strong brand for something, but not for what we originally set out to do based on Adam's suggestion. Software Commons is now evolving into an attempt to solve the sustainability crisis in Open Source; you can join that conversation over here. The present ticket was brought from what is now the fsl.software repo to this here new repo, which is for a website called howtoshare.software.
Our Purpose Here
From @dcramer on getsentry/fsl.software#2:
The intent here is to normalize a category of software which provides more freedom than closed source, and more freedom than typical source-available software. It should not diminish the value of FOSS (or OSI's definition of "Open Source"), but should also not be overly confusing to end-users, and not include prejudice.
I've updated the issue title based on this intent: "Normalize software sharing between closed-source and Open Source." The site currently live at howtoshare.software pursues this intent by defining levels of source availability. I propose that we use this issue to see if we can converge on details under this general approach.
Original
from @dcramer
Let's educate the broader open source community on where these style of licenses make sense. There's far too many conversations where Open Source is one giant bucket of things, but thats not how the world actually operates.
For example, if you're building a library, FSL almost certainly should not be used (and frankly, non-compete in general should be avoided). Obviously thats our opinion, but given this entire thing is our opinion thats ok, and it doesnt need stated that the team has a lot of historical domain experience in mainstream open source. I would go so far as to say we should suggest libraries be put under a fully permissive license, but we should run the exercise of the core licenses and which models they might work best in (permissive, copyleft, non-compete, and maybe even closed source/proprietary?).
We should also not exclusively tie it to the type of code, but the organizational and/or business model in general.