Sentry is now Fair Source

Today we’re launching Fair Source, a new approach to software sharing that is safe for companies to adopt and developers to use. Before Fair Source, companies that wanted to engage the developer community with their core products often did not know how to do so while maintaining control over their roadmap and business model. The result is that most software products today are closed-source. With Fair Source, companies have a new option.

The Fair Source option is not theoretical. Codecov, CodeCrafters, GitButler, Keygen, and PowerSync were all closed-source products that are now shared with the world thanks to Fair Source. By gathering together under the Fair Source banner, we hope to encourage many more companies to join us.

Of course, Fair Source emerges within the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and let’s be honest: there is and has long been a real tension over the right for a single company to control the governance and commercialization of a shared software project. The tension came to a head for us at Sentry a year ago when we published the source for Codecov under a non-compete license and labeled it Open Source. Chef co-founder Adam Jacob spoke for many when he challenged us to articulate our own values and come up with a new term to stand behind. “Just don’t call it Open Source.”

Point taken. Fair Source is our new term.

Defining Fair Source

Fair Source is software that:

1. is publicly available to read;
2. allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and
3. undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).

The intention is for the first point to be a bright line, and to invite exploration within the second. In addition to Sentry’s Functional Source License (FSL), Fair Source also recognizes the new Fair Core License (FCL) from Keygen and MariaDB’s venerable Business Source License (BSL or BUSL) as fitting the Fair Source Definition. We expect further licenses to emerge as companies apply Fair Source to their particular business model. Fair Source runs on GitHub, and the README is where we document governance and our processes for recognizing new licenses and company adoption.

The third point is also intended as a bright line, and a key differentiator of Fair Source from Open Core and other approaches. Delayed Open Source publication (DOSP) is a concept established by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). DOSP ensures that if a Fair Source company goes out of business, or takes their software in an undesired direction, the community or another company can pick up and move forward. Major forks are, of course, a rare event (though perhaps they are becoming more common). Time will tell whether our intuition is right that DOSP provides a meaningful long-term forking benefit while allowing companies and developers to better align on the rules of engagement up front for single-vendor projects.

Resolving a Long-Standing Tension

Companies have long sought to benefit from the Open Source software development model while maintaining control of the roadmap and business model for their core products. In fact, the tension between community and commercial approaches was already there in Netscape’s launch of the Mozilla project in 1998, the veritable Big Bang of Open Source. Community-governed Open Source has since carried the day for shared infrastructure software such as Linux, Kubernetes, and React. By adopting a new term for corporate-governed software sharing, Fair Source opens a path for companies to share their end-user software products and platforms in new and interesting ways.

Sentry’s experience is evidence that what we now call Fair Source can provide meaningful protections for companies and meaningful rights to developers. Compliance departments at over 10,000 organizations of all sizes have determined that it is safe to run Sentry internally under Fair Source licensing. Some modify it for their own use. That this has not economically undermined Sentry is equally clear. We recently passed 100,000 cloud customers, and $100 million in annual revenue.

Thank you to all of Sentry’s users who have engaged with us over the years, whether trusting us to host Sentry and Codecov for you or operating them yourself. Thank you to CodeCrafters, GitButler, Keygen, and PowerSync for participating with us in this moment by sharing their previously closed-source products and putting their weight behind the Fair Source term.

Learn more and join us at fair.io.