> The freedom to fork has to be available to the community or any subset thereof, and viable. This is the weakness of the BUSL- because it prevents the community, or a subset thereof, from pursuing a key source of revenue to fund a fork.
I believe the main issue today is less the BUSL but that 3 or 4 years which are the common terms are a bloody long time. The secondary issue is that the BUSL is a huge turnoff for contributions for a potential community fork. I know people forked Sentry from the BSD source rather than the BUSL rollover versions, even though the Apache2 licensed Sentry is much newer (though still years old).
We might not owe anyone anything, but we also are not particularly happy with the license choice we have at the moment. We had the hope that we can start a positive trend for combining a SaaS business with Open Source and I don't think it has quite worked out how we wanted. A lot of companies rally behind the BUSL that have very different values than we do, and that adds to the negative perception of the license.
I believe the main issue today is less the BUSL but that 3 or 4 years which are the common terms are a bloody long time. The secondary issue is that the BUSL is a huge turnoff for contributions for a potential community fork. I know people forked Sentry from the BSD source rather than the BUSL rollover versions, even though the Apache2 licensed Sentry is much newer (though still years old).
We might not owe anyone anything, but we also are not particularly happy with the license choice we have at the moment. We had the hope that we can start a positive trend for combining a SaaS business with Open Source and I don't think it has quite worked out how we wanted. A lot of companies rally behind the BUSL that have very different values than we do, and that adds to the negative perception of the license.