is a BSL licensed service acceptable for sysadminy use cases?

[Harald Sitter]

Ahoy ahoy

I do on occasion write behind the scenes micro services for various
things we need in KDE and usually more specifically neon. It's always
been a big lament of mine that we don't really have a good way to
record errors from these services. Gitlab meanwhile has builtin
support for a piece of software that would allow us to do this: sentry
[1]. The trouble is that sentry is only kind-of open source [2] and
consequently there is some concern if we really should use it, even
though the use case is pretty much exclusively for sysadmin internal
affairs rather than a service we render to the outside or the wider
KDE community even. Bhushan and I also looked at similar software but
found nothing nearly as hot, and of the serviceable stuff I believe
the best option also had ultimately relied on only kind-of open source
software (mongodb IIRC).

What's your thoughts on the subject? Can sysadmins use not-quite-free
software for internal stuff?

Personally I would put forward some arguments pro:

a) we do already on occasion need to run non-free software to
facilitate our work. our windows builders for CI and binary factory
come to mind.

b) given we want to use this as an extra bit of sugar we'd not rely on
their service for production or anything. if we decide that we don't
like it next week we could conceivably just throw it out the window
again.

c) I do feel for the developers need to turn a profit so most software
freedom is better than no freedom in my book

[1] https://invent.kde.org/help/operations/error_tracking
[2] https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry#enter-the-business-source-license-bsl

HS