is a BSL licensed service acceptable for sysadminy use cases?

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 26 de maig de 2021, a les 16:07:14 (CEST), Harald Sitter va escriure:
> 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?

Is this about us writing BSL software or us using BSL software? I think using, but want to be sure.

What's the use case of the software? How locked in are we into it?

> 
> 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.

I think this is a bit different "obviously" [*] to create Windows software you need to run Windows.

> 
> 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

This is a bit of a slippery slope, and makes me a bit sad with it since it agrees with the "you can't make money with Free Software" argument.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> [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

[*] I know mingw, cross compiling i know