Licensing
We have the following goals regarding our products and services:
- Anyone should be able to run Sentry and Codecov for themselves or their business.
- There should be no difference in features between our SaaS and our self-hosted offerings (no open-core model).
- There should be minimal limitations on usage of code; should be as free as possible.
- There should be protections from other companies selling our work without giving back.
This last bullet point — protection from other companies selling our work — may sound controversial but we found it to be necessary to ensure Sentry as a company can survive and keep working on Sentry and Codecov the products.
All these lead us to develop the Functional Source License, which we describe as eventually open source. Although this license is not among the OSI-approved licenses and does not fit the strict OSI definition of open source, it gives you all the freedoms provided you are not offering a commercial version of Sentry or Codecov. Even more, it removes this one limitation after a two-year grace period, turning into a bare Apache-2.0 license eventually. You can read more about our license and the whys behind it on our blog. Since we strive to keep everything as open and free as possible, we are only using the more restrictive FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 license on the Sentry and Codecov web app code.
The Three We Use
Here are the 3 licenses we use:
Apache License, Version 2.0 (Apache-2.0)
Sentry’s default license of choice is the permissive but protective Apache-2.0 license. This license is OSI-approved, widely adopted, and still has some safe-guards like attribution requirement or patents protection. Any new projects are licensed under Apache-2.0 unless there’s a concern around GPL-2.0 compatibility for adoption.
We use the MIT license as a fallback for the Apache-2.0 license where we need to reach to a wider audience, due to the GPL-2.0 incompatibility. This is the license we use for all our SDKs.
Functional Source License, Version 1.1, Apache 2.0 Change License (FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0)
All components powering the main Sentry and Codecov web apps use FSL, which limits their usage in a commercial Sentry-like offering.
If you have questions, please reach out to us at oss@sentry.io.
Employees can review our full licensing policy.