It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license.
It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image?
Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the copyright discussions there.)
I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product, you were still not fully in control and someone else exploits the economic value without investing.
Our way of dealing with this was delayed open source publication. That led to the FSL [1], and later to bootstrapping the Fair Source initiative [2] to establish an umbrella term that does not conflict with Open Source. What I have found interesting in the years since is that many companies are wrestling with the same problem, but feel that the two year head start the FSL gives is too aggressive.
I actually still find that surprising. I would like to know whether this is a legitimate concern that two years is not enough, or mostly a perceived one. To me, moving to an Apache 2 or MIT license after a relatively short period is a much stronger statement than a license that risks the project effectively ending if the commercial entity is unwilling to relicense it more openly at the end of its life such as the O'saasy license.
I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose:
A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it.
I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like shared protocols, libraries, etc...)
Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it, essentially paying to keep it on your turf. Reasons for not stealing:
1) Security CVEs and patches. No serious company will use it without these.
2) Bugs, if I take it I will have to fix it.
3) Merging changes. If the source is branched, I will have to get people to move to my project. Otherwise, I will have to employ people just to merge the changes all day.
4) Authority. I would argue that if you do not control the narrative of the project it is essentially similar to abandonware of the project. What would a customer/client prefer more? to use the original product or some copy of it? If you are the Authority that inspire people, they will not go to the competition.
I remember in the past the open source were thought of as communists. I think that we are far from that, and big capitalist companies knows how to profit from open source (even Apache 2.0 and MIT).
People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0.
If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Very cute but I am pessimistic about the battle tested nature of the second clause. Licenses are like mythical swords in fantasy stories: the famous ones are famous because they are not only objectively well made, but also because they survived in battle. Imagine some blacksmith presenting King X with GoblinsbaneY touting it as the greatest sword ever yet having only a blank face when asked what battles it has won. He’d be laughed out of court.
Or maybe an analogy closer to home (Anduril notwithstanding) would be cryptography code. New ideas are cheap compared to code that has been to hell and back in the wild and remained unbroken.
(I assume this license is novel and untested. I’ve not heard of it before. Happy to hear otherwise, of course.)
I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO.
I used the MIT license for https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna mainly because the challenge is usually in product velocity and direct sales/distribution. Blocking from SaaS is explicitly entirely redundant.
Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO
Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 29.4 ms ] threadIt’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image?
Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the copyright discussions there.)
The restriction is on the redistribution of the software - the same rights must be passed on when redistributing it.
this license places (complicated) restrictions on how the software is used.
Our way of dealing with this was delayed open source publication. That led to the FSL [1], and later to bootstrapping the Fair Source initiative [2] to establish an umbrella term that does not conflict with Open Source. What I have found interesting in the years since is that many companies are wrestling with the same problem, but feel that the two year head start the FSL gives is too aggressive.
I actually still find that surprising. I would like to know whether this is a legitimate concern that two years is not enough, or mostly a perceived one. To me, moving to an Apache 2 or MIT license after a relatively short period is a much stronger statement than a license that risks the project effectively ending if the commercial entity is unwilling to relicense it more openly at the end of its life such as the O'saasy license.
[1]: https://fsl.software/
[2]: https://fair.io/
I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like shared protocols, libraries, etc...)
Even though it may seem harsh to apache 2.0 the code, no one will steal it since you are maintaing it, essentially paying to keep it on your turf. Reasons for not stealing: 1) Security CVEs and patches. No serious company will use it without these. 2) Bugs, if I take it I will have to fix it. 3) Merging changes. If the source is branched, I will have to get people to move to my project. Otherwise, I will have to employ people just to merge the changes all day. 4) Authority. I would argue that if you do not control the narrative of the project it is essentially similar to abandonware of the project. What would a customer/client prefer more? to use the original product or some copy of it? If you are the Authority that inspire people, they will not go to the competition.
I remember in the past the open source were thought of as communists. I think that we are far from that, and big capitalist companies knows how to profit from open source (even Apache 2.0 and MIT).
If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Or maybe an analogy closer to home (Anduril notwithstanding) would be cryptography code. New ideas are cheap compared to code that has been to hell and back in the wild and remained unbroken.
(I assume this license is novel and untested. I’ve not heard of it before. Happy to hear otherwise, of course.)
https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/
Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO