Unlike Simple Analytics (the post authors), you deploy Counterscale to your own Cloudflare account and control the code + data end-to-end. It also uses no cookies, has no browser fingerprinting, and has no monetized SaaS offering.
It only has 90 days retention though, which could be viewed positively.
> However, it's not meant to be a community project or used commercially for free.
But they can?
Source available can mean everything from "proprietary, you can look but you can't touch" to "this source code is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0".
Creative Commons projects can be used in commercial projects, for free, provided you adhere to the license terms - but they do not meet the open source definition.
This is exactly the problem. "Source available" refers to such a massively wide gamut of possible licensing scenarios that it may as well be meaningless.
> Which is exactly why they now need to switch licenses and put newer features behind more restrictive terms so users are forced to pay
Sentry switched to BUSL in 2019, almost 5 years ago.[1]
Most of the aforementioned fundraising occurred after the license change (e.g. the $90MM round you mention from 2022, and another $60MM round in 2021).
The "restrictive terms" - which again, were introduced in 2019 - are that you can use the software but not use the code to compete against the software's authors. For 99.99% of users, this has been a non-issue, because most people have no interest in doing so.
> Is it possible to run Counter scale on-prem against logs from HAProxy, Nginx, or Apache?
Probably. But it's not for that use case (for example, Counterscale intentionally strips IP addresses).
> There's also a newcomer called Plausible which has a FOSS Community Edition [1] which can be self-hosted.
One of the goals of Counterscale is that you can deploy it "fire and forget" with a single terminal command.
Contrast this to Plausible CE, which makes it clear you need some basic adminstrative skills to operate the software:
> you should have a basic understanding of the command-line and networking to successfully set it up
The point is that Counterscale is designed differently than traditional "self-hosted" solutions in order to promote ease of deploy. It comes with serious constraints (like a dependency on Cloudflare). But some people may prefer those tradeoffs.
Plausible is great (I use it at Sentry), but I want to clarify that only Plausible Community Edition is open source, and it note it differs significantly from their paid SaaS offering:
Because those are the underlying services that the above software is built on. And they allow the system to handle both very few to many many requests/sec for basically $0. That's the point of the article.
To say, "I can run a server that can handle a bunch of requests for free" doesn't mean much. Of course you can do that. But can you replicate the aforementioned system for free? Probably not.
Maybe self-operated is better terminology -- that's fair. (Though I think one of the key points is that there is almost nothing to operate.)
For me, the fundamental issue is whether I am controlling what code is out there, I'm paying the pure infrastructure costs, etc. So whether it's self-hosted or self-operated doesn't matter.
For some it sounds like if you aren't managing it at the operating system level then it isn't self-hosted.
I assume you're not talking about this company because there is no such script on spotlightjs.com (easily verifiable), and the docs are also actually in the repository:
Your browser's dev tools don't show you what's happening inside your server (and any downstream services) when responding to the browser's HTTP requests. Spotlight does. That's what's special about it.
In the early 2000s in college I wrote a basic terrain renderer in C++ and OpenGL. It randomly generated some textured terrain, and had some basic features like you could move the camera and look around. Nothing super impressive.
A few months later I landed a 16-month internship on a team writing an OpenGL ES driver. There were 160 applicants, but the hiring manager said I was the only applicant who had actually played around with OpenGL.
> Then release your software under a source available non-compete license with the caveat that it will become open source when you stop working on it. (Basically what you have already done.)
Done.
Note that the license website is pretty clear that it is not Open Source. If you find a place where that is not true, you can open an issue on the website’s repo and we’ll address.
I don’t feel it’s deflection because Armin is the creator of Flask, a founding engineer, and our Principal Architect. He additionally is a member Sentry’s senior engineering/product leadership, and a key contributor to our licensing efforts. It’s his blog and his personal comments, and we are not a monolith, but I feel his statements are a good reflection of our values. Mine at least. (Disclosure: I’m also a part of this group.)
The Head of Open Source has followed up on the Codecov conversation and expanded on those comments [1]. I earnestly hope you’ll weigh these official comms higher than an HN comment.
I don’t feel “given you already have a proprietary license, why wouldn’t you just make it freely permissive” needs much explaining. We develop the software; the exclusivity period helps us monetize the work (vs giving it away to someone else who would).
I think it’s worth reading the announcement from 2019 when Sentry first switched to BUSL. The original article links to many such pieces.