Yet another software license is vying for the attentions of SaaS companies seeking to align themselves with the open source realm, without compromising their commercial endeavors.Sentry, an app performance monitoring (APM) company that helps companies such as Disney, Microsoft, and Cisco track and resolve laggy or buggy applications, has transitioned its core product to a new license it designed called the Functional Source License (FSL). The company’s open source chief Chad Whitacre says the license is for any SaaS firm that wishes to “grant freedom without harmful free-riding.”“There’s been a long history of companies with deeper pockets and more resources taking advantage of traditional open source companies,” Whitacre told TechCrunch over email. “Open source companies, regardless of license or the pedantic definition, have become increasingly reliant on being venture-backed, for-profit, or more importantly being supported by the companies that rely on their code.”SwitchRecent history is littered with examples of companies that grew off the back of open source projects, but later abandoned those roots to protect their commercial interests. In 2021 Elastic switched Elasticsearch from an Apache 2.0 license to a duo of source-available licenses, a move designed to prevent third-parties such as AWS from essentially selling its own version of Elasticsearch “as-a-service” without contributing much back to the original project. More recently, HashiCorp did something similar with Terraform, while the likes of Element (with Matrix) and Grafana transitioned from permissive open source licenses to so-called “copyleft” licenses, essentially forcing users to keep derivative projects open source, or pay for a license to use the product.As for Sentry, the San Francisco-based company started out more than a decade ago under a permissive BSD 3-Clause license, one that comes with few restrictions. Similar to the other aforementioned companies, Sentry relicensed its core product back in 2019 to counter what co-founder and CTO David Cramer called “funded businesses plagiarizing or copying our work to directly compete with Sentry.“This has included taking marketing content from our website, plagiarizing our documentation and framing it as their own, or straight-up copy/pasting our product visuals,” Cramer wrote at the time

Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin.

The AI-powered code cartography solution brings a new approach to code visualization and organizationRALEIGH, N.C., July 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Devnaut , a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that creates, visualizes and organizes codebase maps through AI, today announced its public launch out of High Alpha Innovation 's venture-building program with pre-seed investment from Capital One Ventures .As codebases continue to grow in size and complexity, developers, engineers, and technology leaders are increasingly facing the difficult and time-consuming challenges of navigating unfamiliar, frequently-changing code. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed identify unclear ownership boundaries as their primary challenge at work, and nearly three out of four wish they spent less time tracking down colleagues to resolve application issues, according to a study published by Sentry in partnership with SlashData.Devnaut is revolutionizing the way developers interact with complex codebases through its AI-powered code cartographer. Tweet thisDevnaut is addressing this challenge and revolutionizing the way developers interact with complex codebases through its proprietary, intuitive, AI-powered code cartographer. The code exploration and collaboration tool fosters increased productivity, team collaboration and significant reductions in forensic work by helping developers, managers, and executives obtain real-time visibility. Using the C4 model , Devnaut's novel approach is enabling organizations to visualize and automatically organize code."The industry has been building low-level code tools geared toward serving single pain points for developers for decades, but no one has solved for the macro-level perspective. By visualizing complex codebases, Devnaut is eliminating the burden of time-consuming manual forensic work and empowering developers to focus on what matters most: building great software," said Devnaut Co-Founder and CEO, Jeff White