Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Fair Source Definition (via) Fair Source (fair.io) is the new-ish initiative from Chad Whitacre and Sentry aimed at providing an alternative licensing philosophy that provides additional protection for the business models of companies that release their code.

I like that they're establishing a new brand for this and making it clear that it's a separate concept from Open Source. Here's their definition:

Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS):

1. is publicly available to read;
2. allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and
3. undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).

They link to the Delayed Open Source Publication research paper published by OSI in January. (I was frustrated that this is only available as a PDF, so I converted it to Markdown using Gemini 1.5 Pro so I could read it on my phone.)

The most interesting background I could find on Fair Source was this GitHub issues thread, started in May, where Chad and other contributors fleshed out the initial launch plan over the course of several months.

# 9th October 2024, 6:17 pm / licenses, open-source, pdf, sentry, chad-whitacre

Optimizing for Taste. David Cramer’s detailed explanation as to why his company Sentry mostly avoids A/B testing. David wrote this as an internal blog post originally, but is now sharing it with the world. I found myself nodding along vigorously as I read this—lots of astute observations here.

I particularly appreciated his closing note: “The strength of making a decision is making it. You can always make a new one later. Choose the obvious path forward, and if you don’t see one, find someone who does.”

# 27th September 2023, 4:34 am / ab-testing, david-cramer, sentry

The first ever commit to Sentry (via) This is fascinating: the first 70 lines of code that started the Sentry error tracking project. It’s a straight-forward Django process_exception() middleware method that collects the traceback and the exception class and saves them to a database. The trick of using the md5 hash of the traceback message to de-dupe errors has been there from the start, and remains one of my favourite things about the design of Sentry.

# 6th November 2019, 11:08 pm / django, sentry

How Sentry Receives 20 Billion Events Per Month While Preparing To Handle Twice That. RabbitMQ federation, nginx and HAProxy, Riak as a key/value store, data processing is still mainly Python with a little bit of Rust. As of July 2017 it’s all hosted on Google Cloud Platform.

# 8th November 2017, 11:32 pm / scaling, rust, sentry

Try hosting on PyPy by simonw. I had a go at hosting my blog on PyPy. Thanks to the combination of Travis CI, Sentry and Heroku it was pretty easy to give it a go—I had to swap psycopg2 for psycopg2cffi and switch to the currently undocumented pypy3-5.8.0 Heroku runtime (pypy3-5.5.0 is only compatible with Python 3.3, which Django 2.0 does not support). I ran it in production for a few minutes and didn’t get any Sentry errors but did end up using more Heroku dyno memory than I’m comfortable with—see the graph I posted in a comment. I’m going to stick with CPython 3.6 for the moment. Amusingly I did almost all of the work on this on my phone! Travis CI means it’s easy to create and test a branch through GitHub’s web UI, and deploying a tested branch to Heroku is then just a button click.

# 5th November 2017, 7:17 pm / pypy, python, heroku, travis, sentry