Sentry’s Software Licensing Journey — And Why It Matters for You

Sentry’s software licensing journey has been a long and winding one. The application performance and error monitoring leader, which serves 4 million developers across 90,000 organizations, started as an open source project under the BSD 3-Clause license. It switched to the Business Source License in 2019 before creating and adopting a new license, the Functional Source License, in 2023. Sentry’s open source management team has gained significant insight into software licensing strategies along the way, including tips and tricks for managing compliance that your organization may find useful. Join Chad Whitacre, Sentry’s Head of Open Source, and Gavin Zee, Head of Commercial Transactions in our upcoming webinar for a behind-the-scenes look at the company’s licensing (and re-licensing) path and how it relates to their efforts to tackle the open-source sustainability crisis, plus practical guidance on managing compliance with source-available and open-source licenses. We’ll also discuss: -How and why Sentry relicensed from the open-source BSD license to the source-available Business Source License and later Functional Source License -Lessons learned from creating, publishing, and adopting a new license (the Functional Source License) -The bigger picture of Sentry’s software licensing compliance initiatives across open source, source available, and proprietary licenses -Potential roadblocks for complying with source-available licenses (and how to address them)