Plausible Community Edition

How does AGPL license work for such services? Would I have to distribute source code of my web application if I use Plausible CE? If not, how is it different from MinIO where as far as I understand the AGPL licensed use of the product requires distribution of entire code base?

We've been using Plausible for over four years at our startup. Always reliable, simple, and fast metrics. Open source is tricky to scale and maintain while also ensuring a consistent income. Happy to hear they're making this change to protect their brand, IP, and ensure a sustainable future for the team.

> The code for all these features is still available to the public so it can be reviewed and inspected, but these features will not be a part of Plausible CE and they’ll have a different license.

Will the code for these features be in the same repo, or be kept separate? If the former, is it easy to remove them to create a fork that is fully open source? Or does the community edition actually contain proprietary code that is disabled?

> if you want to contribute to our codebase in the future as an external contributor, you’ll need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

What are the terms of this CLA? Does it mean that Plausible could change the license to something that isn't FOSS in the future?

Sounds similar to the issues FUTO [1] is having and why they made their "Source First" license[2].

Plausible definitely took a different approach though. Interested to see how it works out.

[1] https://futo.org

[2] https://sourcefirst.com

> Our license doesn’t prevent these corporations from using the Plausible Analytics name and logo either, as these are a part of our self-hosted code

Don't licences normally explicitly bar this? Tough over-sight for Plausible unless there is an actual reason for letting other businesses pretend to be you. Perhaps they figured it would act as a bit of marketing?

I've been very pleased with Plausible as a Google Analytics alternative. I don't really care about the privacy and open source stuff, but the integration is simple and if you just want to know "how many people are looking at my site, where are they coming from, etc" it's fantastic. GA4 is really too complex for most people.

Out of curiosity: if the companies reselling Plausible (the ones mentioned in the post) kept the old version running, the old license applies?

(I know they wouldn't get updates, security improvements, etc)

The treats and risks from "corporations" described can be true, but if you are a small site using the self hosted version, this isn't good news. The product will not be fully featured as the managed version, and the feature gap may be bigger and bigger on the long term. CE is like a "free basic plan" that you host, they now have a better reason to up-sell the users of the self hosted product to the managed "premium" version.

This is good news, I set this up once and then realized it was a 30-day self-hosted trial and abandoned it as it was for a tiny site with no budget for SaaS

I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me.

These new ones preach they are better than Google Analytics (also another evil tracking system) yet some how these ones still track you anyway and you're paying for analytics which is useless and you're punished for growing.

It might be best to save money and not use any analytics system, it's just noise at this point.

Am I missing something?

Any particular reason for the submission OP?

Related discussion just two days ago:

Plausible Analytics: GDPR Compliance w/o Cookie Consent Banner

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909006

is this like a PR stunt ? genuinely curious

I seriously wonder what HN thinks is a valid business model for writing open source software. Everyone here seems to insinuate that people want to create a business and use open source as a growth hack. But how do you differentiate those from people who want to write open source (because they believe in it) and have to have a business to support their livelihood?

This is a team of eight people that tried to do everything „right“ by changing to a FOSS license (which happened four years ago) and the changes announced here sound very reasonable (changing branding and removing undocumented APIs). But all comments are dunking on them as if they haven’t even read the article.

"We want to reduce the threat from businesses such as hosting companies and other resellers who try to commercialize popular open source projects. We’ve seen our self-hosted code being used in a way it was never intended for by corporations that don’t care about us or open source."

I don't understand why people think they can stop others from commercializing their open source project. You can give something to the world. You can hold onto IP to stop others from cashing in. You can't have it both ways.

I've been a paying customer and advocate of Plausible for over 2 years, and this is not ok.

Marko frequently posts on social media about Plausible's revenue growth, currently at over $1M ARR with a tiny team and little overhead.

They are doing great financially. Yet in this post he tries to gain sympathy by focusing on "we only make $300/mo in donations".

Frequently moving the goalpost on what it means for your product to be open source betrays a lack of integrity and will have me, and probably others, looking for an alternative.