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Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

elastic.co

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Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#21

Post by tannhaeuser »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6
Pet_Ant wrote: post #3

I hope that SSPL becomes the standard for companies so that at least it becomes a known entity instead of a proliferation of bespoke licenses: like if CockroachDB moved to it as well. Personally, I'd rather see a more aggressive AGPL where REST calls are considered linking and trigger virality and I believe that would meet the definition of open source by the OSI while preserving the value of the commercial version.

> Personally, I'd rather see a more aggressive AGPL where REST calls are considered linking and trigger virality That would be a horrible precedent. Sending an http request to a server should not trigger copyright violation. This is similar to newspapers who claimed that having links to their site, violates copyright.

> This is similar to newspapers who claimed that having links to their site, violates copyright.

No newspaper has claimed that ever to the best of my knowledge, and it would make absolutely no sense to. What's being criticized is so-called "rich linking", ie. previewing content such as Wikipedia articles from search engines or news articles from aggregators without taking viewers to the primary source/site. People having a radical anti-copyright agenda have conveniently named this "rich linking" to dilute the discussion, as have news aggregators to downplay the issue.

As an aside, the way the EU copyright reform is being formulated into national law in Germany has been criticized as outright contrary to the whole purpose of the reform, and coming straight from pro-Google lobbyists [1].

[1]: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/eu-urheberrechtsrefor... (in German)

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#22

Post by npiit »

nopzor wrote: post #2

wow, this is super interesting, but i can't say i'm surprised by this move. the landscape has really evolved over the last few years for companies trying to build a business around open source. at grafana labs we are closely following these developments, and are constantly wrestling with decisions around what is best for our own licensing strategy. all of our peers (eg. mongodb, elastic, redis, confluent, cockroach,…

I thought Grafana was doing great with its managed offerings. Personally I'd prefer you consider BSL before SSPL since it's usually clearer to most people.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#23

Post by shawnz »

fiberoptick wrote: post #14

I wonder where this leaves the AWS-sponsored Open Distro for Elasticsearch? ( https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ ) Seems to me that they have no choice but to hard fork off of the last Apache-licensed release of Elasticsearch et al

Presumably this change will impact Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch service, but why would it impact Open Distro?

Although, I guess there will not be much of an incentive for Amazon to continue development of Open Distro after this change.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#24

Post by npiit »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #3

I hope that SSPL becomes the standard for companies so that at least it becomes a known entity instead of a proliferation of bespoke licenses: like if CockroachDB moved to it as well. Personally, I'd rather see a more aggressive AGPL where REST calls are considered linking and trigger virality and I believe that would meet the definition of open source by the OSI while preserving the value of the commercial version.

>Personally, I'd rather see a more aggressive AGPL where REST calls are considered linking and trigger virality

That's why I never understood the point of SSPL. Is this exactly what AGPLv3 is supposed to be for?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#25

Post by darkwater »

dhd415 wrote: post #16
LittlePeter wrote: post #13

What does it mean for Elasticsearch Service on AWS?

They'll have to base their service off the last Apache-2 version of Elasticsearch. Unrelated to this license change, but they'll probably have to rename it, too, after the trademark infringement suit finishes.

Or they could, you know, just respect the new license and publish their changes and part of their "secret sauce". I bet it would be anyway tightly coupled to other AWS internal services so nobody would get hurt in the process.

Edit: fixed typo

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#26

Post by dhd415 »

darkwater wrote: post #25
dhd415 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll have to base their service off the last Apache-2 version of Elasticsearch. Unrelated to this license change, but they'll probably have to rename it, too, after the trademark infringement suit finishes.

Or they could, you know, just respect the new license and publish their changes and part of their "secret sauce". I bet it would be anyway tightly coupled to other AWS internal services so nobody would get hurt in the process. Edit: fixed typo

I can't imagine they'd want their competitors to see any of the internals of their control plane or other internal infrastructure.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#27

Post by shawnz »

arpinum wrote: post #12

"protection against public cloud providers offering open source products as a service without contributing back". I have no issue with whatever license they choose, but let's be honest, its not about contributing back to these projects, its inserting a poison pill clause that they know cloud providers can't meet. Specifically, by contributing back they mean, per the license: "If you make the functionality of the Prog…

Elasticsearch couldn't exist without the open source Lucene project which is at its core.

Lucene is licensed under the permissive Apache license which is why Elastic is able to release proprietary paid modules that link with it.

Now they are closing the same holes that they themselves used to create their product. Contributing back is definitely the last thing on their minds.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#28

Post by LukeEF »

I can understand the motivation - AWS' approach, particularly to elastic, has been pretty awful, and migrating away from Apache/GPL/MIT is like a coming of age for the big databases (Mongo, Cockroach, Elastic...) - but calling the article 'Doubling Down on Open' stretches credibility.

Be honest, treat us like adults and cut all the 'we're doing this to remain open' crap. You are a public company who wants to increase the cost of development to your competitors so you can increase your market share. That's it .

Maybe that is too cynical, but I recently went through a license shift (GPL to Apache) with TerminusDB and we were clear that honesty about motivation was the best formula for comms.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#30

Post by LukeEF »

LukeEF wrote: post #28

I can understand the motivation - AWS' approach, particularly to elastic, has been pretty awful, and migrating away from Apache/GPL/MIT is like a coming of age for the big databases (Mongo, Cockroach, Elastic...) - but calling the article 'Doubling Down on Open' stretches credibility. Be honest, treat us like adults and cut all the 'we're doing this to remain open' crap. You are a public company who wants to increase…

Special mention for this paragraph: 'we expect that a few of our competitors will attempt to spread all kinds of FUD around this change. Let me be clear to any naysayers. We believe deeply in the principles of free and open products, and of transparency with the community.' Get your offense in early and try not to mention open source!
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