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Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

elastic.co

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Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#91

Post by CSDude »

alexfromapex wrote: post #88
Areading314 wrote: post #82

This is an alarmist headline. The SSPL license to which they are switching only requires your code to be open sourced if you are providing Elasticsearch itself as a service. This change is directed at cloud providers who take open source software and then provide them as a service for payment without contributing to the project. If you are using Elasticsearch on your backend to build search-enabled products or websit…

I think these are relevant from the Elastic blog post: - no impact on the overwhelming majority of our user community - no impact on our cloud customers or self-managed software customers Also, this helped calm my nerves: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing

They are dangerously vague. Is AWS at concern or the log as a service providers? Are you willing to take that risk?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#92

Post by ajsharp »

Areading314 wrote: post #82

This is an alarmist headline. The SSPL license to which they are switching only requires your code to be open sourced if you are providing Elasticsearch itself as a service. This change is directed at cloud providers who take open source software and then provide them as a service for payment without contributing to the project. If you are using Elasticsearch on your backend to build search-enabled products or websit…

Appreciate the clarification.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#93

Post by JarlUlvi »

The way I understand it, AWS has been creating derivative products that don't work very well based on ELK. AWS has also not been contributing back to the community anything, while raking in the millions for https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/the-elk-stack/

Many elastic pros recommend not using the AWS version because it doesn't operate properly.

While I am pro OSS I can understand why a company based on OSS would not want to subsidize a much larger AWS who is extracting value, and also, their direct competitor.

When I talked with AWS about an estimate for Managed ELK, and also, an EC2 based ELK, I received estimates > 50M a year. Crazy pricing

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#94

Post by cduzz »

CSDude wrote: post #83

How does this affect people providing “search” functionality of arbitrary items, but not Elasticsearch itself (AWS)? Where is the line drawn? Is the SSPL vague enough for that?

So, let's say you've got a product catalog in some SQL database. Your business processes update inventory and availability and leadtime and such in that database.

But you really like the lucene natural language search functionality, so you copy your database into a lucene database for searching. But hey, elasticsearch takes care of a bunch of tedious problems, so instead of using raw lucene, you use elasticsearch...

So, you've got a PHP web application that queries this cache of the catalog stored in elasticsearch; what's your legal liability?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#96

Post by EwanToo »

CSDude wrote: post #83

How does this affect people providing “search” functionality of arbitrary items, but not Elasticsearch itself (AWS)? Where is the line drawn? Is the SSPL vague enough for that?

This is the crux of the problem.

If you're purely processing internal logs on an internal service, you're probably good.

If you're exposing an API or a UI to paying customers which calls Elastic search to run a query, then it's maybe not great.

Everything needs to be caveated with "maybe" or "possibly", because nobody knows how it'd go in court.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#97

Post by Nican »

Areading314 wrote: post #82

This is an alarmist headline. The SSPL license to which they are switching only requires your code to be open sourced if you are providing Elasticsearch itself as a service. This change is directed at cloud providers who take open source software and then provide them as a service for payment without contributing to the project. If you are using Elasticsearch on your backend to build search-enabled products or websit…

Also not a lawyer, but I find the language in the license pretty interesting and ambiguous choice of words.

> [...] where obtaining access to the Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software is a primary reason or substantial motivation for users of the SaaS Offering to access and/or use the SaaS Offering

It seems like you can still offer Kibana to end customers, but I wonder where the cutoff line for "substantial motivation" ends.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#98

Post by ignoramous »

Areading314 wrote: post #82

This is an alarmist headline. The SSPL license to which they are switching only requires your code to be open sourced if you are providing Elasticsearch itself as a service. This change is directed at cloud providers who take open source software and then provide them as a service for payment without contributing to the project. If you are using Elasticsearch on your backend to build search-enabled products or websit…

TFA explains why Elasticsearch switching to SSPL is indeed a cause for concern. Money quotes:

> Basically, it’s a hostile proprietary license masquerading in open source clothing. By using an SSPL project in your code, you are agreeing that if you provide an online service using that code then you will release not only that code but also the code for every supporting piece of software, all under the SSPL.

> It’s not a stretch to interpret the wording of the license as requiring users of the SSPL’d software therefore to release the code for everything straight down to the bare metal. There are those who will point to the FAQ for the SSPL and claim that the license isn’t interpreted in that way because the FAQ says so. Unfortunately, when you agree to a license you are agreeing to the text of that license document and not to a FAQ. If the text of that license document is ambiguous, then so are your rights and responsibilities under that license... This ambiguity puts your organisation at risk.

See also: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts...

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#99

Post by dang »

Areading314 wrote: post #82

This is an alarmist headline. The SSPL license to which they are switching only requires your code to be open sourced if you are providing Elasticsearch itself as a service. This change is directed at cloud providers who take open source software and then provide them as a service for payment without contributing to the project. If you are using Elasticsearch on your backend to build search-enabled products or websit…

Re "alarmist headline": the comment was originally posted in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25781695, but it's a good subthread so I moved it over when merging the threads.
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