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Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

elastic.co

101–110 of 378 posts

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#101
post #97

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 cutof…

Yea I read that as if E/K is used to power your backend analytics for your dev team we're OK but using for client facing reports, a key feature of your application, is blocked.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#102
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…

[deleted]

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#103
post #87

Where does Elastic claim SSPL is open source?

Also, why is SSPL not open source? As far as I can tell, it mostly just seems like the APGL, but taken to 11. I can definitely appreciate why it's a problematic license, but I don't think "not open source" is its problem.

It seems it has neither the OSI's blessing as an Open Source licence, nor the FSF's blessing as a Free Software licence. Can anyone comment on why not, given that the AGPL has the blessing of both organisations?

edit Here's an informative StackExchange comment. [0] Apparently it's a good deal stricter than the AGPL, and introduces much more legal uncertainty.

[0] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7523/

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#105

It's just a change to make sure that those who resell ES as a service share their code. We use AWS's ES. And, as far as I'm concerned they already open-source their version. SSPL is actually helping the open-source community here

> It's just a change to make sure that those who resell ES as a service share their code.

No, its purpose is clearly to prevent others from reselling ES as a service at all since it's effectively impossible for anyone offering ES as a service to comply with the SSPL, if they were only concerned about others that offer ES as a service sharing their code AGPLv3 would be sufficient.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#106
post #61

Luckily there are faster and smaller alternatives in Rust for the ElasticSearch - Toshi[1], Meili[2] and Sonic[3]. In the age of Rust there is no need to use JVMs overhead. [1] https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi [2] https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch [3] https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

I didn't realize rust and the jvm solve the same problem.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#107

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…

The author says in the end that the problem is not Amazon. Then links to a post where he suggests that companies maintaining the open source should have "invested the resources to build stronger communities around them. They would have reached out to Amazon, encouraged them to contribute back to the projects, and helped them to do so."

Of course, they should "encourage" Amazon not to steal their product and business model. Right.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#108

It's just a change to make sure that those who resell ES as a service share their code. We use AWS's ES. And, as far as I'm concerned they already open-source their version. SSPL is actually helping the open-source community here

> their code

Meaning the entire codebase of the infrastucture that provides the offering. I.e. the underlying code behind AWS. Not a big deal right?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#109
post #94
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...…

None. That's clearly not offering Elasticsearch-as-a-service.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#110

I wonder how many people contributed to Elastic which do not work for Elastic.co ? Those folks have reasonably counted on having fruits of their labor to be available under Apache 2.0 and now they only get to use them with SSPL restrictions

Lets have a round of applause for the Lucene contibutors !
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