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Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

elastic.co

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Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#151

Post by AmericanChopper »

victor106 wrote: post #45
LukeEF wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

This. I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have AWS make so much money out of it, to make the largest shareholder the richest man on earth, while contributing nothing back to any of the open source projects. This has to be fixed or we will see less and less developers open sourcing quality products

I don't think it's reasonable to attribute motive to the contributors in this way. Changes like this protect the elastic enterprise, whether they align with the motives of contributors would have to be evaluated on a per-contributor basis.

I've made several contributions to ELK, and my only motive has been that it's useful open source software, and I want to make it more useful. I personally don't care who profits off the codebase, I think anybody should be free to. I personally would object to anybody trying to lock down how it can be used, and would see any attempt to do so as running completely counter to my personal motivations as a past contributor.

Which is exactly what I see Elastic doing here.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#152

Post by treis »

latortuga wrote: post #135
edoceo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even worse, Elasticsearch is a great product for adding "search" to your webapp. I don't see how integrating it doesn't run afoul of: Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network...

I'm not sure if people are really confused about this or sowing FUD. Using Elasticsearch to search your own webapp is not providing Elasticsearch as a service. It's using Elasticsearch to provide functionality in your application.

Providing Elasticsearch as a service means allowing people to upload their own data and giving them an Elasticsearch instance to search it.

There's some grey area where it's a question if you're providing an application with a search feature or just hosting Elasticsearch. Like if you provide a way to upload logs and then search them that's Elasticsearch as a service. But if you provide an automated upload, is that enough?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#153

Post by hbogert »

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

what layers would they have to show? All of them up to bare metal? This is madness, should you be able to show your UEFI firmware? Should the server's out-of-band-mangement firmware be available as well?

The license is plain vague.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#154

Post by ahachete »

lacker wrote: post #144
kam wrote: post #119

Are there any known instances where a company offering Mongo or another SSPL-licensed app as a service has complied with section 13 by releasing the “Service Source Code” of everything supporting the service? If not, that basically confirms the OSI's rejection of the SSPL as an open source license -- If that provision is too onerous to be followed, it might as well say "you can't offer this as a service".

You could say the same about the GPL - the practical effect is almost never to make a company release their previously-proprietary source code, the practical effect is to make companies not use it in the first place. Which is fine, as long as it's clear what the rules are, and the rules seem clear enough to me.

So there's no big cloud offering MySQL-as-a-Service, right?

And nobody uses Linux for their *-as-a-Service offering, no?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#155

Post by paxys »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #76

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

I feel this way about all similar licensing changes (Redis, Elastic among many others). It's basically a large company vs much larger company fight, and the losers are the thousands of individual contributors not affiliated with either one who have worked for free and can no longer use their work in the way they want. Moves like this are definitely eroding trust in open source in the long term.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#156

Post by hbogert »

dhd415 wrote: post #109
cduzz wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how is that clearly? What if your UI over time provides the mechanisms which are isomorphic to the functionality provided by ES?

This will be a nightmare if ever tried in court.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#157

Post by coagmano »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #145
tus88 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open source though.

Yes, it is not. But who cares? What I care about as a user is repairability: * can I inspect source and build it myself? * can I fix it? * can I share modifications with others? Many of the new "cloud protection licenses" offer this, yet they are (by definition) not opensource.

I think this is the right way to look at things, after all, these were the orignal "why" arguments in favour of open source. If we can get the same benefits while also protecting open products from megacorps like AWS, that's a better licence than a true open source licence

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#158

Post by ignoramous »

bevacqua wrote: post #33
shawnz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elastic contributes massively to Lucene, so this is a false dichotomy

Would Elastic be in a position to "close source" / "re-license" their code if Lucene itself wasn't permissively licensed? Your argument's putting the cart before the horse.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#159

Post by confiq »

treis wrote: post #152
latortuga wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, Elasticsearch is a great product for adding "search" to your webapp. I don't see how integrating it doesn't run afoul of: Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network...

I'm not sure if people are really confused about this or sowing FUD. Using Elasticsearch to search your own webapp is not providing Elasticsearch as a service. It's using Elasticsearch to provide functionality in your application. Providing Elasticsearch as a service means allowing people to upload their own data and giving them an Elasticsearch instance to search it. There's some grey area where it's a question if y…

I wish it would be explained that way

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#160

Post by pastacacioepepe »

fabianhjr wrote: post #133
pietrovismara wrote: post #95

Honestly, every relevant FOSS project should adopt a similar license to prevent exploitation from corporations.

There is some discussion on the P2P Foundation regarding copyfarleft/copyfair/copyjustright however in my experience even the most popular copyfarleft isn't as adopted. ( https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft ) I have been gathering resources regarding copyfarleft licensing and projects here: https://github.com/LibreCybernetics/awesome-copyfarleft

That's great, thank you for doing this!

I already knew about the Anti-Capitalist Software License but didn't know about the others. Copyfarleft is a great concept.

To make this work we need to build an ecosystem around these licenses and non-exploitative business models. The fist step is indeed to let people know such licenses/ideas exist.

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