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Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

elastic.co

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Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#171

Post by halbritt »

matthewowen wrote: post #131
ignoramous wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How true is this, in practice? I hear software folks say this sort of thing somewhat frequently, but I haven't heard it from a _legal_ person. And my general sense and understanding is that although an FAQ style clarification is not _perfect_, it _does_ carry non-trivial weight. Judges are not totally capricious people making arbitrary decisions: the notion that in a dispute they would just cast aside one party's _cl…

In my experience, corporate lawyers don't really understand the distinction and will opt for the route of least risk, which generally entails a commercial relationship with the company. Unfortunately, neither Mongo nor Elastic really offer useful commercial relationships. That is, pay them a sum and be free to use the widely adopted open-source version of their thing.

The overhead to those relationships for what they do offer is significant.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#172

Post by mrkstu »

JarlUlvi wrote: post #93

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…

Which makes it sounds like AWS wasn't competing very well in the space, if it couldn't do so affordably.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#173

Post by wmf »

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

Those folks have reasonably counted on having fruits of their labor to be available under Apache 2.0

Not really; the essence of permissive licenses is that proprietary extensions/versions are allowed. If you want to contribute code that will always remain open you need a copyleft license like GPL.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#174

Post by lmc »

frenchy wrote: post #87
bevacqua wrote: post #81

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.

I found myself asking the same question a few weeks ago. The StackExchange link is probably more comprehensive, but I wrote a bit about it as well, here: https://blog.mcquade.dev/why-is-the-sspl-not-an-open-source-...

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#175

Post by confiq »

xvilka wrote: 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

> https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

This is actually very interesting project. Do we have some benchmark that sonic works on huge scale with lot of data?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#176

Post by __blockcipher__ »

unethical_ban wrote: post #139
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…

You are being too cynical. Their argument is, more charitably: "We built this, we released it for free. Our business model is professional support and hosted services. In order for us, the creators of this software, to continue building it, we cannot allow megacorporations to freely spin up a loss-leading competitive service and cut us out."

Some observations:

(1) It's interesting how much of the reasoning/argumentation for these restrictive licenses ultimately comes down to a more articulate form of "but that's not fair!". I also wonder how much the implicit beliefs that "unrestrained capitalism is a bad thing", "markets naturally lead towards monopolies", "antitrust law is legitimately necessary", etc are impacting peoples' reasoning here.

(2) If they can't actually compete and provide superior value to whatever managed offering Amazon can scrounge together, that's actually their fault. AWS' managed elasticsearch offering is absolutely terrible, speaking from experience. They block access to important APIs like `reroute`, any minor cluster change results in a whole blue-green deployment which very frequently hits a race condition that prevents the newer cluster from ever coming up healthy, requiring a ticket to be filed that takes multiple days to respond to if you don't have premium support, etc.

So functionally the idea that AWS is going to fleece them because they'll offer a just-as-good service for cheaper has not been the case. Elastic co's managed offering is simply far superior.

---

Ultimately, Elastic has shown that they don't actually want to release FOSS. They want to release proprietary software, and that's why the (in hindsight very easy to foresee) usecase of a cloud provider offering a managed service angers them so much. They don't really breathe the FOSS mindset, because a true non-restrictive license (BSD, Apache 2.0 etc) means that a company can absolutely use your software to make money and that's okay.

Anyway, Elasticsearch is incredible software and the Elastic team has made something truly incredible. I just wish they had a vision for monetization that aligned with their open-source beginnings. It's clear that they don't, and the sooner they stop pretending they're offering a free or open-source solution here, the better.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#177

Post by zmmmmm »

edoceo wrote: post #101
Nican wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> using for client facing reports, a key feature of your application, is blocked.

That seems a very pessimistic / overly conservative interpretation to me. They are clearly shooting for people selling Elastic itself as a hosted service here. Your client facing report being "Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software" is unlikely to fall into "reasonable interpretation" space IMHO.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#178

Post by __blockcipher__ »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #151
victor106 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 of…

> 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.

This x 10000. I couldn't agree more, thanks for putting that so clearly.

Frankly, I think a number of people in the Open Core movement have a psychological hangup around profit. They feel that if a company - particularly a large corporation - is making money using their software without "contributing back", that that should not be allowed. Well, if you don't want to allow it, fine, but don't pretend you're in the business of releasing free software - you're not. You want to be in the business of proprietary software, since only proprietary software lets you say "hey I don't want Jeff to profit off of my work without paying my for a proprietary license".

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#179

Post by ignoramous »

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

F/OSS exists so that not everyone has to be subject to undifferentiated work, among serving other very high impact purposes. Think brew.sh, vim/Emacs, Eclipse IDE, Postgres, Java, Linux/Linaro etc;

Substitute AWS for "a software developer" and see if you feel the same way.

> I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have other software developers make so much money out of it... while contributing nothing back to any of the open source projects. This has to be fixed...

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#180

Post by VoxPelli »

Seems like there’s no talk on why they picked SSPL over BSL?

I like BSL because it always eventually transitions to an ordinary open source license. So over time all BSL licensed code will actually be open source. That seems to not be the case with SSPL?

Good post on BSL: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

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