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Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

elastic.co

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Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#281

Post by thayne »

softwaredoug wrote: post #263
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…

Here's the actual language from SSPL > If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service... (license conditions apply) > “The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License. IANAL, but that seems pretty cut and dry referring to making an Elasticsearch or Kibana service

But there is also

> 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, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version.

From what I understand the big question is, where is the line on if value is derived primarily from "the Program", and what exactly constitutes modifying the program.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#282

Post by wmf »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #278
wmf wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great for Matt, but other companies like Elastic can't afford to go from >50% to 5% of their market.

Well, now organizations like Wikimedia are going to have to drop Elasticsearch everywhere despite it powering wikipedia article search and more. So congrats on both missing the GP’s point and also failing to see how this license change would shrink Elastic’s usage / market anyway

People will just switch to OpenDistro.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#283

Post by thayne »

> outright attempts to splinter our community with “open” repackaging of our OSS products

That make it sound like packaging together the open source core with some third party plugins that could be used in place of proprietary plugins from Elastic was somehow some evil plot to destroy the community. Was the goal of the package to increase the bottom line of a company other than Elastic? Probably. Was the goal to splinter a community from which said company profits? Probably not.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#284

Post by ta988 »

nopzor wrote: post #20
binarymax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that any “derivative work” will need to also open the management layer under SSPL. The management layer is AWS, so this puts OpenDistro in a tight spot. I’m not sure forking would work - as Elasticsearch evolves Amazon would not be able to copy features anymore. In the search space, this would be a very hard pill to swallow.

they’d still be able to innovate their own fork, but they will no longer be able to pull future upstream elastic code into it. so it becomes more of a hard fork. if elastic continues to innovate it will be difficult for open distro to remain competitive with it.

I don't think AWS really cares. They "bought" (the devs of), and killed, blazegraph to make Neptune. And since, Neptune doesn't really evolve much either so both projects are stagnating. Enough to say they can do "graphs" but not enough to really do anything useful...

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#285

Post by Qub3d »

Bombthecat wrote: post #112
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…

Wait? Would even my devops pipeline fall under it? Or my monitoring? Deployment and management in kubernetes for example?

I would like to point out to anyone else perusing these comments the issue a lot of people are raising in the comments can be summed up in the two responses to the parent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25782849

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25784581

The ambiguity is the problem. Yes, the FAQ/A Developer/A Company has said they really mean (A), but the license text, which is the legally binding part, is ambiguous. Even if a judge supports the freest reading of the license, you have to go through the time and resources to get in front of a judge.

For FOSS, this means the majority of projects that run on a scattering of donations + developer free time are dead in the water the first time someone tries to hit them with a Cease and Desist or similar.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#286

Post by thayne »

thayne wrote: post #283

> outright attempts to splinter our community with “open” repackaging of our OSS products That make it sound like packaging together the open source core with some third party plugins that could be used in place of proprietary plugins from Elastic was somehow some evil plot to destroy the community. Was the goal of the package to increase the bottom line of a company other than Elastic? Probably. Was the goal to spli…

I think the licensing change is more likely to fracture the community than a third party distribution.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#287

Post by catern »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #183
bevacqua wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And guess what, when a corporation uses Elasticsearch in a serious way they will inevitably end up contributing back. It's actually easier to just get a change merged upstream rather than to manage a whole fork, unless the upstream is really hard to get patches merged with. The whole narrative of "company X is offering Elasticsearch as a service and not contributing back!" is ridiculous. First of all, the whole point…

>First of all, the whole point of free software is that somebody somewhere is going to be making money with that software, and that's okay, regardless of contribution.

No, the point of free software is that users of the software have the freedom to use the software, redistribute the software, modify the software, and redistribute modified versions of the software. Someone making money using those abilities is incidental to the actual goal.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#288

Post by catern »

lovelearning wrote: post #69

There are some small-scale ES search-as-a-service providers that serve small and medium businesses. There are also service providers whose core service is something entirely different and just use ES as the backend for their search APIs. While the target is AWS (and I think what they are doing to service providers like Elastic and MongoDB is terrible), I think this will also adversely affect overall ES usage by many…

Such businesses can continue providing their service, they just have to provide the code to their users.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#289

Post by erezsh »

ignoramous wrote: post #179
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

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.…

As someone who writes open-source, I'm always happy to see other developers use my code to build cool stuff, and I expect nothing in return.

I'm also happy to see small start-ups rise faster by using my software.

But if those theoretical start-ups, whose business wouldn't exist without my software, grew to dozens of employees, made millions of dollars, and still I wouldn't see a nickel.. That's when I would start to wonder, why am I doing this for free?

Incidentally, the bigger the company, the less likely it is to contribute back.

To conclude, that sounds like false equivalency to me. It does matter who is using it for free and profiting.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#290

Post by erezsh »

tus88 wrote: post #113
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

It's not open source though.

The only entity who says it's not "open source" is the OSI, which is mostly funded by corporations, who are in the business of cloud computing.
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