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Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

elastic.co

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Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#31

Post by sithadmin »

patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

Glancing at the referenced lawsuits[1,2], the point of contention is not that Elastic's open source code is being used. It's that a.) Elastic feels its trademark is being abused in a manner that misrepresents the relationship between Elastic and Amazon, and b.) that Open Distro incorporates code in a manner that explicitly violates Elastic's licensing.

[1]https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/403...

[2]https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.347725...

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#32

Post by motives »

patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

I don't believe the issue most are taking here is the license itself that elasticsearch now has, I think its the relicensing of existing contributions (ironically including those from AWS and their employees) which were originally under a true, well-accepted and liberal FOSS license.

If elasticsearch had this license from day one, that would be fair enough, but many people do not freely contribute time and effort to improving something which is not freely available to all others (whether individual or large corporation).

Elasticsearch is self-victimising here when they are arguably exploiting FOSS contributors good will (though due to the CLA what they are doing is most definitely legal).

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#33

Post by jnsaff2 »

richardARPANET wrote: post #15
tibbydudeza wrote: post #7

Amazon is the new Microsoft.

*Oracle

I've been at the receiving end of Elastics selling tactics and pricing. Elastic is the new Oracle was my conclusion. IIRC the pricing was along the lines of $12k per CPU Core or GB of RAM. Straight from the nineties.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#34

Post by granzymes »

dhd415 wrote: post #10

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification . Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That mak…

Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. Maybe we can change the link to this post?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#35

Post by okl »

patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

I agree, and if they had a problem with it, why didn't they say so 5 years ago?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#37

Post by bluelu »

rkangel wrote: post #2

I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems like the most blatant trademark violation ever.

Is it really so easy?

Doesn't elastic also use Amazon trademarks in their code and documentation? (e.g. ec2, etc..)? I'm not a licence expert, but maybe if you have a have a legal licence to run it, you probably can also name it like that?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#38

Post by z77dj3kl »

"And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. It has no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises."

No, that's just not true. So many users, from small hobby side-projects, to large open source projects, and mega-corps care about the licensing of dependencies, each for their own reason, and will not want to build on top of proprietary software that imposes draconian licensing terms.

It doesn't matter what they say, read the license. It's vague and there is no legal precedent. It's a big risk for anyone who cares about licensing issues for their projects.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#40

Post by signal11 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #19
patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

> Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. I mean, sure. Someone can poop on the lawn. There is a difference between that, and some business coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that.

While the imagery is evocative, scale of usage isn't a factor in open source licenses, so the metaphor sort of breaks apart. Sun found that out the hard way -- IBM probably profited off Java way more than pre-acquisition Sun.
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