I am interested to see how long or if Elastic sticks around after this. If people will just move on to another AWS product or if they'll keep using Elasticsearch.
Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
51–60 of 708 posts
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#52Elastic was an open source project, and now it's not. This was done because they believe it will be more profitable. It does affect you, especially if you contributed to the project, in which case they're basically spitting in your face as thanks for your hard work. This is not materially different from when Oracle infamously killed OpenSolaris, something they were rightfully crucified for by the community. They're n…
There’s still an oss license elasticsearch, they packed a lot of extra features to compete with Amazon distro and that bundle has a different license
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#53"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 impos…
If you're a paying customer, you are probably fine. If you're using SSPL'd Elastic (or Mongo DB, the risks are the same) for anything serious -- i.e. beyond a hobby, get legal advice ASAP. SSPL isn't an OSI certified license; many would call it at best a 'shared source' license because of the riders attached. [DELETED because, as user `gpm` points out, OSI doesn't own 'open source' as a trademark, sorry about that --…
OSI does not have a trademark on the term open source, they tried and failed to acquire one.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things seem like Amazon went beyond just selling their hosted version of Elasticstack: "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and cal…
> "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet. > "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsear…
> This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.
And Elastic tried going the legal route:
https://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/252471650/AWS-faces-El...
It sounds like their whole issue was about confusion in the marketplace, though, and when someone does an oopsie that results in that kind of confusion, it may not be enough to take care of it quietly, on the side. So it seems now Elastic is making more noise, in an effort to clarify things more publicly.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I would be much happier that. I do not even understand why to do this whole dance with Elastic.
A lot of people have adopted the Elastic stack over the years, I guess Amazon just wanted their share.
They do. They've done similar things with Redis and MariaDB, both of whom also offer commercial solutions. The SAs all insist that "no it's a partnership". I don't fault them they're parroting the marketing line. With the new Grafana stuff that seems more like a real partnership because you have to purchase the enterprise features and support from the marketplace. What they've done to Redis and partiularly Elastic is pretty shameful.
The Elasticsearch Service has problems: you can't join the cluster like you can with the normal version, permissions are janky at best, it's slow, and it's expensive. For those reasons the projects my team used it on opted to roll our own elasticsearch cluster which proved a better solution long term beyond the initial annoyances. I say that to say it's not a one to one product, which will probably be their defense.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#56Their 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…
That is not the point. There is legal and there is good - and simply reiterating that something is legal is unproductive and pointless.
This isn't really the spirit of Open Source though. The point of Open Source is that reuse and modification isn't just technically allowed legally, it's encouraged.
I fully support their right to change their licensing, and I understand they may not have thought through the implications of their license -- and I empathize with that. I also empathize with criticism that Amazon isn't doing a great job of supporting the ecosystem that supports them, it would be nice if they did more. And it goes without saying, but I also strongly empathize with the frustration about the borderline trademark infringement that's happening here. That's a completely separate problem.
But I don't like the implication that Open Source licenses are a legal technicality rather than a specific philosophical choice to allow reuse. People don't need to feel guilty about following Open Source licenses, the idea is to encourage reuse -- even by corporations.
We do harm to that movement when we try and backtrack from that philosophy or say, "sure, you have the legal right to reuse the code, but we're going to try and implement social/technical barriers to you doing so." There are plenty of decent source-available licenses projects can use if that's their intent. They carve out exceptions for small-scale reuse while trying to limit companies like Amazon from capitalizing on the ecosystem. And maybe more projects should use those licenses since they more accurately reflect the outcomes that the authors seem to want. There's nothing wrong with having projects that allow only small-scale reuse.
But if someone releases their project as Open Source I'm going to treat it like Open Source, because that's what the movement is about, and trying to reverse the legal progress we've made by constructing new moral barriers in front of reuse is harmful to that movement. When we say that people have a moral right to reuse, adapt, and share our code, we mean it.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#57I don't think most of Amazon's behavior actually violates any norms and values of traditional open source communities.
I think instead we are finding that norms and values of traditional open source communities are in some ways contradictory/inconsistent; that there can be competing interests where it isn't true that either one of them is the one that "opensource norms and values" privileges; or that the traditional "norms and values" don't necessary lead to the world that enthusiasts had fantasized about.
In a lot of these discussions, I think the underlying basic thing is that some are alleging, often implicitly, that included in the "norms and values of open source" are that if anyone is making money from value provided by open source, it should be authors of that open source, or at least they should get a cut.
I don't think that is in fact one of the traditional norms and values of open source community. In some ways it's even counter to the tradition.
The actual world/ecosystem around open source has evolved to be very different than the one imagined by traditional norms and values though. Compare to how apache httpd was originally written -- 6 or 8 people, each from a different organization, collaborated on company time each getting paid by their employer, to produce something of value to all of their employers, where the only desired 'profit' was the thing being available for all to use.
That is sort of a stereotypical traditional fantasy of open source. It is of software being created without a profit motive, in an ecosystem where people would contribute to such things on 'company time' (they had a steady salary from some company already). The more people using the software you wrote, the better, and you never wanted a cut of their profits -- that is the fantasy of traditional open source norms and values.
That is not the world we ended up with though.
So the problem is that now it is "obvious" to some people that if we wrote the the thing, and then formed a company around that thing we wrote -- it's not "fair" if someone else is making money from it without giving us a cut.
But this isn't a value encoded into open source licenses at all, and that wasn't an oversight, it was intentional because this wasn't in fact a traditional "norm and value" of open source at all, and in fact it is in some ways counter to the actual traditional norms and values, one of which I would say was: Your desire to make a profit from this code should not in fact be allowed to prevent anyone else from using it. It is ElasticSearch which is acting contradictory to norms and values of open source in believing nobody should be able to use their software without giving them a cut of profits from it.
These disputes will keep happening, not because some companies are violating the "norms and values" of open source, but because the actual traditional norms and values of open source are increasingly unable to power a sustainable economy where people can get paid (in the manner they think they deserve?) while producing open source.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the person you are replying to is making any kind of argument about legality. I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you.
> I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you. I think that is false. Most things that are said assume that the listener will self-moderate. If I have Crohn's or IBS and I post a sign on my front-lawn saying "bathroom free to use for those in need" I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and us…
Sure, there is something to be said for reciprocating the generosity offered to you by taking only what you need.
I think this can become a complicated game of accounting though. Did Amazon take more than they need or did they just build a useful cloud service on top of a widespread open and free product that was released intentionally under those terms?
When Elastic chose the Apache license, what was the goal? Was it to allow as many people to benefit from the software as possible? If so, Amazon is clearly advancing that goal, not hindering it.
Or is the idea that Amazon is somehow blocking Elastic from competing in the cloud search space? Elastic is growing quite rapidly and Amazon's use of ES seems to have only accelerated that growth, so I don't really buy that either.
Furthermore consider this: Is Elastic reciprocating the generosity offered by Apache and the Lucene project, to which they basically did the same thing that Amazon did to them?
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#59"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 impos…
Yep, it's also incompatible with virtually all copyleft open source licenses. So if you were using any AGPLv3 code with elastic you now have to switch to Amazon's fork.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#60Their 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…
> ironically including those from AWS and their employees
Does AWS ever contribute anything that isn't an AWS integration? I'm not asking rhetorically -- those are the only kind of "contribution" I've ever seen from them.