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

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

#61

Post by alex_young »

z77dj3kl wrote: post #38

"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…

This lack of clarity in law will likely result in huge issues in the sale of your startup if you ever go that route. Who wants to buy a potential lawsuit because of a database selection?

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

#62

Post by ddevault »

gpm wrote: post #53
signal11 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trademarks are not a requirement for defining terminology. The word "cake" is not trademarked, but if I sell you a used car tire when you buy a "cake" from me, I still lied and misled you about the product.

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

#63

Post by aprdm »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #33
richardARPANET wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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.

In my experience it was that by Node regardless of how many cpus or ram the node had.

Regardless very expensive.

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

#64

Post by prepend »

So I guess the options are now to use the “OpenDistro” [0] or the SSPL distro maintained by Elastic.

It’s too bad that Elastic is no longer open source, but respect the companies choice to close source their stuff.

Will be interesting if Amazon just maintains their fork or abandons it to make something else.

I’m not familiar with elastic as a project and not sure how many community contributions they have, but expect that to shrink as I’m not sure many OSS developers will freely contribute to non-OSS projects.

As for trademark stuff, I expect a renaming like Hudson/Jenkins.

[0] https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch

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

#65

Post by elliekelly »

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…

> Then after a period of time, typically 3-4 years, but not more than 5 years, the restrictions lapse, and the source code automatically converts to an Open Source license, in our case Apache 2.0.

I’m not familiar with this type of license. Any idea how/when this time frame is decided? Is it 3-5 years from software release?

I guess I’m confused by the use of “automatically converts” with a vague timeline. If it’s automatic why isn’t the time of “automatic” conversion more definitively known? What’s the event that triggers the change?

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

#66

Post by the_local_host »

granzymes wrote: post #34
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?

I kept feeling like I was reading the same thing over and over and just not finding out what exactly Amazon is doing now that it won't be able to do in the future. Skimming the links to the blog post and FAQ didn't help much.

Whatever it is it's pretty deep in the weeds. It looks like the intent is for most users to be unaffected; non-AWS cloud providers to be unaffected; even AWS's Elastic Cloud to be unaffected; but AWS has to stop doing something with specific regard to Elastic Search and I can't figure out what it is.

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

#68

Post by jbarberu »

nautilus12 wrote: post #29
tibbydudeza wrote: post #7

Amazon is the new Microsoft.

I was told many of the more predatory players from Microsoft left to join Microsoft in the last few years. I need to look into this though.

"...players from Microsoft left to join Microsoft in...", wat?

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

#69

Post by jrochkind1 »

brodouevencode wrote: post #23

They kinda do the same with Redis.

I have never seen the Redis maintainer(s) complain about it though.

Would be interesting to compare/contrast, what leads to the difference.

They do the same with lots of products really. Postgres and MySQL too for instance. Also never seen postgres or mysql maintainance teams complain about it.

What are the contextual differences that make it a point of conflict with authors/maintainers in one case but not others?

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