Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elastic.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 708 posts

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

#181

Post by blackoil »

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…

Another view, they opened/maintained a lawn wherein you can come have picnic and may buy some drinks from the store, which covers the cost. Now a super chain opens next to them and uses park as free seating for its customer. So they are adding rule against that.

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

#182

Post by studius »

hodgesrm wrote: post #112
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…

> It doesn't matter what they say, read the license. I would love to but the terms within the ElasticSearch codebase on Github are quite confusing. Here's the text of the LICENCE.TXT file. Source code in this repository is covered by one of three licenses: (i) the Apache License 2.0 (ii) an Apache License 2.0 compatible license (iii) the Elastic License. The default license throughout the repository is Apache License…

Open-source and free software licenses don't imply that the source must remain served on some site, and it doesn't imply that the license for the code cannot change for future versions of that code necessarily- as it depends on the license and/or other factors.

But if you have a copy of the license and the code and it permitted use of it perpetually, then it can continue to be used. That's my understanding.

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

#183

Post by thecleaner »

prepend wrote: post #64

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…

I think you are grossly over estimating the contributions that the general community has to open source. Theres a company behind this project and they do most of the maintenance work.

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

#185

Post by delfinom »

stavros wrote: post #166

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…

Amazon is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody sees it.

They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.

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

#187

Post by literallyWTF »

yrgulation wrote: post #119

The cringe on this thread is appalling. Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, taking time away from their families and lives, only for companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make billions in prof…

Yup, pretty much the life story of open source. Some people always tend to get upset that individuals/companies either don’t spend every waking second on a project or want to get paid for their work if used in commercial products.

It’s honestly no different than a leach

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

#188

Post by sokoloff »

brlewis wrote: post #178
DougBTX wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem tricky. On on hand, they want to stop AWS using "Elasticsearch" in a product name because it isn't in partnership with Elastic co., but on the other hand AWS's product really does contain Elasticsearch, which is why they are changing their license. If AWS had a product called "Elasticsearch Service" which didn't contain Elasticsearch, then it would be pretty clear cut as that would be very confusing, but…

In general, yes, it can be tricky to determine what will and won't be confusing to people, since different people see things differently. In this specific case, it doesn't seem tricky to me. When you have concrete examples of people getting confused, no speculation is needed.

But what are they confused over? "Amazon RDS for SQL Server" seems no more and no less confusing to me than "Amazon Elasticsearch Service".

As a user, I don't care in the least about the business relationship behind the product. I care about whether Amazon RDS works like SQL Server and whether Amazon Elasticsearch Service works like Elasticsearch. What financial arrangements, if any, are behind the scenes are not a concern to users.

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

#189

Post by c0l0 »

longhairedhippy wrote: post #105

Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the last version with a friendly license and then transition to the Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a business standpoint it seems like a reasonab…

The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream release of ElasticSearch, as published by Elastic.

Also, if you take a closer look at Open Distro, you will quickly come to the conclusion that you really do not want to deploy what drops out of there. The RPM package does CRAZY stuff that made me exhale audibly enough for coworkers to notice - like spawning a postinstall shellscript that `wget`s a .so for/from an optional library that the Open Distro release team put into an S3 bucket, and then `mv`ing that downloaded file (iirc even without any content verification; so the content could be your proxy's captive portal markup, for all they know) into (again, iirc) /usr/lib. That is from WITHIN AN RPM PACKAGE, mind you, where you could and should really just carry that file yourself.

That and other minor troubles with the tooling surrounding the actual product (ES) made me abandon Open Distro fairly quickly. Which is a shame, since a really freely licensed spin of ES with "Enterprise" features would indeed be very nice to have.

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

#190

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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…

No. You are confusing between following FOSS licensing to the letter and following the spirit.
Post reply on HN