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

>This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.

Surely the legal department would have issued some sort of retraction. Can you find it?

>Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon

Yeah, that's what we're saying.

>people were scared of using proprietary code without knowing...I'm not surprised they missed some as it was really hard to tell.

Amazon is a trillion dollar company that has every capability of doing their due diligence. Sloppy communication, abuse of trademarks and stealing proprietary code are all inexcusable behaviors by a company with the size and power that Amazon has.

You're describing the problem as if it were the excuse. Amazon abused their power, stole proprietary code, abused a trademark, and violated the culture of the open source community whose code they were leveraging for profit. There's no excuse for it, even if it was somehow legal - and I don't suspect it was. I suspect that Amazon knows it's not legal - they just figure they can get away with it.

Elastic’s arguments are problematic considering the history of the codebase.

They didn’t invent “elasticsearch” from scratch, rather they took someone else’s codebase (Lucene) and made it better. Fundamentally that’s what AWS did too... they took open source code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed service front but aren’t offering up strong reasons for this being “NOT OK”. Elastic was happy to use code and concepts from others to build their product but seem annoyed when others did the same to them. I don’t get it.

The brand name thing might have more weight but it will come down to if they were truly enforcing the name the whole time they owned it or are just annoyed with AWS. If the name fell into common use they they likely won’t have much luck protecting it.

Why does this read like a child wrote it?

The cloud providers would just build a competing service if they couldn't co-opt an existing popular open source solution. Or anoint an adjacent solution, like solr in the case of elasticsearch. But what can be done and we really haven't seen a "open-core" type infra component try this yet: is require open-sourcing changes. The opendistro approach sorta gets us there, in a hard-fork sense, but seems in adequate and is really only being done for connivence rather than licensing requirements. But we already have a licensing solution: the AGPL. But no enterprise or saas startup wants to touch AGPL software for the fear of it contaminating proprietary code. So it seems to me the solution is a hybrid APGL for cloud providers and apache/mit for others approach. Such a license seems feasible to write and would be superior to open-core for most users.

> 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?

Ten years ago I would be very hesitant adopting ElasticSearch if I knew that they were the only ones allowed to maintain a cloud solution of it. The fact that is was liberally licensed made me less afraid of vendor lock-in.

In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all of its good connotations) it once was.

> AWS is the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how blaming Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is anything other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is OSS at all, and we should want an environment where companies that produce OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for wanting to get paid for the work that they release freely into the world.

It's okay to release things as non-OSS. It's also okay to release something as OSS first, and then regret later. But it's super weird that they're painting this picture of AWS being a big evil company when they're just doing exactly what is expected. Can't they just say "we're not able to build a company around the liberal license" instead of this "we're such an open company and we love open source and AWS is ruining everything" talk?