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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

#251

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

StavrosK wrote: post #241
35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of the license that the ES developers chose? Software isn't born under the terms of Apache 2/MIT/BSD/a similarly permissive license. The people who developed it…

> Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of the license that the ES developers chose? We shouldn't. But you can't have your cake and eat it too, and say "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't change your terms!". They're their terms, they can change them if they want to.

> But you can't have your cake and eat it too, and say "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't change your terms!".

I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them?

You seem to be the only person passing value judgements:

> Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I think Amazon is.

This is incorrect: Amazon used Elastic per terms of the license. Elastic didn't care for an infringement on their business, so they've relicensed. No one is in the wrong here.

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

#253

Post by Karunamon »

I don't understand how the SSPL is substantially different enough from AGPL to warrant being called "non-OSS" as has been done multiple times in this thread.

It is literally the AGPL, with even stronger copyleft provisions. It is anti-proprietary in the strongest conceivable way. How is that not open source? It does not infringe upon, and goes out of its way to protect, the four freedoms.

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

#254

Post by no_wizard »

I never understood why its so hard for Corporations (specifically, US Corporations) to just give back to these projects via corporate charity contributions. I know, this takes away from other worthy causes too in some ways, however, I think we could get massive boosts that help all tides in the long run.

After all, US corporate giving, from a cursory search, in 2019 alone was 21.09 billion USD[0] if even 1% of that made it toward open source, that would fund an overwhelming amount of projects overnight. Just 1%. And it would be extremely effective per dollar in terms of what society gets back in return.

I don't know why tech companies don't see it this way in particular.

[0]: https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-g....

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

#255

Post by eropple »

danShumway wrote: post #128
eropple wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the morality of a system for immoral ends. At some point, whether you or I appreciate it, the open source world was bound to have to reinvent a solution to that.

There is a solution to that already, it's called using source available licensing instead of Open Source. But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of code/money/value is not required. That's literally the scenario that many of us are trying to build. It feels like the difference here is that you're looking at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying tha…

I will define freeloading by those with the capacity to do otherwise as immoral any day of the week (and AWS functionally does a lot of that), yes, and I will define it in those moral terms regardless of the legal letter of a license. There is an implicit social contract that open source software absolutely and without question relies upon--and yes, large actors owe more in response than small ones in that calculus. When the social contract is abrogated by an actor who is beyond the capacity for shame or for criticism to change their ways--that's absolutely a problem. This shift of what open source means away from "Amazon, please co-opt and strangle at your leisure" is inevitable, and I don't really think it's wrong.

(I also don't like Elastic as a company, to be clear, and wouldn't shed many tears if they disappeared tomorrow, there's just a hierarchy of dirtbags and they're not near the top.)

As far as encouraging those source-available licenses--that sounds great, except that, in my experience, people with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't giving away the farm. So I don't know where we go there, either.

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

#256

Post by api »

dragonwriter wrote: post #158
api wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open source world needs to come together and create a license that is well crafted. Otherwise we will keep seeing these less suitable licenses. So far the FOSS world seems to be pretending this problem doesn’t exist. Pretending a problem doesn’t exist doesn’t make the problem go away. It makes you go away as you become irrelevant. There is the AGPL, but it's not quite right. It also has the letters G-P-L in it, w…

> The open source world needs to come together and create a license that is well crafted. It has created several. It hasn't created licenses well-crafted for purposes directly contrary to the purpose of having open source software, because that's not what the open source community is interested in. > So far the FOSS world seems to be pretending this problem doesn’t exist. From the point of view of the FOSS world, the…

> From the point of view of the FOSS world, the issue here is not a problem; creators having an exclusive ability to monetize software as a service isn't a purpose open source is intended to serve; in fact, avoiding the lock-in that results from such exclusivity is a big part of the point.

If the creators get nothing, then why bother? Why slave away to make software just to give free labor to billion dollar companies while you get nothing? Is free labor for Amazon what open source is about?

If open source refuses to adapt to the realities of today's software ecosystem, it will die out... or at least "serious" open source projects will die out and all that will remain is hobbyist level stuff, abandonware, and half-done academic projects.

Personally I do think FOSS in its present form is going to die for most major projects. You'll still see FOSS libraries, building blocks, academic projects, and some major projects that really are large and old enough to have enough real grassroots contributors to keep them going. For major projects in the future you're going to have something more like a shareware model but with source-available.

Nobody creating a new large-scale project today is going to give it a license that they know will result in somebody else productizing it, making a fortune, and giving them nothing. At least Amazon acknowledges where things came from... in some cases the productizers even rename the project and don't even give the author credit.

FOSS and its gift culture ethos just isn't working in today's world. The software market of today is a dark forest.

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

#257

Post by nrmitchi »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #236

I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It al…

> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services

You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area.

> To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way.

You're phrasing this in a way like Amazon "leveraging the ElasticSearch brand" isn't a trademark issue. Is "leveraging the trademarks of another company" suddenly okay (as long as you don't do it 'a few times too many') as long as you're Amazon? What if Amazon started selling smart thermostats by "leveraging" the Nest brand?

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

#258

Post by cactus2093 »

What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Or what every hosting provider including AWS does with the Linux kernel, sell access to a service that is running that software.

I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released open source software and now are mad that it is taking on a life of its own that they don’t 100% control. That’s the whole point of open source as far as I’m concerned, other people can do stuff you might not have expected with your code.

Now they’re making it more closed going forward, which is fine and is certainly their right to do. But this argument is so bizarre, instead of saying that we tried to do this open source but unfortunately it makes it too difficult for us as a business so we’re closing things off, they’re trying to spin it as they are the true, good defenders of open source fighting against the forces of evil by closing off their licensing further.

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

#259

Post by franciscop »

acatton wrote: post #200
franciscop wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of the known open source licenses (vs this no-precedent one) is that they were made long time ago for other situations and they do a poor job at protecting open source authors from the abuse that we see from Amazon and similar.

I'm confused by the "abuse" part. If I think the author of the GPLed project "foobar" is a jerk, and I fork it and maintain it without colaborating with foobar's original author, am I "abusing" the GPL? Personally, I don't think so, and I think I should have the right to do so. I wonder how this is different from Amazon behavior here. (I want to make clear that I'm not saying Shay or anybody at elastic is anything. T…

I never said forking is abusing. But if you fork it, position it as an official product with the same name on your platform and lie on twitter saying that your foobar was a collaboration with the original foobar author then yes, you are definitely abusing your power.

On the other point: "the GPL is working as intented" yes but not as the authors want, hence the change of license! Nothing wrong with that IMHO.

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

#260

Post by spinningslate »

StavrosK wrote: post #238
CaptArmchair wrote: post #236

I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It al…

> The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".

true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.
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