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

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281–290 of 708 posts

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

#281
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost, but not quite, the "Tivoization" that prompted the creation of the GPL3. The requirement to give something back and/or avoid taking profit from the work of others is something the OSS world has a complicated relationship to. GPL is quite clear that there's a requirement to pass on source changes, if not explicitly to give them back, and many people were outraged by even this limited requirement and in…

> many people were outraged by even this limited requirement It isn’t a limited requirements. There is a very real legal risk that using GPL software in an enterprise code base means you have to open source of your entire code base. That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used.

So the companies can simply buy an alternate licence. What's the problem? They end up giving back in terms of $$$ then.

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

#282
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure…

> leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal

Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a slowly evolving discussion. Certainly, and I think that if we want OSS to thrive we need to move towards a future where it's easy for companies to make a return on their investment by releasing OSS. I think Amazon and all the "I provide your software as a service" providers eat into that and hinder that future. Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, b…

But imagine where we'd be if this discussion had happened 30 years ago, in the days when the monetization model was charging a distribution fee. How much of the modern Internet would have had to be excluded from free software licensing to protect that? I have no issue with tweaking OSS licenses to respond to the circumstances of the times, but tweaking them in order to ensure I can make lots of money seems anti-compe…

I agree, but I think it's generally "tweaking the rules so they can stay alive" at this point, ie not about increasing an already big revenue stream.

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

#284
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relea…

How would the captive portal intercept s3 tls calls successfully?

TLS in enterprise settings is commonly intercepted by TLS/HTTPS proxies that create trusted (by the OS's local trust store) certificates for proxied peers on the fly. Banks often do this - the one I work for, for instance.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a slowly evolving discussion. Certainly, and I think that if we want OSS to thrive we need to move towards a future where it's easy for companies to make a return on their investment by releasing OSS. I think Amazon and all the "I provide your software as a service" providers eat into that and hinder that future. Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, b…

I believe in a previous thread, someone suggested OSS except companies having this much of a revenue (since market cap is a bit of a variable metric). Why wouldn't that be a viable model?

I would love that, and think it's a great model (basically "you don't have to pay us if/while you aren't making money from this"), but as far as I understand it, it's hard to enforce. Amazon can just make a subsidiary that makes less than that amount (or no money at all) and skirt that requirement.

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

#286

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…

> Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? Um, about that... > When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion.

It's interesting that they phrased it like that. If they were confident about this, they would easily be able to prove this in court and it would be a very simple case of copyright infringement right?

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Reusing code is not freeloading in the Open Source (capitalized) movement -- at least, not the kind of freeloading that we'd like to discourage.

I don't know what else I can do as an Open Source developer in my projects and my terminology to imply that when I say, "you can reuse my code for any reason" I actually mean it. I guess traditional Open Source advocates could abandon the entire term and go off and create a brand new movement where we try to make that even more explicit, but people are just going to follow us there and then try to coopt the term again.

> people with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't giving away the farm

I will call out people who are doing that.

But really, the only comments I have about source available products are:

A) they don't offer all of the advantages of Open Source (although they offer many more benefits than fully closed-source software), and I think that pointing that out is not a moral judgement, just a statement of fact about what the licenses do and do not allow.

B) people who offer source available licenses need to stop saying that they're basically the same as Open Source, or that they're just a subset of Open Source, or that they exist because Open Source has lost its way.

Because the licenses are not the same. All other debates aside, both us at this point in the conversation recognize this, right? You and I are disagreeing about a fundamental philosophy on what rights and moral responsibilities people have around code. You fundamentally disagree with me about whether or not large companies have the right to completely freely reuse permissive code, or whether they have an obligation to pay for it. That disagreement is so large that it affects our attitudes about whether offering large-scale commercial hosting of an Open Source product is moral.

And it's fine that you and I disagree on that point, but we can look at that disagreement and say that clearly your goals when licensing software are different than mine. So to me, it seems pretty reasonable that people who have this fundamental disagreement with the OSI should acknowledge that instead of acting like the Open Source movement is broken. It's not broken, it disagrees with you about the goals are in making code available to other people.

It's not people being stubborn, it's not that the OSI doesn't understand the consequences of Open Source, it's that it does understand the consequences of Open Source and it disagrees with you about what consequences are desirable. The Open Source movement doesn't need shared source advocates to 'save' us, we need them to acknowledge that their goals are different than ours.

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

#288
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure…

The grey area here is more about what the "market" is defined as here. It's not entirely clear that the existing dominance that AWS has is different enough from "hosted search services" to be considered a different market (from an anti-trust point of view)

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

#289
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure…

Yes, thats all this comes down to in the end.

Open source works fine, and does quite well as a business model (use it as free advertising).

What has happened here is a plain old case of monopoly.

Once markets are no longer efficient, the model breaks down. Amazon can use its resources to extinguish competition with their own product.

This is why we need antitrust law.

It's not a failure of capitalism, its not a failure of the businesses involved its just what happens when you run a freeish market. That is, things get out of whack to the point we the people feel it is unjust, it would eventually right itself but this would take a long time and likely do more interim damage than its work allowing, so we fiddle with it, hopefully not breaking anything in the process.

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

#290
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relea…

How would the captive portal intercept s3 tls calls successfully?

It doesn't have to, can just serve anything - if the client code doesn't check certificates...
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