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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

#361

Post by amenod »

twobitshifter wrote: post #351
granzymes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. Maybe we can change the link to this post?

> hack the source code to grant yourself access to our paid features without a subscription, or the use of modified versions in production. I think the change that you can’t modify the code and use it yourself in production is a big change that is glossed over. ES is now free as in beer. You can look at the code but you can’t touch it or change what it does. Edit: I was wrong about this. The license itself does not s…

This is false. License [0] clearly states the conditions under which you can do it and they seem pretty reasonable. Nothing that a normal user, faced with an issue they want to fix, wouldn't accept. I imagine Amazon would have trouble accepting those and other terms, but that's the whole idea.

[0] https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license

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

#362

Post by pietrovismara »

prepend wrote: post #215
pietrovismara wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source code is freely accessible and you can use it for free. What's the difference to you as a user? Or are you simply concerned about Amazon?

I make products that use that package. I want all the packages I depend on to be compatible with my license. I don’t want to run into an audit years from now during due diligence that I have some liability from an incompatible license. I can’t afford lawyers to determine compatibility today. And I suspect that they would say “not compatible, pay to be safe.” That’s the difference to me as a user.

This sounds more like an issue with the licensing world itself than with this license, which by itself is pretty simple and won't affect you except in the case you offer your products containing Elastic as a service to third parties.

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

#363

Post by wazoox »

Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company?

More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and everyone loses in the end but the handful of plutocrats that control Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

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

#364

Post by ethbr0 »

michaelmior wrote: post #352
jeffasinger wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my job, we evaluated moving from AWS hosted ES to several of the Elastic offerings. Many of them were more expensive than AWS was before taking hardware into account (as in comparing cost of Elastic licensing vs the whole cost from AWS). This made it exceedingly difficult to justify the move. It's not only the headstart with the client (billing relationship in place), but the cost that hampers them.

But isn't a big part of the reason Amazon can offer better pricing because of the scale of their existing client base? I'm not saying that they are doing this, but they could if they chose operate on very thin margins or even at a lost to keep their hold on clients and make up with it on other products in their ecosystem.

Hmm. Operating on thin margins to gain market share and drive competitors out of business, then making up the difference by creating sales in related businesses in their ecosystem doesn't sound much like Amazon...

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

#365

Post by wolframhempel »

alextheparrot wrote: post #350
wolframhempel wrote: post #328

In a more general way, the Elastic/AWS case proves a more fundamental vulnerability of Open Source as a business model. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this article called "Why I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one." trying to make this case and point out a couple of systemic pitfalls in OS as a business model (Apologies for the self-promotion, but I felt this might be relevant): https://ww…

In your post you talk briefly about licensing -- effectively (1) MIT/Apache are common and very permissive (2) AGPL sometimes gets shut down by legal (3) Changing licenses is hard. Given these primitives, do you think one solution to the problem is just what we see here, a new licensing structure for some types of open source? Elastic's move here, attacking the issue through licensing, is one way that this sort of bu…

I wouldn't assume Elastic-style licenses to be a solution going forward. Elastic can use this license model now that they've already achieved considerable popularity and success - but I doubt that they would have gotten to where they are, had they started out with this license.

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

#366

Post by MaxBarraclough »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #278
gpm wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tellingly, such redefinitions are generally broader than the accepted OSI definition, so as to include whatever product someone is trying to push. I disagree. In fact I'll present the counter example of "myself". I don't agree with the OSIs definition of open source, I think it run contrary to the plain meaning of the term, and is contrary to pre-OSI use of the term. I've argued that numerous times on this forum (a…

Frankly I don't get why OSI proponents are so angry about the use of the term Open Source, when they can just unambiguously use "OSI Approved License" instead. It's borderline gatekeeping and it irks me to no end.

> It's borderline gatekeeping

No, it's a term-of-art. When people muddy the waters and try to undermine the standard terminology of a field, it's not some righteous struggle to liberate a term, it's just an obstacle to clear communication.

In aviation, flap is a precise term-of-art, and is never used interchangeably with aileron, despite that an aileron is plainly a kind of flap (in the colloquial sense). If you adopt your own definition of flap, to refer to both flaps and ailerons, no-one is going to sue you, but no-one is going to know what you're talking about. Your use of the term will be considered not merely different, but wrong.

Similarly, you could try telling a physicist that you consider the words power and force to be interchangeable. They're not going to sue you, but they're also not likely to entertain your deliberate misuse of standard terms.

Are pilots and physicists gatekeeping by being so insistent that you use their terms their way?

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

#367

Post by kstrauser »

wazoox wrote: post #363

Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and…

> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code.

Those are interesting and specific accusations. Got any proof?

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

#368

Post by wazoox »

kstrauser wrote: post #367
wazoox wrote: post #363

Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and…

> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Those are interesting and specific accusations. Got any proof?

That's right in the article.

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

#369

Post by throw8932894 »

BossingAround wrote: post #342
fuball63 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the point of it being open at all if it is prohibitively difficult to develop on without tests? To me it seems like a happy medium of being accessible while still protecting your livelihood.

> This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the point of it being open at all if it is prohibitively difficult to develop on without tests? Personally, I wouldn't use a proprietary library/framework unless absolutely necessary. I think it's a great strategy, actually; OP is sacrificing outside contributions while making it much more difficult for someone to just fork the project and bypass them entirely.

I am not sacrificing much. Project was fully open for a while, bot no coauthor emerged. I only get minor patches. Contributions are happening outside core project, some people build pretty awesome stuff on my library, I also get connectors etc...

I would say this approach fits great for one-men projects.

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

#370

Post by tolmasky »

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…

I don't think there's "right" and "wrong", but bizarre (entitled?) expectations. A natural part of Open Source is that someone may come in and make way more money off of something than you do. In fact, Amazon makes way more money off of Linux than Linus ever did. But you don't even have to go that far, many completely unrelated YC companies made way more money off of Linux than Linus did, and could arguably have not pulled that off without Linux being a free OS that you don't even have to think about since it's so ingrained in hosting. But when the intent of Open Source is "to increase the quality of software around the world", this is considered a good result. However, when the intent of Open Source is some nebulous initial hyper-growth to then hope you can offer hosting, the expectations just aren't set correctly. Unfortunately, the open source strategy does not magically offer the right result based on the intent of the author.

If Linus all of a sudden woke up tomorrow and said "Hey, I just realized that I'm not being paid a cut by literally every single company in Silicon Valley, that is NOT OK, I am going to shift gears and remove non-contributor code and start releasing Linux as closed source from now on", I feel people would be less forgiving than they are to these much less impactful companies. But Linus would be as "right" as they are, arguably more so.

Many of these companies are simply learning that maybe all those "dinosaurs" of the 90s might have been onto something with commercial licensing, which ultimately seems to be what they actually want: to charge money for their software. Sure, it doesn't get you free contributions and ready-made communities, but it gets you money, which is what a company is supposed to do. And that's fine! It's just not Open Source.

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