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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

#381

Post by remram »

specialist wrote: post #321
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 convinces investors to eschew profits. Unusual. Result: lower cost of capital. Amazon benefits from extended tax holiday. Result: lower cost of doing business. Amazon appropriates FOSS. Result: lower cost of development. Amazon knocks off successful products, competing with their own partners in their own walled garden. Result: lower cost of product development. Amazon allows counterfeit products, fake reviews…

Any single entry on that "clever stuff" lists directly hurts someone and destroy the ecosystem in the long run.

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

#382

Post by rjmunro »

j3th9n wrote: post #329
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 problem here is that Amazon is infringing on copyright, using the "Elasticsearch" trademark and lying about a partnership in a tweet. > 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. Open source doesn't mean you can infringe on its copyr…

Please don't confuse trademarks and Copyrights - they are entirely separate things. Using a trademark is not infringing Copyright. It may or may not be infringing the trademark, but that's a whole different thing.

In general, anyone can use your trademark as long as they are using it about you or your product. I can say "I like Coca Cola, it tastes great" or even "Coca Cola is disgusting" but if I put Coca Cola on the menu but give you Pepsi, that's infringing.

This is why some projects have generic names and brand names for the commercial version. PhoneGap and Cordova, RedHat and Centos, etc. Amazon can offer a machine and say "This is Centos, it's mostly the same as RedHat", but they can't say "This is RedHat" unless they pay for actual RedHat.

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

#383

Post by dumbfounder »

StavrosK wrote: post #216
dumbfounder wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Elastic was built on top of Lucene. I slice it this way: as a company that is highly invested in AWS it is easier for us to deploy AWS ElasticSearch service than to use Elastic's cloud offering or set it up ourselves. But that doesn't mean I like it. Or are you talking about a different end user?

Your options are "OSS ES that you can set up on your own for free" or "Closed source ES that you have to pay for". Not "Use AWS" and "Use Elastic".

I don't think of it that way at all. Nothing is free. The servers cost money. It costs money (resources) to manage servers. The cloud offerings appeal to us because we do not want to manage servers. AWS ES appeals to us because it is hard for us to sign contracts to buy software outside AWS. The trajectory of the software is definitely something we factor into the decision, but it is very often outweighed by the other factors. To me it is AWS Elastic vs Elastic Cloud vs hosting our own Elastic. Or use something else entirely.

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

#384

Post by zokier »

throw8932894 wrote: post #180

I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living. Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for…

> And I extensively use code generator which is also not public.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

(emphasis mine)

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

#385

Post by dv_dt »

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…

In a way it's hinting at the need for anti-trust barriers similar to how India barred Amazon from both running a product marketplace and offering it's own products in the same marketplace.

I can see both sides of it though. If there are an anti-trust barrier between running AWS and offering major services on top of it, there would be a better overall segregation and likely more innovation overall. On the other hand, putting up a barrier there would be both complex and leaky, and cause missing out on sorts of efficiencies from close integration of cloud platform + services.

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

#387

Post by spullara »

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…

If you ask me, these license changes are bait and switch. If they had started with this license it wouldn't have the same adoption, now they are pulling it.

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

#388

Post by dehrmann »

mariuz wrote: post #83
dhd415 wrote: post #10

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification . Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That mak…

Related article Uproar: MariaDB Corp. veers away from open source https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109213/open-source-uproar...

That's pretty ironic considering MariaDB's history.

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

#389

Post by lacker »

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 came in and took a bunch of that money while not giving anything back.

Amazon is giving a lot back to the community, though. They are providing a really valuable service when they provide open source software as a service. They aren't giving back to Elastic the company, but it's important to note the difference, because Amazon isn't being a bad actor here. I think it's reasonable for both Amazon and Elastic to act the way they do, and I think the competition between their respective business models will end up in a better set of products available to developers.

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

#390

Post by thayne »

> We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon

I am sympathetic to many of Elastic's complaints, but not this one. If you make an open-core product, you have to expect that others will attempt to make competing, possibly open source, alternatives to your proprietary components.

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