Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by alextheparrot » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

wolframhempel wrote: post #365

alextheparrot wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think your historical assessment is fair, as usually legal has an allow-list of licenses and anything else is non-trivial to integrate. Moving forward, though, with multiple companies trying to solve issues via licensing (Mongo, Elastic, Confluent), I think we could see some of the new licenses become legal allow-listed (Which allows for some of the moment open-source can give as you mentioned in the link).

Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Elastic-style licenses moving forward is API compatibility. It is just a question of how much money is at stake for a company like Amazon to go from just operationalizing ElasticSearch to running and maintaining an API-compatible fork, just as they've done with Mongo. It would actually be a bit hilarious if Amazon open-sourced said fork with a more permissive license, given that their buck is usually made off of ops.

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

#462

Post by dd_roger » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

I have a hard time understanding the point of the author.

If Amazon is infringing a trademark (which indeed seems to be the case in my non-expert eyes), reparation should/could be obtained before a court regardless of the license of the code.

If the author has a problem with his FOSS software being used by an entity he doesn't like then he is in disagreement with the FOSS ideal at its core, this is a perfectly respectable opinion but don't blame it on Amazon.

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

#463

Post by ensignavenger » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #253

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.

https://opensource.org/osd

See in particular items 5, 6 and 9.

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

#464

Post by growse » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #455

babarock wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of "open sourcing" if you get annoyed at people redistributing your work? Honest question here. I'm really not interested to know who's in the "right" or in the "wrong". I want to know, what's the motivation for opensource if not "reuse my code please"

That question makes the wrong assumption. You assume "OSS" is a given and "getting annoyed at Amazon" is the issue. In reality, "getting annoyed at Amazon" is the given and "OSS" is the issue. Then, you can ask "if they get annoyed at Amazon, why open source?" and the answer is "indeed, and now that they realized their mistake they're changing it".

> Then, you can ask "if they get annoyed at Amazon, why open source?" and the answer is "indeed, and now that they realized their mistake they're changing it".

Notably, they're changing it after building a business off the back of many contributors, many of whom expected to be contributing to OSS. Sure, there's a CLA so there's no legal issue, but I'm not sure it's any more morally virtuous than what Amazon's doing. Both are versions of "trying to make billions of dollars off the backs of other people's work".

There's having cake, and then there's eating it. Either you want to retain control over something so you can monetize it to the max, or you want to particpate (and benefit from) the OSS community and build something that benefits everyone.

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

#465

Post by pydry » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #275

StavrosK wrote: post #232

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?

Easy to work around with "hollywood accounting". Amazon could license the software from a shell company they own that makes very little revenue.

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

#466

Post by donretag » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #169

I recently ran a project to compare AWS Elasticsearch and Elastic-hosted ES. Surprisingly, we found that AWS did better for our use-case. Better IaC - easy to set up clusters with Terraform, and associated alerts. Better monitoring and easier setup. Better price/performance. AWS is obviously lower friction from a purchasing point too once you're already an AWS user. This makes me curious if Elastic are shooting thems…

I have been using Elasticsearch for over ten years and have seen a few of the hosted versions. For many years, AWS was running way behind. A few major versions behind, almost no options. No one used it. The ES version was not great, but it was way better than the AWS version.

Fast forward to 2021 and the AWS version is as seamless as most of their offerings. Works with the VPC, backing stores. You can set it up with CloudFormation/CDK. ES has stagnated.

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

#467

Post by notatoad » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

M2Ys4U wrote: post #427

notatoad wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That depends on jurisdiction. In the EU, it is "dominant market position" (and explicitly so) that's the threshold for the Commission to take competition action, for instance.

would AWS be considered "dominant" though? they are the indisputably the market leader, but there's plenty of competition

(not trying to argue they aren't dominant. just curious)

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

#468

Post by dd_roger » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

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…

Neither of these issues have anything to do with the license.

Either Elastic's code used by Amazon is indeed stolen proprietary code and no licensing change is needed to obtain reparation, or Amazon is making lawful use of FOSS source code and the question boils down to "if I publish code under a FOSS license, can anybody use it?", to which the answer is obviously yes. And if you'd prefer it to be "no" then don't publish FOSS.

Regarding the trademark, this indeed seems (to my non-lawyer eyes) to be an infringement (or extremely borderline at the very least) but isn't related to licensing.

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

#469

Post by floatingatoll » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

judofyr wrote: post #239

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…

> 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…

The new license doesn't restrict others from operating Elasticsearch as a service. It restricts others from operating Elasticsearch as a service unless they release any source code patches, improvements, and/or functionality extensions they make to it.

To me, that's exactly what you're saying you expected from liberal licenses, but it's delivered by a restrictive license, using the restrictions popularized by GPL licenses. This makes ElasticSearch more open source, rather than less, because now anyone who uses it has to "open" their source code. That's the premise of GPLv3 in a nutshell, and I'm hard-pressed to understand how it's a drawback here.

Have I misunderstood and their new license somehow reduces the openness of their source code to the world?

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

#470

Post by kureikain » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

From time to time, I see some cool application and I really want to see how they done it. It's ok if it's "truely OSS" I just want to see how they did it, what trick they made.

An example, a few years ago I saw a few mac app that show you network metered in status bar and little snitch. I don't know how they did that. I wish I can read their code, even if it's truely OSS.

To me, the value that ElasticSearch give to us is great. And when I do some cool thing, I myself want to share too but I don't want other to take my code and make money off it without contributing back to me.

I think Elastic, as a company, doing a good thing here, and AWS is the bad actor here, they even lie about their collaboration between them and Elastic.