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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

#521

Post by Spivak »

wizcaps wrote: post #493
Spivak wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it ends up being ruled that Amazon infringed on Elastic's trademark (their case here is pretty flimsy) or copied Elastic's proprietary code then Amazon deserves to get raked over the coals for copyright infringement. But Amazon offering hosted Elasticsearch and forking the project is something that I think is okay. It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers. Amazon is driving the cost of hosted Elasticsearch…

The entitlement in this thread is staggering. > It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers. Everyone is seemingly happy with ES not being able to monetise the product they build for the community, to subsidise the thousands of developer hours spent on it, so their company can save a few dollars. They (you) would rather than money go to Amazon for providing.. nothing to the ES community.

No, I would rather ES built a sustainable business selling their software with a normal licensing model that makes sure they're getting paid no matter who's hosting it. In that world it doesn't matter if AWS or Google or Microsoft or anyone else want to offer hosted versions of it because ES still gets their cut.

But co-opting open source to grow your user-base and then switching your license because you don't like the reality of what open source actually entails leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

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

#522

Post by kemitchell »

patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

> Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that.

Apache 2.0, section 6:

> 6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

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

#523

Post by M2Ys4U »

notatoad wrote: post #467
M2Ys4U wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I don't see why not.

British Airways only had a 38% market share when they were sued for abusing their dominant market position in 1998 (which was upheld by the Court of Justice in 2007)

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

#524

Post by nenolod »

Incidentally, the fact that it is OK to use Apache-2 licensed components inside projects licensed as SSPL is probably a net negative for free software moving forward as there will be more of these companies which do this in the future. It doesn't end with Elastic.

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

#525

Post by tinyhouse »

cmiles74 wrote: post #512
tinyhouse wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core of Elastic-search is Lucene, another OSS. I'm sure the ES team contributed a lot to Lucene, but do they share their profits with all the Lucene developers? You can think about Elastic as a hosted service around Lucene.

The only obligation that Easticsearch has to the Lucene project is to donate back improvements to Lucene itself. I believe the Elasticsearch project has done this in the past. No one is asking Amazon to share profits with Elastic. Many people do expect Amazon to honor trademarks of other companies. Many people expect Amazon not to package proprietary features as if they were free and open source. Lucene is a library…

I don't know anything about this story so cannot comment about them packaging proprietary features. But here's my thought about the trademarks claims from Elastic. The only info I have is the blog post they shared.

Elasticsearch is a name of an open source project. Why is calling something "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" a trademark issue? It's not Amazon's fault they called their company after the name of an open source software (the OSS came first btw). Also, IMHO calling it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" is fair since it represents exactly what it is. Would it better if they instead took the code, made some closed modifications and then released a service around it with a new name? My thought is no.

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

#526

Post by judofyr »

floatingatoll wrote: post #469
judofyr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lic…

I think the term "more open" is a bit too vague in this discussion. Sometimes people use it to refer to permissiveness (e.g. BSD) and sometimes people use it to refer to stimulating further open source work (e.g. GPL).

(And if we're following the "definitions" then ElasticSearch is no longer "open source" since that has a strict definition, but it's probably not so relevant in this discussion.)

I also don't really object to their license choice at all; what I object to is how they're framing the discussion. This license change is all about business: They want to be able to sell their cloud service without competition. That's perfectly okay, but there's no need to hide this. And certainly no need to "shame" Amazon for building a business on top of something Elastic open sourced.

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

I think their new license just shows that it's all about business. If they really wanted an open source license which stimulates anyone to share improvements to ElasticSearch they could have picked GPL. As of now, any big company (Facebook, Google, etc) can create an improved internal fork of ElasticSearch which none of the community will ever be able to take advantage of. And why are they fine with Facebook/Google doing this? Because it won't jeopardize Elastic's cloud offering.

In addition, their new license also makes it harder for other people to build businesses on top of ElasticSearch. Imagine that I invest a ton of time and effort into creating a new management layer which is capable of scaling ElasticSearch drastically better. Something completely novel which looks at current trends of traffic and automatically moves shards around. Non-trivial stuff. Well, sorry, there's no way of building a business on top of this idea.

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

#527

Post by pjmlp »

btinker wrote: post #471
judofyr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all of its good connotations) it once was. This. It is too bad they couldn't have satisfactory financial success building on open source and it is their right and perfectly fine to switch to a different model, but their justification as well as the SSPL dual licensing muddle the water unnecessarily.…

Basically shareware with source available, we have come full circle.

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

#528

Post by pjmlp »

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…

HNers praise how great Amazon is for product XYZ.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for Graviton.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for leaving Azure and GCP on the dust.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for FOSS project XYZ.

HNers bash Amazon because yet another project made the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses.

Yep, I am seeing a pattern definitely.

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

#529

Post by tinyhouse »

nrmitchi wrote: post #498
tinyhouse wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core of Elastic-search is Lucene, another OSS. I'm sure the ES team contributed a lot to Lucene, but do they share their profits with all the Lucene developers? You can think about Elastic as a hosted service around Lucene.

I've said this elsewhere, but no. There are two main differences here. 1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement. 2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and t…

1. No one says you need to modify/extend something in order to sell a service around it. That's why we have licenses that list exactly what you can do and cannot do with the software.

2. Amazon adds value here by providing hosting solutions for companies using the elastic search software. So it makes sense to call it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" since that's what it is. I think interpreting this as Amazon built a new competing product but calling it the same name is not the right interpertation. If that's confusing then maybe modifying it to "amazon elasticsearch hosting service" would be the OK thing to do. Not sure if that would make Elastic happy.

3. That's nice of them (really!). Sounds like win-win. But again, it doesn't make anything they do more justifiable.

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

#530

Post by pjmlp »

HotHotLava wrote: post #418
tolmasky wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Linus' original license did forbid making any money off the kernel: > - You may not distibute[sic] this for a fee, not even "handling" costs. Also I think the GPL was pretty important to the kernel, since many companies, especially in the 90s, probably would have kept contributions private and their code closed without that gentle push.

Without it, we would have all the big UNIXes still around, adopting BSD code as they already were doing.
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