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

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

#541

Post by richardwhiuk » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

kemitchell wrote: post #520

Pet_Ant wrote: post #95

> Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us. I feel like I just said this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849 The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. ElasticSearch is trying t…

> No one wants to build their infrastructure on something with expensive IBM/Oracle-costing support. What's stopping you from running Elastic without paying for support under the new license?

You might need to open-source your entire service.

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

#542

Post by jabl » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #232

pjc50 wrote: 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…

> 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…

> Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, but it never anticipated providers providing services on an OSS product without contributing significantly

Well, the so-called "service provider loophole" was certainly well-known when GPLv3 was drafted. That's why AGPLv2 was created some years prior. IIRC early GPLv3 drafts contained AGPL-style language, but several of the companies involved in the GPLv3 drafting process (such as Google) objected, and those clauses were withdrawn from the final GPLv3.

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

#543

Post by richardwhiuk » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #413

patrickaljord wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet. > "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsear…

> This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet. But the tweet is still up: https://twitter.com/Werner/status/649738362086027265 (archive: https://archive.is/0py42 ) Pretty sure legal has reviewed it like a 100 times by now: AWS' taking no prisoners here.

It's not completely wrong. Using an open-source code to make something new is, to some extent, colloboration.

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

#544

Post by richardwhiuk » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #479

ensignavenger wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://opensource.org/osd See in particular items 5, 6 and 9.

That doesn't parse. The SSPL does not discriminate against a person, a group, or a field of endeavor, any more than the GPL "discriminates" against people who distribute modified versions of a program by requiring them to distribute the source code of the changes. Further, the requirement of the SSPL does not cover "distributing with", so point 9 doesn't seem to make sense either.

The main problem is that the license is bad, in the sense that it's vague.

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

#545

Post by samatman » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #528

specialist wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This kind of critique is basically never valid.

Any time I've seen it, it's glaringly obvious that HN users come down on both sides of the issue.

Pattern-matching detractors of your position as dominant in a particular venue's discussion is a common partisan failure mode. Doesn't mean you have to succumb to it.

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

#546

Post by richardwhiuk » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #44

sokoloff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me (not a lawyer) that “Amazon Elastic Search Service” would be OK in a way that “Amazon Elasticsearch Service” would not. (AWS had EC2 before Elastic’s trademark was registered.)

I'm not a lawyer either, but as I understand it, a trademark is violated if it's likely to confuse people into thinking the product/service is from the trademark holder when it actually isn't. If Amazon's CEO experienced such confusion himself, that does sound like a slam dunk to me. FTA: When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us…

I think the original link and the CTO disagrees with what "colloboration" means.

From Amazon's perspective, if they contributed a single fix, or asked a single question of ElasticSearch on the issue tracker, then this is a product born from colloboration.

It's difficult to think anyone is going to think that Amazon ElasticSearch is by anyone other than Amazon.

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

#547

Post by ABeeSea » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #539

ABeeSea wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well .. yes. That's the license fee. If you incorporate Oracle code or Nintendo characters in your software you'll get sued as well. So no you can't use GPLd libraries without contributing forward. This is intentional and the purpose of copyleft. GPL allows you to "use" but not "make derived works".

And most companies have decided that the fee of opening their entire code base to use a single GPL library isn’t worth it. That is heft license fee if you have invested billions into creating your company’s source code.

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

#548

Post by iamsb » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #296

cortesoft wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic even existed. They couldn’t have released it as closed source because they weren’t there to release it at all. It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene. I am ok with them making money off their project, but it i…

> It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene. That "one guy" is the CEO and founder of the company. You are making it seem like some guy developed an open source database, and a company later came around and built a business out of it, when that wasn't the case.

At least as per the wikipedia page[1], there is a lag of 2 years between product and company, and there prior history of him working on similar products. So I think it is reasonable to give benefit of the doubt that open source product was created in good faith and commercial interests only got explored later.

Most open source to commercial success stories like Kafka, Mongodb, and Elastic do seem to follow similar path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#History

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

#549

Post by vntok » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #145

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 [...] Hence the license change yes?

Too late, licensing changes are not retroactive.

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

#550

Post by pabs3 » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

If Amazon violated their trademark and proprietary license, how do they think they will be able to stop Amazon from violating the new proprietary license?