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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

#551

Post by bonzini »

nenolod wrote: post #519
patch_cable wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a link in the article to a separate post: https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin... . I think this is what it is referring to.

I read that article and it is very redolent of what SCO argued back in the day. If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin.

They did in September 2019. Is literally the first sentence of the linked article and it links to https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users.

I am not sure of the outcome.

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

#552

Post by cortesoft »

eloff wrote: post #205
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…

> I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn’t like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work. Because no other companies build on a foundation of open-source software today? I think that describes every company. Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not just components of it, but does that really matter? I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here.

My distinction is that I don’t think they are being abused. They want to build a business around an open source tool just like AWS wants to also build a business around an open source tool.

I am happy to let them compete to see who can offer the best value.

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

#553

Post by jabl »

pjmlp wrote: post #530
HotHotLava wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they would still be around in some form, yes, although the mass market advantages of x86 would still have killed of the traditional RISC Unix workstation market etc.

OTOH maybe eventually most people would have switched to FreeBSD (or whatever free *BSD would have been the "mainstream" choice), just like they switched to Linux in our universe, since they thought that whatever value add provided by some proprietary unix wasn't worth it anymore.

In a hypothetical copyleft-free universe, sure, there would be a lot more companies using OSS to create proprietary products without having to think about what is a derivative work, linking and distribution restrictions. OTOH all those proprietary companies playing the "commodify your complement" game against each other would ensure that the quantity and quantity of OSS would continually be increasing as well, forcing those companies to continually innovate lest they lose their market to the free OSS alternatives. To repeat, hypothetically speaking, as we don't have an alternate universe to run such experiments in.

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

#554

Post by johncena33 »

mbreese wrote: post #474
stingraycharles wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AWS is a case of someone ruining it for the rest. Yes, they’re allowed to do that and there’s nothing wrong legally, but in the end everyone will be worse off. I would be much more hesitant choosing an storage solution if I knew the parent company has problems monetizing upon it.

> more hesitant choosing an storage solution if I knew the parent company has problems monetizing You should be hesitant about choosing any mission critical product where you don't know how the vendor will make money. This is even the case with stable vendors. How many products has Google killed over the years because they could figure out how to make them profitable (enough)?

> How many products has Google killed over the years because they could figure out how to make them profitable (enough)?

HN never ceases to amaze me. This is a post on pattern of exploitative and anti-competitive behavior of AWS. Somehow HN crowd found a way to whine about Google. Every single day multiple anti-Google posts on HN front page was not enough.

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

#555

Post by api »

dragonwriter wrote: post #532
api wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few OSS projects get popular enough and are structurally amenable to that kind of group contribution scenario. Of those that are, in most cases it results in an unusable hodge podge of crap rather than a well crafted product.

> Very few OSS projects get popular enough and are structurally amenable to that kind of group contribution scenario. Yes, very few open source projects ever move out of the fringes of relevance. That's always been true. The idea that there has been some radical change making OSS less relevant is just false; what has happened is that OSS has gotten enough mindshare that people who want to use business models that OSS…

I think we have a very different view about the goals of OSS then, and I think your idea of its goals is narrower.

I wish all software could be at least source-available and preferably available under even more liberal terms if that could be made to work. That way we could see how things work, learn from things, debug with the benefit of source, port things to different platforms or fix platform problems without waiting for the vendor, contribute if for no other reason than experience, and preserve software after vendors go belly-up without having to resort to emulating old platforms whole cloth.

I also wish there was mainstream adoption of open software for privacy and security reasons. I wish people could use operating systems, web browsers, messengers, and so on whose source could be audited so people could understand privacy implications.

That would all give us more freedom and more transparency, but it also requires a business model to sustain those kinds of projects. As it stands nobody outside geekdom uses open source software because there is no business model to sustain OSS with the degree of polish demanded by end users.

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

#556

Post by iamsb »

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…

Is there a common theme that can be addressed by adding restriction which can stop distribution as a cloud service in MIT/other licenses?

This is a question, and not a informed opinion/suggestion.

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

#557

Post by pabs3 »

throw8932894 wrote: post #431
zokier wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cha…

I distribute output from code generator. It is fully readable with comments. I also receive some patches on generated code, which I port back to generator. I agree it does not fit strict definition of OS, but it fits Apache 2 license.

It is definitely not compliant with the GPL family of licenses, so this could block GPL licensed projects from using your library.

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

#558

Post by kemitchell »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #541
kemitchell wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In a narrow set of use cases, yes. In the vast majority of use cases---building applications with Elastic for data---no.

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

#559

Post by cortesoft »

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.

No, but my point is one guy wrote it and has made a lot of money from it. He has been more than compensated for his work.

Any money made from here on out is not based on the work of creating the software, but on helping people use it. If Amazon does a better job of that than Elastic, than they should win the competition.

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

#560

Post by peterwoerner »

astrange wrote: post #494
remram wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Getting investors to give Bezos free money for being Bezos was actually pretty good for customers and got everyone free one-day shipping. Amazon is an investor charity like Uber, not a business.

Right now it is better for the customers, but that doesn't mean it will continue to be this. You assume that once/if Bezos crushes the rest of the competitors he won't start significantly increasing prices.

We saw something similar in the 90s where health care prices plummeted as the now winners developed and convinced the public that their monopolies were good. Now they are able increase prices by 15-20%/yr into the foreseeable future.

This is not a prediction (per se), but a statement that we should realize that monopolistic might be good for the consumer in the short term but bad in the long term.

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