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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

#561

Post by johncena33 »

samatman wrote: post #545
pjmlp wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry I hate to disagree. HN has lost its way last few years. The amount of FUD spread against Google on HN is mind-boggling. Every single day there is at least one anti-Google post on HN front page. Most of the content is the old broken record. I simple hide these posts from newsfeed. But the moderators have chosen to look other way.

On top of that, lots of discussion has become simply low-quality. The comments on technical posts turn into complaining about something not related to the technical content rather about the product. The amount of complaining and whining is through the roof. Mods should look into "Whine Wednesday" type threads to keep the off-topic whinings and complaining invading every single thread.

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

#562

Post by samblr »

What gets often never discussed in these debates is below :

The sheer inability of OSI to provide a new-age license that can counter AWS.

Can anybody knowledgeable shed some light on this topic ? Like what OSI license can counter AWS & if there are none why aren't OSI doing anything.

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

#563

Post by superzamp »

sn_master wrote: post #310
yrgulation wrote: post #119

The cringe on this thread is appalling. Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, taking time away from their families and lives, only for companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make billions in prof…

What does the term WAANK stand for?

I guess FAANG + wankers = WAANK

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

#564

Post by specialist »

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.

I apologize. I'm simply trying to understand and explain, if only to myself, to better calibrate expectations.

I do not criticize or defend Amazon's parasitic relationship with FOSS. Frankly, I don't yet see how it can be any other way. I just merely acknowledge the plain truth. And that Amazon is better at this than the other belligerents.

While I'm a very happy Amazon Prime customer, I'd never be an employee or otherwise do business with Amazon. I just feel like there's no way for me to benefit proportionally. Per the parable of the lion's share.

> ...the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses.

Go on.

I'm hoping someone, anyone will discuss Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ) advice.

I have three projects in my back pocket. Once seen, their secret sauce is trivially reproduced. I can think of no way to publish them as anything other than FOSS. Not even as a service. Nor can I figure out how to pay rent working on them.

Which is a pity. These three tools are pretty neat.

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

#565

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

7952 wrote: post #412
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…

Would anyone consider licenses the specifically exclude certain companies?

WTFPL effectively does that. Big companies won’t touch it.

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

#566

Post by h_anna_h »

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…

The license does not seem any different to AGPLv3 as you are describing it, in that case why did they not just use AGPLv3 which is FOSS?

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

#567

Post by Lazare »

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…

> No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good.

I don't think that's clear. I (and the team I work with) use AWS, like so many of us do. (And the ones who don't very likely use Azure or GCP.)

Why do we give money to AWS (and their kin) every month? I'd submit it's because we're getting value from it. If AWS was actually bad for end users then we, as end users, would walk away.

If you were right, and AWS was bad and Elastic is good, this would be an easy problem. But actually, they're both good. The issue is people who paid AWS to host ES instead of Elastic, and you know who those people are? Us. And with reason!

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

#568

Post by Pet_Ant »

matz1 wrote: post #106
Pet_Ant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you. I think that is false. Most things that are said assume that the listener will self-moderate. If I have Crohn's or IBS and I post a sign on my front-lawn saying "bathroom free to use for those in need" I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and us…

>I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks But you should expecting that, you can't assume the listener will self-moderate.

Really? If someone comes over and you say "help yourself to anything in the fridge" you shouldn't expect that someone will take a snack and not clear out your fridge and load up there car with groceries for the week?

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

#569

Post by viraptor »

anticristi wrote: post #447
thefreeman wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem that Elastic doesn't like is that amazon reimplements features as part of their core offering that ES tries to charge for. I'm sure they would have no problem contributing back but Elastic doesn't want these features to become part of the core offering.

This sounds like the Docker Inc and Red Hat dance again. Red Hat wanted tighter integration with systemd, Docker Inc not. The debate ended with Red Hat doing: alias docker=podman

One of the debates ended. But since it's not a complete replacement, or started some more debates.

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

#570

Post by nenolod »

joshuaissac wrote: post #535
nenolod wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I read that article [...] If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin. The first sentence of that article: > Back on September 4th, we filed a lawsuit against floragunn GmbH, the makers of Search Guard, a security plugin for Elasticsearch

Yeah? SCO sued a bunch of people too. They haven't won, though.
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