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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

#621

Post by metiscus »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #618
sokoloff wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 GPL does not require releasing source code or patches except to those whom you give the binaries. If Facebook…

Isn’t this the situation AGPL3 was written for? It’d probably kill ES and lead to a fork from the latest pre-AGPL3 version, but it’s still an option.

IANAL but I believe that the AGPL would address the case where AGPL code was used in a user facing setting. If the code was used only internally I believe that it is no different from the GPL in this respect.

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

#622

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

metiscus wrote: post #621
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this the situation AGPL3 was written for? It’d probably kill ES and lead to a fork from the latest pre-AGPL3 version, but it’s still an option.

IANAL but I believe that the AGPL would address the case where AGPL code was used in a user facing setting. If the code was used only internally I believe that it is no different from the GPL in this respect.

AWS elasticsearch is user-facing: the users are AWS’s clients.

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

#623

Post by whs »

h_anna_h wrote: post #566
floatingatoll wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it's AGPL your application would have to be open source. With SSPL only the management plane has to.

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

#624

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

tolmasky wrote: post #370
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…

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…

I don’t see these as comparable. If Microsoft packaged up Linux and started selling Linux licenses, maybe? Elastic search being used in a product seems different from elastic search being the product. It’s not black and white, but there are real differences.

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

#625

Post by nijave »

c0l0 wrote: post #284
ec109685 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the captive portal intercept s3 tls calls successfully?

TLS in enterprise settings is commonly intercepted by TLS/HTTPS proxies that create trusted (by the OS's local trust store) certificates for proxied peers on the fly. Banks often do this - the one I work for, for instance.

The proxy should be verifying the cert of the connection it's proxying to so it has to either be malicious or buggy where it corrupts the software.

The proxy won't connect to bank.com with an invalid cert unless it's configured incorrectly (but the same is true of the OS anyway)

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

#626

Post by jfim »

astrange wrote: post #605
peterwoerner wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There appear to be more competitors than ever to me. Amazon doesn't have much of a moat in their retail business (they do in AWS) since your lock in is only that you've bought Prime for the year; they're merely very good at it.

They do though. If one has paid for Prime, they might not even think about shopping elsewhere because they get Free n day shipping, for whatever value of n Amazon has nowadays.

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

#629

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

metiscus wrote: post #621
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this the situation AGPL3 was written for? It’d probably kill ES and lead to a fork from the latest pre-AGPL3 version, but it’s still an option.

IANAL but I believe that the AGPL would address the case where AGPL code was used in a user facing setting. If the code was used only internally I believe that it is no different from the GPL in this respect.

Correct: AGPL3 is GPL3 + one requirement – any user who communicates to a program must be able to retrieve its source code.

If ES was under AGPL3, AWS' ES server would absolutely fall in scope.

The Facebook example, however, is tricky. You are technically right: the FSF calls this the Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) problem[1]. But Facebook can run an AGPL3 project and, as long as they are careful, will not need to expose any changes they make to it.

In practice, Facebook and other big corporations are extremely unlikely to do this. If they get it wrong, they've inadvertently accepted a license they didn't mean to, which could open them up to liability or worse – relicensing things. To prevent this you get a set of approved permissive licenses that are always kosher. If you want to stray off the path there is a set of massive flaming hoops you have to jump through (VP approval? legal review? just the beginning of your fun!) that are designed to convince you that you should chose a different path that involve more permissively licensed software.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

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

#630

Post by didibus »

StavrosK wrote: post #280
35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't have your cake and eat it too, and say "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't change your terms!". I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them? You seem to be the only person passing value judgements: > Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I…

> I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them? I'm talking about the general sentiment here. Either Amazon have been playing by the rules and Elastic is within their rights to change those rules, so no problem anywhere, or Amazon has been harming a part of the OSS ecosystem and forced Elastic to make an unpopular change. > Amazon used Elastic per terms of the lic…

> I care that more companies are encouraged to release their software as OSS because they can make money for it. That's a win-win situation to me.

Why is it a win for you?

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