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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

#651

Post by jabl »

jabl wrote: post #553
pjmlp wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 propriet…

> ... the quantity and quantity of OSS ...

This should be "quantity and quality"

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

#652

Post by quotemstr »

dralley wrote: post #633
anticristi wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not the only reason, docker has a daemon running as root and requires "sudo", podman does not.

Rootless docker exists nowadays FWIW

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

#653

Post by bartvk »

Guthur wrote: post #648
floatingatoll wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What real , non-theoretical, "would stand up in a courtroom" risk is there if the SSPL extends to cover the Linux kernel? SSPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service" GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you release binaries SSPL+GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service or if you…

ElasticSearch know exactly what they are doing here. By leaving it grey and a little open to intrepretation they know that AWS lawyers will have to advice AWS to avoid it because it might open them up to legal attack.

You write as though the AWS lawyers' advice is binding. However the article starts with a trademark violation and apparently in that case, the AWS lawyers didn't have the upper hand internally.

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

#654

Post by pjmlp »

jabl wrote: post #553
pjmlp wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 propriet…

But we kind of do, BSDs are enjoying lots of upstream changes from Apple and Sony.

And in what concerns x86, they would just support it as well, as Solaris did. HP-UX and Aix also have supported a couple of CPU architectures, as did some of the others.

Just Irix was kind of married with MIPS.

Or Windows would just have won the x86 server room instead.

In any case, there are a couple of major surviving GPL projects, all competition against Linux on the IoT space are BSD/MIT FOSS POSIX clones, ironically one of them being sponsored by Linux foundation (Zephyr), so those around in 20 years will get to appreciate how much of GPL will still be left around.

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

#655

Post by pankajdoharey »

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…

Isnt that ultimately every business trying to do save costs? I dont see anything wrong as long as it is legal. ElasticSearch here wants to pervade the notion that they are open but wants to exclusively maintain cloud hosted versions. Thats not how opensource works, Open source works through open collaboration and feeedom. Opensource forks are completely valid as long as they dont violate the licensing terms.

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

#656

Post by pankajdoharey »

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 dont think there is a group like "HNers", HN is just composed of people with diverse opinions. No one agrees on everything. The rules are simple, so long as we agree to disagree everyone gets along.

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

#657

Post by pjmlp »

specialist wrote: post #564
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.

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 oth…

Here is my advice, other professions pay for the tools they use for their job.

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

#658

Post by andrewshadura »

colechristensen wrote: post #582
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's borderline gatekeeping No, it's a term-of-art. When people muddy the waters and try to undermine the standard terminology of a field, it's not some righteous struggle to liberate a term, it's just an obstacle to clear communication. In aviation, flap is a precise term-of-art, and is never used interchangeably with aileron , despite that an aileron is plainly a kind of flap (in the colloquial sense). If you ado…

But it’s not a term of art, when it was first used it had a broad scope for more or less anything where source was made available to users of software. The OSI definition is a newer more narrow definition adopted long after the term was in broad use. And fundamentally, the literal meaning of the words open and source do not have connotations beyond the source being available for viewing.

Please cite this supposed earlier pre-OSI usage. Can you?

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

#659

Post by chillfox »

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.

I am guessing that there's only two ways for them to remove the tweet.

1. Delete it with an apology (admitting guilt is not likely to be great for the lawsuit).

2. Delete it and say nothing (destruction of evidence is not likely to be great for the lawsuit).

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

#660

Post by c0l0 »

nijave wrote: post #625
c0l0 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

"Should" is such a beautiful concept ;)

The McAfee-based proxy we have SOMETIMES (I guess it depends on the content-type and the length of the upstream response) renders a kind of "intermediate" HTML document as the response body, where the human user is supposed to click on a link that makes the UA download the originally requested resource from an internal, ad-hoc mirror. I guess that is due to some virus scanning snake oil.

At any rate, what the packages at Amazon did there is just right up in "that is crazy"-territory.

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