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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

#671

Post by woofie11 »

cycloptic wrote: post #616
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…

No offense but this advice is rather risky and legally dangerous, please don't tell people to potentially put their products in jeopardy by doing this. The correct thing to do is for MongoDB/Elastic to just clarify the wording in the license.

No. The correct thing is to adopt a license I understand.

AGPL is okay.

I'm not hiring a lawyer when I'm selecting a few tools to benchmark. I'm not using EC until I've had the license reviewed by a lawyer. Ergo, redis or similar.

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

#672

Post by woofie11 »

whs wrote: post #623
h_anna_h wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dual license.

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

#673

Post by neop1x »

anticristi wrote: post #446
cactus2093 wrote: post #258

What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Or what every hosting provider including AWS does with the Linux kernel, sell access to a service that is running that software. I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released open source software and now are mad that…

This. Elastic produced a product that is popular because it's open source. (The closed source version of ES is called Splunk or DataDog.) Now they are pissed off that they can't profit from its popularity. I feel their sadness, but I don't think Amazon is the problem. Even before Amazon many non-Elastic hosted ES offers appeared (logz.io ?). I would hate to be in their shoes, but it brings a valuable lesson to future…

But what if this openness is the thing made them more popular than closed solutions like Splunk?

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

#674

Post by antonvs »

rossjudson wrote: post #645
mbreese wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 not killed?

It's quite a long list.

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

#675

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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.

> when it was first used it had a broad scope for more or less anything where source was made available to users

I'm not sure the early history of the term really matters. Presumably early aeronautical engineers and early physicists had to all agree on the terms of their field. It's fortunate that they did so, and now that their field is mature, their terms are clear and unambiguous.

Someone without an education in physics might not be able to intuit that physicists use the terms strength, hardness, and toughness in distinct and precise ways.

> The OSI definition is a newer more narrow definition adopted long after the term was in broad use.

I'd say it's a more considered, more precise, more meaningful definition.

> the literal meaning of the words open and source do not have connotations beyond the source being available for viewing

I already gave the example of flap, a precise term-of-art in aviation that reuses a non-technical English word in a way that cannot simply be intuited.

I also don't see that open needs to be a synonym of viewable. I think it's fine that open be used to refer to something broader, as in the Open University for instance. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

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

#676

Post by ctvo »

taormina wrote: post #533
nrmitchi wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends…

They don't outcompete. AWS's ES is a steaming pile of crap and everyone I've ever met with a real usecase that needs ES on AWS rolls their own on their own EC2 instances.

I quake to think of how bad ES's own managed service must be if it still gets customers then. I don't know anyone that uses the services offered by ES so I can't ask directly.

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

#677

Post by MaxBarraclough »

andrewshadura wrote: post #658
colechristensen wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Apparently the OSI was founded February 1998, the same month the term open source was first coined [0][1]. The OSI says [2] The Open Source Definition was then created during the launch of the OSI in Feb. 1998 by revising the DFSG and removing Debian-specific references.

This seems to indicate that the OSI's precise definition was pretty much there from the beginning, unless they didn't really coin the term open source and it was floating around beforehand. I've heard from others that open source was in use before the OSI definition, so perhaps that's the case.

As I mention in my response though, I don't think the term's early history much matters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Origins

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...

[2] https://opensource.org/history

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

#678

Post by finikytou »

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…

Your argument that Elastic could have released ES closed source and did us a favor is not a valid one.

They released ES open source so that they could leverage the community + an open source tool (lucene) to build their tool and later on their company.

If not for the open source they would be just a random actor in search and SOLR would likely be a better tool than it is now.

Also by your logic elastic did to lucene what aws did to elastic...

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

#679

Post by cycloptic »

woofie11 wrote: post #671
cycloptic wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense but this advice is rather risky and legally dangerous, please don't tell people to potentially put their products in jeopardy by doing this. The correct thing to do is for MongoDB/Elastic to just clarify the wording in the license.

No. The correct thing is to adopt a license I understand. AGPL is okay. I'm not hiring a lawyer when I'm selecting a few tools to benchmark. I'm not using EC until I've had the license reviewed by a lawyer. Ergo, redis or similar.

If the license is so badly worded that nobody can understand it, it needs to be corrected. I agree you should not hire a lawyer for that, it's not your lawyer's job to fix some other company's license for them. It's a shame that MongoDB appears to have completely lost interest in drafting SSPLv2.

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

#680

Post by woof »

ardy42 wrote: post #307
notatoad wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.

> Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly. That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent interpretations of some types of anti-competitive behavior have been rather literal and required something very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the effect of neu…

Amazon, Google, Microsoft is not a duopoly :)

And while there are probably some services on AWS you can’t find at a competitor - that’s mostly a choice (aka profit margin) made by the competitor.

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