Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by ydlr » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #615

ydlr wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. If we accept Elastic's interpretation of trademark law, all retail is illegal. I bought some break cereal at Walmart this morning that clearly displayed a "Kellog" trademark. Walk down any isle of the store, unauthorized use of trademarks as far as the eye can see. NOT OK.

If you try to open a series of stores with Kellog in the name, you'll get slapped down right away. And that's obviously the problem here, putting it right in the name in a way that gives no hint it's someone else's trademark.

> If you try to open a series of stores with Kellog in the name, you'll get slapped down right away.

Fair enough. I still don't think Amazon is violating trademark here, but my analogy was unnecessarily dismissive.

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

#692

Post by k__ » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #435

k__ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. AWS should build a real serverless alternative to it or buy Algolia or something...

Kendra is their Algolia-like service. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/dg/in-adding-docum...

But not serverless.

If you create an index, you have to pay at least 2,50€ per hour it runs.

All pricing examples were multiple thousands of Euros per month.

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

#693

Post by StreamBright » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 11:16 PM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #417

StreamBright wrote: post #4

I wish there was something better than Elastic for indexing large volume of text.

Better in what ways?

In many ways. I could write a book about this but lets just say operational stability and reliability is the primary reasons.

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

#694

Post by rpdillon » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

kemitchell wrote: post #516

btinker wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all of its good connotations) it once was. This. It is too bad they couldn't have satisfactory financial success building on open source and it is their right and perfectly fine to switch to a different model, but their justification as well as the SSPL dual licensing muddle the water unnecessarily.…

I don't have any problem calling SSPL software "open source". Or AGPL software, for that matter. What's not free or open about applying copyleft to network services?

The license discriminates based on field of endeavor, invoking additional constraints on the basis of what you use the software for.

The legal team for Fedora expressed this well, I think:

> It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users. Additionally, it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt towards commercial users of software under that license. To consider the SSPL to be "Free" or "Open Source" causes that shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem, even though none of them carry that risk.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

I think it is this discrimination that makes in not as free or as open as AGPL and GPL.

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

#695

Post by kemitchell » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #694

kemitchell wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any problem calling SSPL software "open source". Or AGPL software, for that matter. What's not free or open about applying copyleft to network services?

The license discriminates based on field of endeavor, invoking additional constraints on the basis of what you use the software for. The legal team for Fedora expressed this well, I think: > It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users. Additionally, it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause Fear, Uncertain…

The field-of-endeavor and persons-or-groups discrimination arguments don't stand up. They just sound nice if you want to knock the license.

If SSPL discriminates against a "field of endeavor" that is making proprietary software, or against "persons or groups" that are proprietary software developers, all copyleft licenses do. That was the point. Here's Richard Stallman on the GPL:

> I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

The quote from Fedora perfectly encapsulates the difference between the OSI review process as people perceive it and the OSI review process as it really was. Are we judging license terms, or what we believe to have been in the secret heart of the company that wrote them? What happens when someone else uses the license, as when independent hackers choose GPL, or startups choose AGPL?

Commercial software makers have plenty to fear from GPL, AGPL, and other open source copyleft licenses, because so many of their business models entail slurping up other people's open code, but not sharing their own. Those licenses prohibit building proprietary software with open code, just not if you happen to "compose" a service with network API calls, rather than build a program by copying code snippets, using frameworks, and linking libraries.

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

#696

Post by chikens » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 7:19 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #354

ec109685 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic is a 10B company and have the ability to write all the proprietary code they want to compete with Amazon.

$15B actually

Don’t forget the CEO has cashed out ~$200M in stock the last two years alone and still holds $1B worth of stock, yet complains about AWS making money and changes the license so he can make even more. He likes to quote a tweet from 2015 from the CTO of AWS when they launched the Elasticsearch service in AWS. That was 6 years ago! They have had time to build a better offering with heir commercial licenses have failed. Elastic is trying to sell security now, what happens when they lose there too, change the license so any SIEM or analytics vendors have to pay them too? Elastic made a promise that the code would ALWAYS be Apache 2.0 and they went back on that promise, they lied to the community that helped build it, their customers, employees, partners and investors. The blog post about the license titles “Doubling Down on Open” is an insult to peoples’ intelligence, they are trying to play the victim because AWS is a mean bully. Well that’s business, if the CEO/founder didn’t see it coming then maybe he shouldn’t CEO? Take his billion dollars and go start something else and hand the company leadership over to someone who knows what they are doing.

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

#697

Post by chikens » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 7:20 AM UTC

Don’t forget the CEO has cashed out ~$200M in stock the last two years alone and still holds $1B worth of stock, yet complains about AWS making money and changes the license so he can make even more. He likes to quote a tweet from 2015 from the CTO of AWS when they launched the Elasticsearch service in AWS. That was 6 years ago! They have had time to build a better offering with heir commercial licenses have failed. Elastic is trying to sell security now, what happens when they lose there too, change the license so any SIEM or analytics vendors have to pay them too? Elastic made a promise that the code would ALWAYS be Apache 2.0 and they went back on that promise, they lied to the community that helped build it, their customers, employees, partners and investors. The blog post about the license titles “Doubling Down on Open” is an insult to peoples’ intelligence, they are trying to play the victim because AWS is a mean bully. Well that’s business, if the CEO/founder didn’t see it coming then maybe he shouldn’t CEO? Take his billion dollars and go start something else and hand the company leadership over to someone who knows what they are doing.

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

#698

Post by horovits » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

SSPL is NOT an open source license. OSI (Open Source Initiative) released a statement to clarify that, and also respondED to Elastic's claims. https://opensource.org/node/1099

The community has invested in Elasticsearch and in Kibana, and we need to keep it open source. really open source.

Check out this initiative: https://logz.io/blog/open-source-elasticsearch-doubling-down...

(disclaimer: I'm a developer advocate at Logz.io) If you also want to take part, email open-es-k@logz.io (or reach out to me @horovits)

Let’s keep Elasticsearch and Kibana open source!

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

#699

Post by patcon » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

cowsandmilk wrote: post #668

patcon wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure they would have no problem contributing back Why the heck would you feel sure of that? What evidence makes you think anything in Amazon's DNA would go in that direction? Amazon is blatantly missing from every open source conversation or ecosystem I've ever encountered. They give essentially NOTHING back except cheap infra as a service, and we pay dearly for it with the losses we get from their predatory be…

Amazon literally started an open source distribution of elastic search and kibana in 2019, one that has been adopted and contributed to by other companies and clouds because it includes feature that are only in the commercial variant of elastic’s offerings. This fact is included in elastic’s blog post as a third party contributed a plug-in to Amazon’s version that Elastic believes copied source code from their commer…

Sorry, I was a little too indignant there. Apologies.

But also, that's contributing "out", not contributing "back". It's the difference between working with your neighbours, vs leaving your extra shit around your house on the curb for someone else to take.

The mechanics of how they relate to the groups from which they filter wealth, that matters imho.

When I get frustrated about how they don't really contribute, it's that I'm intensely cynical about the worldview from which their offerings come.

Anyhow, thanks for the generous comment, and the chance to reflect :)

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

#700

Post by smichel17 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

smichel17 wrote: post #404

brabel wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I care that more companies are encouraged to release their software as OSS because they can make money for it. But they can't! Tell me how many companies make profit off purely OSS... RedHat maybe? What else? And even if they can, they shouldn't be surprised when competitors use their OSS for their own benefit because OSS explicitly allows for that. Making money off OSS is a red herring, just because it works in a…

Fundamentally, there's no "profit" to be made in OSS, nor public goods in general. If you try to charge for more than "at cost", someone else can and will come along and undercut you. Why the scare quotes? Well, I don't mean all profit according to definition, but specifically the "returns for investors" type. Company profits. Technically you can run a sole proprietorship, and make (say) $100k in profit.. or you coul…

Well past the edit window now, but I discussed this with someone else yesterday and they pointed out the word I'm looking for to describe "at cost, including cost of living", non-exploitative part of income is earnings.