AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

Forcing profit accrual in your software license is easy enough. The hard part is to grow a community & popularity the way open source licenses have proven, when you have such restrictions in place.

This is only a "gap" in the sense of the grand injustice of the universe, as the Rolling Stones said, "You can't always get what you want".

'What's missing is an open-source license for products whose profits accrue due to being run as SaaS. If you're just going to say: "This is not possible with open-source licenses", then that's the gap.'

Think about what you're saying for a second.

1. Free software & open source is fundamentally opposed to user restrictions of any form, this is "Freedom Zero" and literally the whole reason the movement was created and got popular.

2. You can't create an "I GET THE MONEY" restriction and still be open source or free software, or accrue anywhere near the popularity and community goodwill you'd otherwise get

3. Therefore this is a problem?

Open source contributors have limited interest in your profits or business model if it means compromising the most essential point of it all. Open source is not a business model, and never was meant to be. Plenty of open source companies made lots of money without restricting user freedom, and they did it while AWS and others existed.

All of the tech leadership and excitement in dev communities today (Docker, Serverless, Kubernetes, Kafka, Spring, Rust, Golang) etc. is driven by open source, not by the clouds' proprietary services.

'What people actually want to do is exclude about 10 or less companies from selling their software at no own cost, while keeping it open-source for everyone else... Maybe there should be a license for that.'

Licenses like this have literally existed for over 30 years. "Everybody but Microsoft", "everybody but IBM", "everybody but the military". They're out there in spades.

Good luck, have fun. Build amazing software and build a community!

Except, these violate "Freedom Zero", the most essential point to why FLOSS was created: freedom to use, no restrictions. You might have some challenges gaining community support because of this.

https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2019/fall/building-ethical-soft...

The excerpt worth reading:

"The lack of usage restrictions in its licenses is key to the success of free software. A world of proliferating and potentially conflicting usage restrictions, each seeking to address a different social cause or need, would introduce so much friction that the tremendous democratic social benefit brought about by the free sharing of software – including the empowerment of individuals to effect social change in unjust institutions – would be undermined.

Just because a license is not the right place to enforce ethical software usage doesn't mean we don't recognize the problem, or respect the people raising it. We should encourage and participate in conversations about the ethical usage of software. With the ground rules of free software as the baseline, anyone can build systems to specifically promote ethical use."

It would have prevented its use in a previous company i worked at (largely for ideaological not practical concerns).

> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor, which was never a realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to cost so much, I guess.

That seems like a silly conclusion. Amazon is being a good actor by all accounts. On top of that Elastic is like a 15 billion dollar company, if that's not working, i need to get going on a business venture that doesnt work.

Anyways what makes you think they would be succesful if they used the license from day 1. Having your cake and eating it too only works if you switch halfway through.

Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like Elastic because companies like Amazon didn't "take" profits from Elastic (and others).

What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them.

The "cost" of being a FOSS company was lower than the "reaped" benefits of the network effects.

That has shifted with "predatory" behavior from companies like Amazon. That abuse of the "vulnerability" in the FOSS ecosystem is a tragedy of the commons. It means that companies have to be more cautious about what they choose to open source.

This is just my opinion, of course. As a founder of a software company though, I see this as a real struggle. I would prefer have https://refinery.io be an entirely open source tool and we make money via supporting the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, it just isn't clear cut. The best option that I see today is a model like what MongoDB and CockroachDB have with licenses like BSL. But, they're not truly "open source". And that sucks.

We are living in a time where there are no good answers in the face of exploitative behavior by companies like Amazon. It means companies like mine have to maintain a proprietary platform in order to make money.

As a developer, it hurts my ideals. As a business owner, it's a risk I can't afford to take. That's why this behavior is a problem for FOSS.