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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

#701

Post by minusf »

Spivak wrote: post #521
wizcaps wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entitlement in this thread is staggering. > It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers. Everyone is seemingly happy with ES not being able to monetise the product they build for the community, to subsidise the thousands of developer hours spent on it, so their company can save a few dollars. They (you) would rather than money go to Amazon for providing.. nothing to the ES community.

No, I would rather ES built a sustainable business selling their software with a normal licensing model that makes sure they're getting paid no matter who's hosting it. In that world it doesn't matter if AWS or Google or Microsoft or anyone else want to offer hosted versions of it because ES still gets their cut. But co-opting open source to grow your user-base and then switching your license because you don't like t…

yes, all these points are quite true.

but the elephant in the room is that there are perfectly acceptable ways to make money off of an open source project and HELP them keep afloat by regular DONATIONS/man power/hosting/etc.

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

#702

Post by cmiles74 »

cortesoft wrote: post #619
cmiles74 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the phrase "based on" implies that a lot of the Elasticsearch functionality is actually Lucene functionality. I disagree that this is the case, I think there is a lot of functionality that Elasticsearch brings that is really othogonal to the Lucene project (sharding, multi-tenancy of indexes, clustering, managing nodes, etc.) Again, you my opinion, definitely enough for it's own project. If that isn't…

Honestly, I was just quoting the opening line of the Wikipedia page. I wasn't trying to imply anything about where most of the functionality was coming from.

Since you have mentioned this I have read three more articles and short blurbs about this kerfuffle and _they all_ have used the same "based on Lucene" text when describing Elasticsearch. As you say, Wikipedia seems to be the one true source of this phrasing!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch

While I still think this phrasing is unfair, it certainly seems to be the consensus. At least when measured by Google search results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Elasticsearch%20is%20a%20...

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

#703

Post by nirmalc »

Yeroc wrote: post #492
JCM9 wrote: post #233

Elastic’s arguments are problematic considering the history of the codebase. They didn’t invent “elasticsearch” from scratch, rather they took someone else’s codebase (Lucene) and made it better. Fundamentally that’s what AWS did too... they took open source code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed service front but aren’t offer…

Lucene is a pretty low-level search library. It has no concept of clustering etc. etc. What ElasticSearch built on top is far from trivial. Furthermore, ElasticSearch pays a number of people to contribute back to the Lucene project. As far as I know AWS hasn't contributed any code of note back to ElasticSearch or Lucene.

Aws/amazon employs lucene contributors ( including Mike Mccandless). Not sure if amazon sponsors their work.

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

#704

Post by joe433343 »

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…

Exactly. I was confused why the Elasticsearch blog is ranting about Amazon when the actual issue is in Elasticsearch license change which makes the source code closed which was open source.

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

#705

Post by andrewshadura »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #677
andrewshadura wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sou…

You say you’ve heard that but you cannot find the proof, because if it was in use, it was only used occasionally. They coined the term and they gave it the definition.

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

#706

Post by FemmeAndroid »

moonraker wrote: post #637
FemmeAndroid wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trademark has to do with licensing insofar as if a major reseller of your OSS licensed product will infringe on your trademark, the easiest solution might be to modify the license. Especially when the alternative is lengthy trademark disputes with a huge company with a lot of lawyers. At the end of the day offering an OSS license becomes less viable when it seems like major players aren’t playing fairly.

Typically the standard for trademark cases is whether or not customers will confuse the two competing names/products/brands. It's quite possible that because both companies target developers, architects, etc who're more than able to distinguish between the two companies' offerings... that Elastic's lawsuits didn't go anywhere

Sophisticated Users are definitely one factor that weight in favor of developers, but in my view it’s outweighed by the degree of similarity of the two marks, the similarity of the services, the uniqueness of Elastic as a mark, evidence of actual confusion (before reading Elastic’s complaint, I was confused by the names, and I’ve been involved in making decisions about the use of these kinds of services.)

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

#707

Post by aries185 »

rsstack wrote: post #355
paxys wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the difference is that Elastic is a massive $15 billion company which needs more revenue to survive, while Redis is still largely run by one person.

This isn't true. Salvatore retired earlier this year. Redis is run, more or less, by Redis Labs which is valued at $1 billion.

While it is true that Salvatore retired last year, Redis is still FOSS under the BSD license, and it has a new governance team. Redis Labs is in the drivers seat with 3 of the 5 members, including 2 Project Leads. But there are members from Alibaba and AWS https://redis.io/topics/governance

If Redis Labs were to do something stupid with the Redis OSS license, Alibaba and AWS would fork it faster than you can HyperLogLog.

Too help clear up confusion between Redis & Redis Labs, you can read about the various licenses here: https://redislabs.com/legal/licenses/

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

#708

Post by aries185 »

cycloptic wrote: post #679
woofie11 wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Redis is still FOSS under the BSD license. If Redis Labs were to change the Redis license, AWS would fork it in a heartbeat. To help clear up confusion you can read about the Redis, Redis Modules and Redis Enterprise licenses here: https://redislabs.com/legal/licenses/
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