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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

#201

Post by VoxPelli »

delfinom wrote: post #185
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 is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody sees it. They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.

They seems to be a lot better when it comes to cooperating with eg Envoy and Kubernetes communities though?

Not sure how good they are with eg MySQL and PostgreSQL, anyone know?

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

#202

Post by prepend »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #123
prepend wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they need one. Comically, this is why trademarks exist to prevent people from confusing the market with similar and reused terms. I think we need a CreativeCommons-like trademark for open source software before it’s too late.

I don't think we really need that. The current solution works relatively well: anyone using open source in a sense other than that described by the OSI, is reliably met with a hailstorm of criticism on HackerNews for being disingenuous. That's as it should be. It's a term of art in the software world, and we don't insist on legal enforcement of every term of art. I tend to capitalise the term, Open Source , to emphas…

That’s what I used to think, but now more companies use “open” with non-OSI licenses and they aren’t run out of town and told STFU.

Personally, any project using “open” in the name that’s not OSI, I pretty much ignore. But it seems to be growing (eg, “open core”, “openai”, stuff like this taking about open with non-open licenses).

It’s getting hard to filter out. One of the benefits I think to CCn is that it clearly lets users know what is and is not allowed. Having OSIn might help with people who don’t read licenses for fun.

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

#204

Post by StavrosK »

VoxPelli wrote: post #198
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…

I think both are at fault. Amazon for provoking this and Elastic for over-reacting like this and totally break with the open source licensing, when that isn’t necessary to stop Amazon. They could do like MariaDB rather than follow MongoDB: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ Would be much more appropriate and alienate the open source community much less.

Hmm, what's the difference between the BSL and Elastic's license?

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

#205

Post by eloff »

cortesoft wrote: post #193
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…

> Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic even existed. They couldn’t have released it as closed source because they weren’t there to release it at all. It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene. I am ok with them making money off their project, but it i…

> I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn’t like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work.

Because no other companies build on a foundation of open-source software today? I think that describes every company. Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not just components of it, but does that really matter?

I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here.

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

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

colechristensen wrote: post #103
prepend wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find these kind of obscure, “don’t worry” posts to increase my worrying. Part of the simplicity of open source is that it’s available for easy audit. Having to hire lawyers to use a product means I probably won’t use it. I also think having people saying “we’re open, but read the fine print” is not good for open source collaboration as it increases confusion and complexity. Elastic is moving the way of a commercial…

Yup. If you, understanding your product, your users, and your licensing, write a post for your users not to worry, it means that you thought about your changes and came to a well informed position that there was reason for worry.

Well, you try to make it sound unlikely, but it's exactly like corporate messaging that there are no plans for layoffs in the wake of bad financial news.

The idea that a license change made to prevent competition and enable a business model centered around extracting monopoly rents from customers has no effect on customers is ludicrous. It's whole point is to have an adverse effect on customers.

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

#207

Post by Seb-C »

sireat wrote: post #100

Elastic has the same problem that MongoDB has with Amazon: Amazon is commoditizing their product on a massive scale. "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Not sure what other alternatives are there besides changing licensing.

Given that aws just built DocumentDB, I am not sure if the licensing changing anything. I would even say that this choice actually hurts MongoDB because I am less likely to choose it since they have less practical hosting solutions.

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

#208

Post by VoxPelli »

dhd415 wrote: post #10

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification . Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That mak…

Great post, thanks, had totally missed that, great that they are evaluating BSL as well, this should really get up there on the HN front page as well.

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

#209

Post by dumbfounder »

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…

And Elastic was built on top of Lucene.

I slice it this way: as a company that is highly invested in AWS it is easier for us to deploy AWS ElasticSearch service than to use Elastic's cloud offering or set it up ourselves. But that doesn't mean I like it. Or are you talking about a different end user?

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

#210

Post by danShumway »

yrgulation wrote: post #119

The cringe on this thread is appalling. Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, taking time away from their families and lives, only for companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make billions in prof…

> The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period.

That's not what Open Source is.

What's actually happening here is that people disagree with the goals of the FOSS movement, which is fine, but then instead of going out and joining any of the many other movements around software licensing that are better suited for them -- instead of releasing products as source available or shared source or noncommercial-reuse/creative-commons or just under any generally permissive license -- instead they act like this is our problem to solve.

The point of Open Source is not to share knowledge, it's to allow people to reuse/share code. There are other movements that are better equipped to solve your problems if your goal is primarily just to share knowledge. But we're not going to drop everything we've worked to build just to accommodate you.

Nobody is forcing you to be a part of this movement. Nobody is forcing you to release your software under MIT or GPL licenses. You can do whatever the heck you want with the software you build, just leave us alone and stop acting like it's our problem that our movement isn't accommodating your goals.

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