291–300 of 473 posts
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Examples?
lowagie/itextpdf being an obvious/prominent one. it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.
Here’s the initial AWS response to the license change that they made in 2018, which I helped write. At the time we didn’t think a new license made sense, as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code, but the core of the issue was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at…
I have taken this position in another thread a while ago, but the responses seemed to indicate that this is not a clearly cut situation at all. If it was, what is the point of the "source-available" licenses in the first place? I mean, the idea that they were invented to cut out AWS is pretty prevalent, no?
I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…
I await the day that the industry corrects itself and stops calling the AGPL open source/free software. It isn’t. It is very obviously a EULA, despite what the anticapitalist zealots at the FSF wish to claim.
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If you use the Elastic license, legally speaking, you're in hot waters. The biggest problem with software licenses for freemium is that you have no contract with the company, money doesn't change hands, and the license itself can be open to interpretation. What's a competitor anyway? This sounds like that JSON license saying you shouldn't use the software for evil. The Open Source licenses have been vetted and are ti…
The Elastic license doesn’t use the term “competitor”. To me, the definition of the limitation is actually pretty clear: > You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software. https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license
Here’s the initial AWS response to the license change that they made in 2018, which I helped write. At the time we didn’t think a new license made sense, as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code, but the core of the issue was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at…
I suppose that they might not have accepted something that was too small percent wise and hence might have preferred to go head to head no matter where that might have gone.
My real sense for why they've struggled to out maneuver is their lack of execution on their managed service (9 years in market, still minority of their revenue); while you had a head start and I'm sure that's what they point to as preventing execution, if they had really focused there they might be more like Confluent in terms of being considered the well regarded SaaS leader in their segment.
But I do think it'd be a good look for AWS to proactively help these companies. I didn't think the approach taken with Grafana Labs was right... that looked more like a Faustian bargain to an outside observer (e.g. we'll cut you down at your knees and directly compete but offer you their more expensive version on our paper. It looked incredibly humiliating).
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Whatever you think of those companies in a wider sense, it's totally inaccurate to suggest that Microsoft, Google or Amazon haven't given anything back to open source.
Hyperbole aside, they certainly haven't given as much as they've gotten, though. E.g., remember when Heartbleed hit, and the world learned that OpenSSL was maintained by one person getting only $2000/year for it? Fixing Heartbleed was estimated to cost half a billion dollars world-wide.
Agreed, but the point of sharing software is that it's not a zero sum game. The thing you create once is not diminished by me using it many times.
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It feels like Elastic got burnt with the license change, their stock is down 40% since they announced the fork, and they are starting to realize that being open source is important. I don't think AWS would abandon the fork given the amount of efforts they put in, they cannot walk back and re-brand their products. It's sad to see elastic turning sides for their benefit, and as a contributor I feel betrayed. While Open…
My understanding (after talking to several market analysts) is that OpenSearch is focused on APM/monitoring/log-aggregation, while Elasticsearch has an edge on pure search engine functionality and now AI. That's because the license change by Elastic impacted not only Amazon, who could not provide Elasticsearch as a service anymore through its administrative consoles, but also all those vendors who were building APM/m…
Not in my experience. AWS is fully behind using opensearch as a search engine. For AI, hard to see how Elastic can compete with AWS...given it's vast resources and deployed products.
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> The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing. It isn’t, though, when comparing it to the ElasticSearch service offered by Elastic the company. Using the same codebase is very different than offering the same service. At minimum, pricing, billing, support, legalese, etc will all vary between the two. Downsides in Amazon’s service should…
Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit. No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks (which weren’t in place in this ca…
Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components that would nonconsensually report telemetry to Google from within the guest operating system beyond what is inherent to the nature of any VM running within Google's cloud, or default configurations that are unjustifiably different in ways that are undocumented and/or would surprise and disrupt the usual expectations of Debian users?
Yes, trademark law is the reason Debian got to have those in-depth discussions and collaborations with Google. Source: I was quite personally involved, both as a Debian developer and as a then-Googler. (And Debian was more pragmatic than you might think about some of the specifics. I was surprised myself.)
Trademark law is not bullshit even though the term "intellectual property" is.
> No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”.
Not in the primary technical nature of the product or the underlying software, no, that's true. But in the overall aspect of whom to blame for the service's faults or credit with the service's strengths - in other words, who is viewed as endorsing the product with the corresponding responsibility for good or bad reputational and commercial consequences - then yes absolutely the naming does change that in a reasonable person's mind.
Imagine you were not a cloud infrastructure expert but rather a stock market investor who sees a lengthy global outage occur in a managed PostgreSQL service running on Amazon Web Services. Further imagine that the PostgreSQL project were commercial enough of an organization to run their own managed PostgreSQL service on AWS in competition to the one run by Amazon, and had PostgreSQL stock traded on a public stock exchange, similar to Elastic's real situation.
In this hypothetical scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the PostgreSQL for Amazon Database" would look bad for the PostgreSQL project and would make the investor likely to sell or short PostgreSQL stock and/or (since the two services compete) buy Amazon stock? And in the same scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the Amazon Database for PostgreSQL" would entirely swap the reputational and financial/commercial impact on both organizations?
(I'm saying "Amazon Database" instead of "RDS" to sidestep the inside-baseball question of whether someone happens to know that Amazon doesn't let external vendors make flavors of the suite of services called RDS. That's an implementation detail that could easily be false at some future time and upon which trademark law cannot usefully rely.)
> (which weren’t in place in this case)
Huh? Elastic definitely had a trademark in place. Not sure why you think they didn't.
> It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks [...] rather than focusing on the actual details of the product
Why do you assume that? My assumption is that both Elastic and Amazon spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when naming their products.
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If you use the Elastic license, legally speaking, you're in hot waters. The biggest problem with software licenses for freemium is that you have no contract with the company, money doesn't change hands, and the license itself can be open to interpretation. What's a competitor anyway? This sounds like that JSON license saying you shouldn't use the software for evil. The Open Source licenses have been vetted and are ti…
The Elastic license doesn’t use the term “competitor”. To me, the definition of the limitation is actually pretty clear: > You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software. https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license
Here’s the initial AWS response to the license change that they made in 2018, which I helped write. At the time we didn’t think a new license made sense, as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code, but the core of the issue was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at…
Unfortunately many companies charge extra for security where security should be the default. Truth to be told there some some situations where extra security costs could be justified but there are not many if charge is necessary it should be considered as a temporary measure. My $0.02.