Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#301

Post by halbritt » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:11 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #270

halbritt wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, very minor use case. Not worth expending effort on. I attempted to convince the lawyers that we should just yolo it because the product had no actual revenue. Didn't go well.

I can get at least a couple of person-weeks worth of dev done for the cost of sending the email that results in attempting to convince the lawyers of _anything_. I wouldn't even ask for a legal review of this new Elastic License, if I thought I could tear it out for less than 2 dev-months of effort.

Well, what, then?

SOLR?

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#302

Post by Bedon292 » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

catern wrote: post #288

lovelearning wrote: post #69

There are some small-scale ES search-as-a-service providers that serve small and medium businesses. There are also service providers whose core service is something entirely different and just use ES as the backend for their search APIs. While the target is AWS (and I think what they are doing to service providers like Elastic and MongoDB is terrible), I think this will also adversely affect overall ES usage by many…

Such businesses can continue providing their service, they just have to provide the code to their users.

Publicly release, not just to their users.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#303

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:57 AM UTC

staticautomatic wrote: post #276

matthewowen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How true is this, in practice? I hear software folks say this sort of thing somewhat frequently, but I haven't heard it from a _legal_ person. And my general sense and understanding is that although an FAQ style clarification is not _perfect_, it _does_ carry non-trivial weight. Judges are not totally capricious people making arbitrary decisions: the notion that in a dispute they would just cast aside one party's _cl…

Remember when Google argued that Oracle shouldn’t be allowed to sue over using the Java API because SUN had said it was fine? That’s the same legal argument as the FAQ issue. It’s called equitable estoppel.

Yeah, that is what happens when one turns down the opportunity to own Java.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#304

Post by Illniyar » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

Everytime an open source project changes it's license to protect against cloud services not "paying their dues" a lot of people say it doesn't matter because the company will only go after the cloud providers, the big players, and if you just use it internally it won't affect you.

I think people forget that these companies might be bought in the future by Oracle.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#305

Post by andreareina » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

erezsh wrote: post #290

tus88 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open source though.

The only entity who says it's not "open source" is the OSI, which is mostly funded by corporations, who are in the business of cloud computing.

Both the Debian Free Software Guidelines[1] and the GNU Free Software Definition proscribe limiting fields of endeavor. The OSD[3] borrows heavily from the DFSG.

I remember reading (alas, I can't find my source) a spokesperson for the OSI admitting to the existence of licenses that meet the OSD that they don't want to be OSI-approved because they don't add enough value versus the cost of proliferation of licenses that are substantially similar.

[1] https://www.debian.org/intro/free

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw

[3] https://opensource.org/osd

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#306

Post by zaarn » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 7:09 AM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #298

andlarry wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place. If something satisfies the four freedoms [0], it is free software. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

How does SSPL satisfy GNU's "freedom 0", to run the program for any purpose?

In the same way the AGPL satisfies it, you can run it for any purpose if you provide the source code to users.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#307

Post by nuker » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 7:10 AM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #212

Xylakant wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) If they can't actually compete and provide superior value to whatever managed offering Amazon can scrounge together, that's actually their fault. The sad-funny thing is that elastics hosted cloud offering is clearly superior to AWS’ hosted elasticsearch in pretty much all regards.

Exactly! I've used AWS' service, it's awful. Elastic's is better, and price is comparable or better in fact. But the point is they don't even have to compete on price if quality is superior! If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently (which in AWS-land means multiple days of back and forth, opening tickets etc), I'd way rather pay $120k/mo for something that actually works.

> If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently

I do the same and AWS ES works fine. I did try Elastic, performance was bad. They run it in containers internally!

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#308

Post by andreareina » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 7:21 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #296

erezsh wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can answer that. The OSI doesn't approve any license that "discriminates on fields of endeavor", which means you are not allowed to prevent cloud providers from competing with you with your own product. Premium sponsors of the OSI include AWS, Google and Microsoft.

Thanks. What about the SSPL is considered discriminating against a field of endeavor? The AGPL is OSI-approved, and as I understand it also has a requirement "that if you provide the product as a service to others, you must also publicly release any modifications". (Possibly not "as well as the source code of your management layers", but that addition doesn't seem to post any additional problems related to "restricti…

Probably the clause that calls out offering ES as a service.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#309

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

erezsh wrote: post #289

ignoramous wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F/OSS exists so that not everyone has to be subject to undifferentiated work, among serving other very high impact purposes. Think brew.sh, vim/Emacs, Eclipse IDE, Postgres, Java, Linux/Linaro etc; Substitute AWS for "a software developer" and see if you feel the same way. > I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have other software developers make so much money out of it.…

As someone who writes open-source, I'm always happy to see other developers use my code to build cool stuff, and I expect nothing in return. I'm also happy to see small start-ups rise faster by using my software. But if those theoretical start-ups, whose business wouldn't exist without my software, grew to dozens of employees, made millions of dollars, and still I wouldn't see a nickel.. That's when I would start to…

I write F/OSS full-time.

AWS does / did contribute patches to Elasticsearch.

The problem Elasticsearch has is, AWS shares none of the gigantic profits it makes from its Elasticsearch Service, which is a double whammy because it cannibalizes Elastic's own SaaS offering.

> To conclude, that sounds like false equivalency to me. It does matter who is using it for free and profiting.

You mean to say, Facebook must share a % of its WhatsApp profits with ejabberd, or ejabberd otherwise is right to SSPL their software?

Or, Google pay Oracle a share of the spoils because it is an "app container layer" on top of Java/JVM? And that Oracle is okay to switch to SSPL otherwise in search of those dollars?

Or, okay if CnFdn SSPLs k8s?

Also, if it matters whoever profits contributes back monetarily, may be the right way to do so would be via a Foundation. Using the Commons Clause or SSPL is not the answer, in my eyes.

Re: Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

#310

Post by pietrovismara » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 8:17 AM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #280

cthor wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSPL isn't being used as an alternative to permissive licenses (e.g. MIT). It's being used to shore up the holes that AGPL doesn't cover[1], to enable the business model of "free for small guys, paid for by the big guys". People want a license that says something like, "you can only use this if you also contribute to the commons, or if you pay for the privilege not to". SSPL is an attempt to be that. Maybe it doesn't…

I know it’s not competing with permissive licenses. That’s my point. The people here acting like the fact that companies are profiting off of Apache 2.0 licensed code are being unreasonable was my point. Separately, I think this move will just hurt Elastic Co in the long term. The organization I work for runs a 30 TB elastic cluster and we’re going to have to go drop Elasticsearch because of this change because we’re…

Good luck with a lot of wasted work power because you are sad that "big Corp" can't exploit anymore "small software house". Please, this is ridiculous.

Anyway, I'm sure many others like me are sympathetic to the cause and will support companies like elastic that take this kind of decision. I don't think elastic will miss you.