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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#321

Post by giancarlostoro »

What license are contributions to Elastic given as? I'm very confused how this works with all the licenses, are they just all compatible with AGPL magically? Or are all contributions under their primary private license, I think the last time I saw someone change a license similar to how Elastic did (maybe MongoDB?) I suggested AGPL, I don't really like the license, but it is designed for this type of thing.

I'm guessing these license models are all because they want to just plainly sell their own instances without cloud providers competing with them directly (who typically have unlimited resources to do so!) or keeping any changes or fixes to themselves (I think that was the reasoning with Mongo?).

Offtopic / Meta to the article itself:

What is with the format of this article, like if they meant for the stuff in brackets to be headings, but chose this format instead of making them headings.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#322

Post by sanderjd »

jchw wrote: post #119
chadash wrote: post #69

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…

For the most part I don't think people are against shared source or closed software existing, being sold, being marketed, etc. There's really only two things people viscerally don't like: - Marketing a project that isn't open source as open source. Debate about what the "definition" is or why it matters all you want; taking a term and using it in a way that contradicts the vast majority of domain experts is bullshit.…

I think you make good points here, but it's also annoying that the words "open source" are defined to mean something a lot more specifically detailed than what the words themselves intuitively mean.

For instance, your post calls things "shared source", which, to me, is a lot less clear of a description for the projects you're describing that way. ("Shared" how? Shared ownership? Or what?)

I think "source available" is intuitive and fine (and better than "shared source"), but to me it's still a bit weirder. To me, it sounds like if you send the company an email, they might send you back a zip file with a bunch of source code. But most of these "source available" projects operate just like any other open source project.

But I'm also not unsympathetic to your arguments here at all.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#323

Post by ensignavenger »

ezekg wrote: post #87
chadash wrote: post #69

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…

> If a vendor goes under, I can self-host. It's worth mentioning that this is true -- to an extent. Under ELv2, if the vendor goes under, you can self-host, but you will eventually lose access to any features protected by a license key if/when that license expires, since said vendor can no longer renew said license. This was one of the main drivers for me writing the FCL [0], which undergoes DOSP [1], even for the pr…

You also can't pay someone else to host it for you. Nor will the community be able to fork it and support development by paying one or more community members to host it for them.

At least with DOSP, eventually the community will be able to do those things.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#324

Post by sanderjd »

Spivak wrote: post #132
phoronixrly wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you've fully shifted to exploiting (without contributing anything) to OpenSearch. I think Elastic will be just fine without your company or Amazon.

How truly far we've fallen that people refer to using open source software— literally software given away for other people to use, exploitation. Gonna go tell those freeloading kids who take my candy on Halloween that they're exploiting me unless they contribute to next year's candy bowl.

I think the word "using" here is doing a lot of work. When talking about an entire application, I think of "using" it as being, well, using the application. But what I think we're talking about here is "using" the application code by selling it as your own product.

I recognize that "open source" is ok with that second way of "using" the code, but I do think it's meaningfully different.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#325

Post by rw-access »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #321

What license are contributions to Elastic given as? I'm very confused how this works with all the licenses, are they just all compatible with AGPL magically? Or are all contributions under their primary private license, I think the last time I saw someone change a license similar to how Elastic did (maybe MongoDB?) I suggested AGPL, I don't really like the license, but it is designed for this type of thing. I'm guess…

The CLA best answers the questions in your first paragraph.

https://www.elastic.co/contributor-agreement

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#326

Post by ensignavenger »

jchw wrote: post #119
chadash wrote: post #69

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…

For the most part I don't think people are against shared source or closed software existing, being sold, being marketed, etc. There's really only two things people viscerally don't like: - Marketing a project that isn't open source as open source. Debate about what the "definition" is or why it matters all you want; taking a term and using it in a way that contradicts the vast majority of domain experts is bullshit.…

I would rather a software product be eventually open source than use a never open source license, but I still try not to use it if I can choose open source. And I refuse to sign CLA's that require giving more eights than the license grants to me, and won't sponsor projects that require them. (with some limited, carefully considered exceptions for well established open source foundations that require CLAs, but that have sufficient gornance to add trust)

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#327

Post by valyala »

sergiotapia wrote: post #45
everfrustrated wrote: post #16

Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch. I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of people had their data compromised due to that (due to people inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)

I think it's pretty sad that Conglomo X can take an open source product, add some tweaks and sell/capture the entire market. Basically taking all the work that open source maintainers have done. What's the solution here?

The main incentive for maintainers of open source software is to see many happy users of this software. Most open source maintainers do not care about monetizing their products (or the monetization has very low priority).

That's why most open source maintainers use truly open-source licenses for their software - BSD, MIT, Apache2, and they will be happy if Amazon, Google or Microsoft builds successful product on top of their open-source software, since this gives them the desired recognition.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#328

Post by eadmund »

chadash wrote: post #69

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…

> 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 much more restrictive in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to open source their code, but very few of them plan to sell hosted search.

The four freedoms of software are: the freedom to use the software for any purpose; the freedom to study and change the software; the freedom to share the software; and the freedom to share one’s changes. The AGPL permits all four; the Elastic License does not allow using the software to make a competitor; therefor the Elastic License is not a free software license.

More details: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> Who wants to put in years building a business …

Free software is not about the original author of code; it is about the users of that code and what they do with it. Copyleft ensures that those who build upon a software foundation grant the same freedoms to their users which they themselves received. Free software is about the users.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#329

Post by maccard »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #298
maccard wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit. 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 r…

You’ve missed my point a little -

> Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components

Absolutely not. But, calling it Debian on Google Compute vs Google Compute for Debian has absolutely no bearing on whether they’re doing that or not.

Like you, I’ve had similar discussions with lawyers on my side and “the opposition side” and we’ve spent hours arguing over the semantics of these things while ignoring the root problem - in this case google bundling nonfree software with Debian and calling it Debian.

> my assumption is that both elastic and amino spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when namjng their products

And yet here we are unfortunately discussing how we’ve come full circle, and I’m wondering how many thousands of people hours across google, elastic and all of their users were spent on dealing with a naming dispute.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#330

Post by nijave »

redwood wrote: post #295
adrianco wrote: post #257

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…

Out of curiosity, did you pursue a rev share model with Elastic (Co) for your Elastic managed service? I guess that's not something thay can be discussed openly but recognizing you probably had 10x their revenue in the managed service and another 10x their revenue in compute behind the OSS, I wonder if there could have been a proactive happy middle ground found years ago. I suppose that they might not have accepted s…

From previous threads, my understanding is Elastic is a pretty arduous enterprise sales process which turned a lot of small/mid customers away.

High vendor management overhead is a huge pain for smaller companies that don't have robust IT to manage those relationships.

The smaller/mid size startups I've worked at almost never acquire "enterprise" software and always leverage pay-by-credit-card type SaaS

Besides operational overhead there's also a much longer acquisition time (no one wants to spend 3-6 months working with a sales team to sign a contract on a project with 2-3 month timeline)

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