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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

#391

Post by [deleted] »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #320
patrickaljord wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet. > "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsear…

> This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet. Sure, but we are not talking about "the intern tweeted something incorrect, gather your pitchforks until they delete it". We are talking about a prolonged time span where AWS completely abused their massive size and market tower to basically do the legal and PR equivalent of laughing in the face of another company the…

[deleted]

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

#392

Post by sammax »

spinningslate wrote: post #260
StavrosK wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".

true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.

I wouldn't exactly call that "competition" though.

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

#393

Post by spinningslate »

julienb_sea wrote: post #358
nicoburns wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.

Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? Because they are careful with their data and legal obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements, but even then you might argue its better for a large organization to pay a…

spot on. The lesson for would-be companies formed around open source is pretty stark: if your stuff is any good, then assume the clould vendors will offer it. If they do, it's going to be really hard for you to compete with a separate commercial offering.

Not only has the cloud vendor already gone through the hoops of getting an enterprise agreement in place. They're also big, and recognised, and know how to deal with Procurement. And Risk. And Compliance. And Legal.

Not saying I like that situation. It does seem unjust that the big guys can just cherry-pick good products and monetise them without giving anything back. It offends my sense of fairness. But that's commercial reality, at least in today's markets.

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

ec109685 wrote: post #249
c0l0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream relea…

How would the captive portal intercept s3 tls calls successfully?

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by [deleted] »

BossingAround wrote: post #330
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…

> What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Red Hat is a top 2-4 contributor to the Linux kernel though, depending on what source (and year) you take a look (e.g. [1]). The big difference is that Amazon doesn't contribute back. The comparison seems misguided at best. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Gi...

[deleted]

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

#396

Post by sammax »

rjmunro wrote: post #382
j3th9n wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that Amazon is infringing on copyright, using the "Elasticsearch" trademark and lying about a partnership in a tweet. > A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. Open source doesn't mean you can infringe on its copyr…

Please don't confuse trademarks and Copyrights - they are entirely separate things. Using a trademark is not infringing Copyright. It may or may not be infringing the trademark, but that's a whole different thing. In general, anyone can use your trademark as long as they are using it about you or your product. I can say "I like Coca Cola, it tastes great" or even "Coca Cola is disgusting" but if I put Coca Cola on th…

Don't you need permission to advertise your product with Coca Cola™?

Or in this case, would Amazon not need Elastic's permission to say "we use Elastic" to advertise AWS?

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

#397

Post by lacker »

fakedang wrote: post #275
StavrosK wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a slowly evolving discussion. Certainly, and I think that if we want OSS to thrive we need to move towards a future where it's easy for companies to make a return on their investment by releasing OSS. I think Amazon and all the "I provide your software as a service" providers eat into that and hinder that future. Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, b…

I believe in a previous thread, someone suggested OSS except companies having this much of a revenue (since market cap is a bit of a variable metric). Why wouldn't that be a viable model?

I wouldn't use software like that. Imagine you build a company using some software, and it was free until you hit $X in revenue. One day far down the road, your company is doing well and you start to get close to $X. You realize you have to acquire a license, ask them for one, and now... you just have to pay whatever they ask for? You're locked in to someone who could quote you whatever price they want. Unless it's really easy to rip out this software, it seems like a huge pain.

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

#398

Post by spzb »

ethbr0 wrote: post #379
spzb wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't fix trademarks disputes by changing software licenses. Elastic appear to have a sound argument on the trademark front but to conflate that with changing the license of their product is disingenuous.

I read their argument as 'suing Amazon in the courts for trademark infringement is an insufficiently expedient remedy.' It does OSS no good if Elastic prevails on merits the day after they go out of business from lost revenue.

And what remedy do they have to a copyright license infringement? The same glacial pace legal system.

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

#399

Post by lacker »

ABeeSea wrote: post #242
pjc50 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost, but not quite, the "Tivoization" that prompted the creation of the GPL3. The requirement to give something back and/or avoid taking profit from the work of others is something the OSS world has a complicated relationship to. GPL is quite clear that there's a requirement to pass on source changes, if not explicitly to give them back, and many people were outraged by even this limited requirement and in…

> many people were outraged by even this limited requirement It isn’t a limited requirements. There is a very real legal risk that using GPL software in an enterprise code base means you have to open source of your entire code base. That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used.

That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used.

Plenty of companies use Linux... this seems like something people worried about in the 90's but have now generally accepted.

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

#400

Post by ralmidani »

As mentioned in another discussion, I used to be a Copyleft Zealot, but I've come to realize an absolutist insistence on "Free as in Freedom" and the "Four Freedoms", without allowing businesses a viable path to profitability, is an obsolete attitude. It has become incredibly easy and cheap to distribute copies of large programs, even as a service over the internet.

Sure, hobbyist projects and foundations for FOSS software still exist, but important infrastructure projects like Mongo, Redis, and now Elastic have all recently changed their licenses from "true" FOSS to "some rights reserved".

One might argue that the point of FOSS is not to make money. But GNU/FSF have said repeatedly that it's OK to "sell" your software. How do you do that when a FAANGMO can easily out-scale you and put you out of business?

If I were to start an actual software company, I would give very serious consideration to licenses like Polyform[0] over "true" FOSS, at least for the important, money-making parts where it would be impossible to compete with a FAANGMO.

[0] https://polyformproject.org/licenses/

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