401–410 of 708 posts
Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and…
Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and…
> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Those are interesting and specific accusations. Got any proof?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused by the "abuse" part. If I think the author of the GPLed project "foobar" is a jerk, and I fork it and maintain it without colaborating with foobar's original author, am I "abusing" the GPL? Personally, I don't think so, and I think I should have the right to do so. I wonder how this is different from Amazon behavior here. (I want to make clear that I'm not saying Shay or anybody at elastic is anything. T…
I never said forking is abusing. But if you fork it, position it as an official product with the same name on your platform and lie on twitter saying that your foobar was a collaboration with the original foobar author then yes, you are definitely abusing your power. On the other point: "the GPL is working as intented" yes but not as the authors want, hence the change of license! Nothing wrong with that IMHO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them? I'm talking about the general sentiment here. Either Amazon have been playing by the rules and Elastic is within their rights to change those rules, so no problem anywhere, or Amazon has been harming a part of the OSS ecosystem and forced Elastic to make an unpopular change. > Amazon used Elastic per terms of the lic…
> I care that more companies are encouraged to release their software as OSS because they can make money for it. But they can't! Tell me how many companies make profit off purely OSS... RedHat maybe? What else? And even if they can, they shouldn't be surprised when competitors use their OSS for their own benefit because OSS explicitly allows for that. Making money off OSS is a red herring, just because it works in a…
Why the scare quotes? Well, I don't mean all profit according to definition, but specifically the "returns for investors" type. Company profits. Technically you can run a sole proprietorship, and make (say) $100k in profit.. or you could structure as a corporation, pay yourself a $100k salary, and make no profit. It's all the same money, but it's two ways of looking at the portion that I would like to describe as fair compensation to a human for the work they do. When I say "at cost", I don't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to make a living working on OSS; I mean it's fundamentally impossible to get filthy rich with it.
And in my opinion that's a good thing. In my experience, "getting filthy rich" / providing outsized returns to investors almost always comes at someone else's expense. Usually the little guy. It happens when the poor sod paying you can't afford to switch to a competitor, so you're able to wring them dry. The counter-argument goes that we need the "filthy rich" incentive to motivate people to make these things. I think it likely increases the rate of innovation, but I think the amount of cool and useful OSS written by people in their spare time is evidence enough that profit is not a requirement in that area, only financial security.
There is a problem, though, where it's currently very difficult to even make a living wage working on OSS (again, or public goods in general). I think can be solved, and I am working on a project trying to solve this (as a volunteer; we could use help). I'll cut it here (I spent far too much time writing this comment already...), but you can read more at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop
I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living. Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for…
> And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. 2. Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without cha…
I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living. Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for…
> And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. 2. Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without cha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that they phrased it like that. If they were confident about this, they would easily be able to prove this in court and it would be a very simple case of copyright infringement right?
Yeah I'm not sure how much weight this holds, especially considering one paragraph later they transition into accusing Amazon of being "inspired" by their commercial features.
Elastic is a 14 billion dollar company[0] with 43% revenue growth YoY[1]. Amazon may be eating into their SaaS market share but Elastic are hardly struggling. Relicensing for competitive business reasons is absolutely fine, but it's silly to pretend that they are doing this for any motive other than making more money. Certainly this is not some altruistic move on the behalf of the open source community. I think that…
On the Elastic's side they simply seem to be mad that Open Source is working exactly as it's supposed to work in favor of a big company that happens to be a competitor. It's like they want to have discretionary control on who benefits from Open Source and who doesn't.
This is tangential, but, speaking of intellectual property, was MongoDB entitled to strip the FSF copyright in the SSPL ? (as per https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compare... line 5)
They do not require in that license to modify the GPL license that you keep the original copyright attribution around.
(IANAL - not legal advice, etc etc)
AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
[0] https://twitter.com/tim_nolet/status/1317061818574082050