761–770 of 969 posts
AWS would be a multi-trillion company by then, will buy these companies and make that code proprietary. they have no incentive to let their competitors win.
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Exactly. For corporations, it was like the guaranteed mutual destruction which keeps peace stable. They felt safe to contribute because their competition could not steal the contribution from the communal pot. A similar setup is needed for the SaaS age. AGPL is a good step but is problematic for corporations because of the patent grant clauses, the way GPL2 is not.
Why not just use AGPL v2, then?
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Right but "who is wrong" is what the disagreement is about, and if Elastic made the mistake then arguably it is them who are wrong. In contrast, a number of people here are acting as if AWS is totally in the wrong. But the only wrong here is Elastic making the mistake and then acting as if the whole thing is AWS' fault. No, if you license your software improperly that's on you, not anyone else.
Does it need to be a binary thing ? Elastic made a strategic mistake, and Amazon made the jerk move that was open to them.
They're a hosting company, they're hosting open source software and they're doing it well.
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And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub.
What are better alternative licenses that also wouldn't deter contributors?
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It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…
Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source only works if…
You’re welcome to license under SSPL (or AGPL) if you wish. But if you want commercial customers (or even users), you’ll have to bear in mind that licenses like SSPL are a “no” (or at least, requires legal review) in many commercial entities, including startups.
Licenses like SSPL won’t give you the growth a new entrant could potentially get with a more commercially friendly FOSS license, because your potential users/customers will see it as a proprietary product and evaluate you as such.
In Elastic’s specific case, iirc a major competitor for them was the proprietary Splunk, so Elastic being FOSS really helped their case. Had they been SSPL from day 1, their growth trajectory would have likely been different.
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I'm about to make a really petty and possibly off topic comment, so sorry for this -- "this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."
I think if you read the two parent comments to "this is the correct take", they also take an authoritative mood. Rather qualifying a statement with "I think", or "I believe", they basically assume some reality to be true and then describe it. And that's ok, as readers we assume that the author is giving their opinion. So "this is the correct take" should be read as "in the reality that I believe is true, this is the…
I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…
Forgive me, which part of [1] even mentioned Profits , Revenue , Business Models , CopyLeft ? And which part of the same article ever said Elastic are not OK with Amazon providing a Services using their Open Source Software? Which they are legally allowed to do so with Apache 2.0? They even mentioned and I quote: "We collaborate with cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud…
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The way I see it is the secret sauce is just black boxing it so you don't have to/can't worry about those things...
There is a slideshare about their networking approach for VPC somewhere it's quite clever. But I can't find anything for EBS and what features it might have that make Aurora replicate the way it does.
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Yes, but, while RH is the 900lb gorilla in the "pure OSS" business (and yes, we should be thankful for their contributions all over the OSS ecosystem even if we aren't RH customers), from a business perspective they are not that spectacular. Looking at wikipedia, the company was formed in 1993, has a revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular. Partly d…
> revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular. That revenue is the budget of the police force in my country. Why would being bigger then that necessarily be a good thing.
RedHat wasn't really that profitable. Sure it also spent billions on growth, but Amazon spent hundreds of billions on growth. (Sure, Amazon is a conglomerate, from books to gadgets to groceries to basically everything and the biggest digital infrastructure platform on top.
(I'm simply using Amazon as illustration, it's really coincidence that this submission is about ES and AWS.)
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Staunch free software proponent here. Clearly, as you say, there's nothing wrong here legally. By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now. Ethically, I can't find anything wrong about this either. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a "spirit of open source". Open source is a way of doing business. Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live…
I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though. Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUN…
From what I can find online, it looks like DocumentDB is actually a layer on top of the AWS Aurora PostgreSQL offering. This means they created a MongoDB compatible API, but are not offering a hosted mongodb cluster. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397)