I wonder how many people contributed to Elastic which do not work for Elastic.co ? Those folks have reasonably counted on having fruits of their labor to be available under Apache 2.0 and now they only get to use them with SSPL restrictions
> Those folks have reasonably counted on having fruits of their labor to be available under Apache 2.0 and now they only get to use them with SSPL restrictions
While i hate the change, that isn't true. They have access to their changes in the current and older versions of Elastic. You can lock yourself to the current version forever and create your own bug fixes.
Those folks have reasonably counted on having fruits of their labor to be available under Apache 2.0
Not really; the essence of permissive licenses is that proprietary extensions/versions are allowed. If you want to contribute code that will always remain open you need a copyleft license like GPL.
I feel this way about all similar licensing changes (Redis, Elastic among many others). It's basically a large company vs much larger company fight, and the losers are the thousands of individual contributors not affiliated with either one who have worked for free and can no longer use their work in the way they want. Moves like this are definitely eroding trust in open source in the long term.
There's a fair amount of hyperbole in that statement. Most of the above products (Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, etc.) don't have "thousands of individual contributors" and are developed primarily by employees of the backing companies.
Second, external contributors can use it in their work in any way that they want so long as it's not in offering Elasticsearch-as-a-service. They can even use for offering Elasticsearch-as-a-service so long as it's based on the current Apache2-licensed code rather than the SSPL-licensed code that will be in effect as of the next Elasticsearch release.
There are certainly valid criticisms of this decision, but a blanket statement that "thousands of individual contributors" are the losers here is an exaggeration.
The quantity of the individual contributors seems to be the only stretch you seem to be able to point out, yet you go further to trying to defend the SSPL license as limiting a very narrow set of applications - despite lawyers and open source advocates almost unanimously having said the license text itself is ambiguous enough to cover a much larger set of use cases.
If you are not a lawyer and if this is not legal counsel, I'd suggest you leave your personal interpretations of a license that is broadly considered to be less permissive than advertised outside of civil discussion.
>There are certainly valid criticisms of this decision, but
Why the but? Obviously this decision hurts AWS but it also hurts a much broader group than them.
my intention there was (and still is) to learn how other HNers think of this. In there I got the response about how the precise version to which people contributed, was and will always be Open Source, regardless of what happens to future derivations of that code.
I'm not sure I bought that reasoning, though... you put it better with that "fruits of their labor". Maybe not the writing, but the spirit of the permissive FOSS licenses is not to end up being swapped into a non-FOSS alternative...
The previous FOSS license did indeed permit any future change in licensing; I would like to learn if that kind of choice might actually become a deterrent and an added reason for a lower number of external contributors, or not.
> Maybe not the writing, but the spirit of the permissive FOSS licenses is not to end up being swapped into a non-FOSS alternative...
Well, you can argue the spirit all day, but in practice, permissive licenses mean what they mean. Once a version is released with that license it stays that way, but subsequent versions can have a new license.
Basically, you do keep the fruits of your labor - you get Elasticsearch 7.10 and all previous versions. But you have no right to Elasticsearch 7.11.
Note: In practice I agree it's a dick move to go to a more restrictive license, and I strongly disagree with Elastic's decision to do so. It's just a greedy move that won't even make them more money in the long run because it will cripple the momentum ES has.
elasticsearch had a contributor license agreement in place for about as long as I can think, requiring full copyright assignment for all changes you’d contribute.
It is effectively very similar to copyright assignment as it gives Elastic basically the same rights they would have if they were assigned the copyright. The only difference is the contributor also gets those rights, but in reality the rights they keep are not that useful since the rest of the codebase is owned by others.
