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 here.
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 everyone is a good actor, which was never a realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to cost so much, I guess.
> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor
Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)?
One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental.
I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.
> Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model.
Trite as it may sound, open source isn't a business model. For a profitable business, you need something unique, a moat that competitors can't cross easily. Open source can certainly be part of that model, for example by increasing the value of your core assets. Or as Joel Spolsky wrote many years ago, commodify your complement.
Google, say, releases a lot of OSS. Guess what they're not releasing? The data they have hoovered up of practically every internet user, that they sell to their customers (companies that buy advertising, not the users). "Data is the new gold". They release tensorflow under a permissive license, not the data they're training and running their DL models on. They release Android for free, as that lowers the cost of phones and drives more users into the Google online empire, giving them ever more data. Again, "data is the new gold", "commodify your complement".
(Not picking on google here to say that they are good or evil, just an example of how you can build a spectacularly good business while also releasing a lot of OSS)
Or for all those VC-funded corps popping up trying to build OSS databases and seeing it doesn't work out (Mongo, Elastic, etc.), build a database, not a database engine. Data is the new gold, software, particularly OSS, is a commodity.
> I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.
Amazing. I think capitalism wouldn't be hurt if occasionally companies made the choice to end themselves "get out while you're no top" and distribute their wealth to the stakeholders, ideally with some sort of bonus to the terminal employees. Of course, the employees might not like that, but it is an attitude of entitlement (if an understandable one) to think that you should have a job for life.
Agreed. This is quite insightful bit from kbenson. It explains well the mystery I was wondering for a while: why company wrote the code in the first place cannot compete successfully against others who supposedly have less expertise and has to rely on license change to defend their moat.
Software matures, and the expertise transfers to many other people while it matures. That shared expertise enters into public common for good. Natural and beautiful.
> 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.
Maybe. I can no longer tick the "does it use an approved open source license" compliance checkbox any more. Sadly, for me, there's now a very strong incentive to move forward with an Apache2.0 licensed Amazon fork instead of the Elastic one.
I would call this MongoDB'd themselves. Except that also would imply that people are still interested in MongoDB. I think their license move probably just accelerated the decline in interest in their product.
Mongo adoption has risen at a rapid rate, and cloud services now make up nearly 40% of their revenue (which, in turn, allows the company to push those $$$ into the core product). Your statement, while a common view on HN, is not correct. Just because tech bros have moved on towards other interests has not meant that adoption of Mongo has faltered.
(I am not affiliated with, nor own stock in, MongoDB, Inc in any way)
Not everything is a cloud-based VC-backed startup. As big as AWS is, they still miss out on a giant chunk of companies who don't want or are not allowed to go into the cloud, which is why AWS-on-premise exists.
The article does say they made 230+ contributions last year to the OSS Elastic is (was?) built on. Not sure how one counts those, but perhaps it helped Elastic as well?
> 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.
Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so - because they're (a) no longer an open-source company [except for beats/etc which only works in the context of the now-proprietary elasticsearch/kibana], and (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0
This is where the Free Software, ideology, and the "open Source" ideology really show its difference
I view SSPL as a Copy Left style License for the SaaS age.
They picked the wrong license in the first place with Apache, they should have used GPL, AGPL, or some other copy left anyway
I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off the work for their own commercial offers while giving nothing back
I do note that the original "open source definitions" were drafted back in the late 90s (and from memory, built on older pre existing Debian docs of similar nature).
The world was different back then, I wonder what the authors of those docs would have considered "user freedom" to be in the age of AWS/GAE/Azure?
(I guess Stallman, for all his flaws, is a reasonable guide to what the free software movement would have thought. It'd be illuminating to hear his opinion on these new licenses. I suspect I know the answer, and it'd very strongly agree with your comment...)
Users is not just end users. AWS and others are users too and Stallman wants them to have the same freedom to use and modify software as I do. We have the same rights and responsibilities. Even Elastic is a user of the software.
I respect anyone who follows a license, I respect anyone who want to relicense a software and I respect someone who forks a project. I don't see any fault anywhere here.
I think they’d ask: In what way is AWS, GAE or Azure restricting your freedom to use free software?
If those companies customize your code and don’t recontribute it, that’s what the AGPL is for.
The SSPL doesn’t actually help with this problem. It removes your freedom to use the software in certain ways. It is a pecuniary license designed to sell you a more permissive license.
So, let's pretend I'm Amazon and I'm offering a SAAS Elasticsearch product. You need someone to manage your Elasticsearch for me, so you pay me. Internally, I'm running vanilla, unmodified Elasticsearch, which talks to a management layer of proprietary code that interfaces with the rest of AWS.
What right is being violated here? You as a user can run your own Elasticsearch software; I haven't modified it and thus I don't need to publish anything specific. What the SSPL says is I must publicize my entire SAAS product - but the user isn't paying me to run their own Elasticsearch SAAS product, they're paying me to run Elasticsearch.
So to call SSPL copyleft is totally absurd.
Now, there's a broader discussion that you raised of whether the open source definitions are out-of-date or not. Personally, I don't believe so. I don't see how any of the newer developments in the space (public clouds, managed offerings, etc) materially change anything; indeed the whole point of OSS is it's based off of deep principles.
According to Stallman at least, the principles of "Open Source" are much less deep that the principals of "free software". His opinion says the "Open Source" philosophy is based off watering down "free software" principles.
"The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term."
I guess you and Stallman agree there, and that permissive open source licenses are totally up-to-date with modern cloud computing businesses and business practices and that Elastic and their choice of Apache2 are getting exactly what they signed up for. And that "free software" licences especially the viral ones exemplified by GPL/AGPL are also still relevant in 2021, and having chosen one of those would have given Elastic.co what they claim to be demanding... (I think I agree there too.)
> And that "free software" licences especially the viral ones exemplified by GPL/AGPL are also still relevant in 2021, and having chosen one of those would have given Elastic.co what they claim to be demanding... (I think I agree there too.)
I think we agree up until this point, at which you fall into a trap. This is the same trap I was trying to avoid by giving my SSPL scenario above.
A copyleft license like GPLv3 does not prevent a business from operating a SAAS business.
AGPL would apply, but it only triggers upon modification. So as long as Amazon doesn't modify Elasticsearch itself, they don't have to publish anything (because there's nothing to publish), and if they do modify, they have to share just those changes. Which is very fair to me from a copyleft perspective.
Now SSPL tries to go further and say for merely using the software in a certain way, you must release not just any changes to the software itself but also everything around the software. That is what makes the SSPL neither open source nor free. (I guess I don't actually know how "free" is defined, so I can only say for certain that it's not open source, but I don't think SSPL even counts as copyleft)
> What right is being violated here? You as a user can run your own Elasticsearch software; I haven't modified it and thus I don't need to publish anything specific.
I as a user can no longer fix bugs in the Elasticsearch that I'm using. So I don't have the four freedoms that copyleft is all about protecting.
> What the SSPL says is I must publicize my entire SAAS product - but the user isn't paying me to run their own Elasticsearch SAAS product, they're paying me to run Elasticsearch.
That's like "I'm not blocking you from going into the building, I'm just blocking you from going through the gate outside". The point of copyleft licenses is that you need to give the user everything they need to run (or hire someone else to run) the same software (or their patched version of it) the same way.
Elastic marketing did not come up with describing AWS or any of the other big tech companies as leeches. That has been around for a very long time
I am aware FSF would disagree with my position, AGPL is better than SSPL.
As to OSI, I have losts of issue with OSI as an organization, and when they state "But Elastic’s relicensing is not evidence of any failure of the open source licensing model or a gap in open source licenses. " they are simply wrong
There is a clear gap in open source licenses when it comes to dealing with SaaS, the fact they do no see this gap is very telling.
the Free Software community saw this problem and thus the AGPL was born, something like AGPL is needed for open source, but OSI refused to even acknowledge there is a problem let alone look for solutions to it
//And no Free Software is not the same as Open Source Software, they should not be linked as being the same
edit:
>>User freedom is the whole point.
Free Software is about user freedom
Open Source is about Developer Freedom, that has always been the big difference.
Apache, MIT, BSD etc are all licenses that allow devs to take code, use it in commerical products. That is why you see places like GitHub default to these non-copy left licenses.
Free Software is about copy left, GPL and the like. Because it gives USERS freedom
I think you have zero interest in Free Software. You want “Free Software except in the ways I don’t like”.
AGPL was about ensuring user freedom by requiring server hosted source code modifications to be contributed back to the community.
SSPL isn’t about that. SSPL removes freedoms from using the software for no principled reason other than to allow a copyright holder to make more money by selling you a less restrictive proprietary license. It isn’t copyleft, it isn’t free, it isn’t open.
Hmm clever editing I can see we are not discussing in good faith.
You built a nice strawman to tear down around my “They are simply wrong” quote using it out of context
How about you address what I actually said OSI is wrong about, they are wrong about the fact that there is no gap in Open Source licensing when it comes to SaaS Sevices. SSPL may not be the best solution to it, but completely rejecting the clear problem is how you end up with less than perfect solutions like SSPL.
I am trying to argue in good faith. I’m not editing anything, I just don’t understand your argument.
I don’t see what the clear problem is with open source licensing. AGPL solves the problem of SaaS providers modifying your software without freeing their modifications, if that’s what you want. AGPL is also an OSI approved license. What more is missing?
If you want to have a business model like Elastic, then open source is simple not right for you.
This is what the OSI Board of Directors says.
It's a different discussion whether this is a good business model, but it's not like op has no point here:
What's missing is an open-source license for products whose profits accrue due to being run as SaaS.
If you're just going to say: "This is not possible with open-source licenses", then that's the gap.
What people actually want to do is exclude about 10 or less companies from selling their software at no own cost, while keeping it open-source for everyone else.
And OSI says this is not a use-case for any of their open-source licenses.
Maybe there should be a license for that.
I don't know.
The OP has a point in that everyone wants to be popular, famous, make lots of money, and also do it while being perceived as a saint.
Forcing profit accrual in your software license is easy enough. The hard part is to grow a community & popularity the way open source licenses have proven, when you have such restrictions in place.
This is only a "gap" in the sense of the grand injustice of the universe, as the Rolling Stones said, "You can't always get what you want".
'What's missing is an open-source license for products whose profits accrue due to being run as SaaS. If you're just going to say: "This is not possible with open-source licenses", then that's the gap.'
Think about what you're saying for a second.
1. Free software & open source is fundamentally opposed to user restrictions of any form, this is "Freedom Zero" and literally the whole reason the movement was created and got popular.
2. You can't create an "I GET THE MONEY" restriction and still be open source or free software, or accrue anywhere near the popularity and community goodwill you'd otherwise get
3. Therefore this is a problem?
Open source contributors have limited interest in your profits or business model if it means compromising the most essential point of it all. Open source is not a business model, and never was meant to be. Plenty of open source companies made lots of money without restricting user freedom, and they did it while AWS and others existed.
All of the tech leadership and excitement in dev communities today (Docker, Serverless, Kubernetes, Kafka, Spring, Rust, Golang) etc. is driven by open source, not by the clouds' proprietary services.
'What people actually want to do is exclude about 10 or less companies from selling their software at no own cost, while keeping it open-source for everyone else... Maybe there should be a license for that.'
Licenses like this have literally existed for over 30 years. "Everybody but Microsoft", "everybody but IBM", "everybody but the military". They're out there in spades.
Good luck, have fun. Build amazing software and build a community!
Except, these violate "Freedom Zero", the most essential point to why FLOSS was created: freedom to use, no restrictions. You might have some challenges gaining community support because of this.
"The lack of usage restrictions in its licenses is key to the success of free software. A world of proliferating and potentially conflicting usage restrictions, each seeking to address a different social cause or need, would introduce so much friction that the tremendous democratic social benefit brought about by the free sharing of software – including the empowerment of individuals to effect social change in unjust institutions – would be undermined.
Just because a license is not the right place to enforce ethical software usage doesn't mean we don't recognize the problem, or respect the people raising it. We should encourage and participate in conversations about the ethical usage of software. With the ground rules of free software as the baseline, anyone can build systems to specifically promote ethical use."
> I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off the work for their own commercial offers while giving nothing back
Like Elastic "leached" of Lucene? Elastics whole business model depends on Lucene being under the Apache license. If Lucene followed your suggestion (funny enough, Lucene used LGPL very early in its history) Elastic wouldn't exist at all.
That is largely hypothetical and one does not know if Elastic would taken a different form is Lucene would have been under LGPL, nothing in LGPL would have prevented it, and maybe Elastic would have chosen LGPL themselves or even AGPL which I personally would have preferred over SSPL but I understand why they choose SSPL and 100% reject OSI's position that is a non-open license, it is a non free software license, but it is IMO an Open Source license
SSPL is marketed as copyleft, but it really isn't. AGPL is. SSPL requires not only that you open source modifications to the software, but also that you open source "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software" that you use to operate the licensed software.
If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a service, you have to open-source your entire hosting stack including UI. God help you if you pay for any proprietary software — you literally can't satisfy these terms. Notably, Elastic itself doesn't have to do this for its own hosting service, because of course it can't satisfy the terms: no hosting company I know of can.
The point of the license isn't to get contributions back. The point is to prevent competition to Elastic's hosting business. Elastic's new version of ElasticSearch is source-available software, not open-source, by pretty much any reasonable definition.
>If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a service, you have to open-source your entire hosting stack including UI.
It's worse than that: you need to release your entire hosting stack under the SSPL. It's extremely unlikely that you're able to do this. Hope your servers aren't running Linux! (Or bash or the GNU coreutils or...)
If it were acceptable for the rest of the stack to be under another free software license, I'm not actually sure I'd be opposed to it. But yeah, as-is it sure looks like they've just written the license such that it's impossible for a hosting provider to comply.
On the other hand, a lot of people (myself included) have no intention of ever being in Amazon's large scale hosting business, and actively avoid building my software on GPL/AGPL where there are more permissive (but still "standard" like Apache/MIT) license choices available.
(I _do_ totally understand the principle of strongly viral licenses, I think the GPL is an amazing thing. The chardonnay socialist in me wishes the whole world would use it. Pragmatically, at work I feel obliged to point out the responsibilities of using GPLed dependancies. From a profit-focussed business decision, it's often better avoided. I agree what Amazon does with Mongo/Redis/Elastic et al. qualifies as "leeching", maybe I'm only fooling myself that my work's projects are somehow better...)
The thing is, in this case, Amazon's business is not about extending ElasticSearch with proprietary features. It's about hosting the OSS product.
Had ElasticSearch been under a copyleft license, the only difference would be that Elastic would've been unable to simply move away from the copyleft license.
> The lesson I’m taking away from this is just use a license like they’re using now from day 1.
Sure, if your whole business model is “sell a SaaS”, then making the whole offering an open source product that is simple for other people to host and offer an equivalent (or, if integrated with other offerings you don’t have, often more compelling) service is a bad choice.
But people choose open source licensing for a reason, and against competing software, a proprietary license can be a negative feature which makes it harder to grow mindshare and prove out utility.
> The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1
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.
> 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.
While true, personally I'd not be willing to contribute to such a project.
Of course, such a license would require legal blessing, which in itself is a lot of (paper) work. What if, the company decides to change the license in an year?
I think it’s significant in this case that most of the development of ES and the underlying engine is done by Elastic. This re-licensing is only of interest because it means most ongoing work on the project will now happen under the new license. If that was not the case nobody would care, the contributors could fork back to Apache 2.0 and continue. After all, the ElasticSearch license used up until 7.1 also allows me to fork the project under a new restrictive license, but nobody is likely to care if I did.
> 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.
It would have prevented its use in a previous company i worked at (largely for ideaological not practical concerns).
> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor, which was never a realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to cost so much, I guess.
That seems like a silly conclusion. Amazon is being a good actor by all accounts. On top of that Elastic is like a 15 billion dollar company, if that's not working, i need to get going on a business venture that doesnt work.
Anyways what makes you think they would be succesful if they used the license from day 1. Having your cake and eating it too only works if you switch halfway through.
It wouldn't have been picked up by the community if it weren't Open Source. Yes, you may have used it if the current product just appeared on the market with a source available license but that's not what happened.
People used and recommended the software for years because it was Open Source. People contributed to the project because it was Open Source. It became popular BECAUSE of Open Source.
Your argument doesn't work because you wouldn't have known about it if it wasn't Open Source.
Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors.
The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original team. Instead, AWS takes all their customers, keeps 100% of the revenue, and passes on nothing.
> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors.
Plenty of people saw this coming. It was completely predictable. The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught on are complex. But I don't think anyone can credibly claim that they were blind-sided. Rather, I think many people and companies simply feared the day of reckoning, discounted the threat, and did as most everybody else was doing.
That was the argument against the GPL, and yet Linux beat BSD. The tension exists, but it's not such a simple trade-off, and the dynamic is highly context dependent. The complexity is in identifying and achieving the best business model.
Like with the GPL 20 years ago, the intuition today seems to be that licenses like the AGPL are simply anathema to adoption (because "viral", etc) and therefore market capture, and if you can't capture the market you can't monetize your investment. It's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but eventually more people (authors, users, etc) will begin to explore the space commercially and, hopefully, disprove the conventional wisdom.
> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors.
First release of elastic was Feb 2010. AWS launched in March, 2006. The folks at 10gen used the AGPL for MongoDB since Feb, 2009. Yeah nobody could've seen this coming.
AWS didn't undercut anyone. They offered their customers exactly what they wanted. Many of these software vendors have delayed offering their own cloud-hosted versions, often years after AWS, even when these vendors should be better equipped at running them.
Elastic is also infamous for data loss and still has consensus problems so maybe proper priorities are the real problem.
There is no meaningful way for an independent vendor to compete with a Cloud Provider offering the same service. It gets bundled in the initial sales pitch, promoted in their documentation and at events, and gets heavily discounted.
It simply becomes the default - and (if on AWS) nobody will even think of Elastic after a couple of years.
And yet many companies are competing just fine. Elastic's biggest growth comes from cloud services, which matches every other database vendor from MongoDB to Redis. [1].
AWS just proved that the market wants to buy solutions, not software. There are tons of customers and environments where a dedicated vendor can offer something far better than the lowest-common-denominator that AWS provides.
If you want another success story, just look at how Snowflake built a better Redshift on AWS (quite literally).
> The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original team.
Who are the members of the original team? Are we not going to give a cut to all the other contributors to the project throughout the years? How much should each contributor get? Are we measuring by lines of code touched?
Actually, your argument that there’s any relevance to Elastic being the primary developer lacks insight. It changes nothing about the licensing situation nor about the ethics. You’re also not factoring in the fact that the nonrestrictive license is why Elasticsearch became the standard.
You also haven’t resolved the logical contradiction that Elastic is equally “guilty” of profiting off of Lucene.
I honestly don’t think a nuanced understanding of these licenses and open source business models can lead to any conclusion except this one: Amazon is not in the wrong here, Elastic is being entitled, misleading and duplicitous. Elastic is free to use Lucene as its kernel and monetize it, and Amazon is free to offer a managed Elasticsearch service.
If you write Apache 2.0 software, you have no right to bitch about competition. That’s the short of it. And remember - Elastic is doing fine. They’re worth $15B. The founder has hundreds of millions of dollars now, and rightly so.
Right. So what would Linux look like if it was developed by a single company?
One of the reasons to choose open source is to avoid lock in by having multiple suppliers, and at least in theory have some healthy competition between them.
~1k lines (per enumerated prs in blog post) against millions of lines, aka less than a fraction of a percent.. plus ignoring code review, issue triaged etc. insignificant level might be more apt.
Amazon is literally under no obligation to contribute any code back. Yet they do because most people prefer to merge upstream if they can, and Amazon is no exception.
Frankly Elastic has been very hostile at accepting PRs if they seem like they’d compete with Elastic’s proprietary offerings. Glaring conflict of interest. So I’m glad Elastic forced a full fork.
BTW, in case you didn’t realize this license change will not prevent Amazon from running their own fork. So even from a greedy business perspective Elastic made a horrible decision, even ignoring the ethics of lying to the community as they have done repeatedly and without showing any remorse.
edit: Fixed typo where I wrote "Elastic" instead of "Amazon" when talking about Amazon being no exception to preferring to merge upstream where possible
AWS launched RDS with MySQL 4 months before the first version of ElasticSearch. Yea in that case it was Oracle, but I think it was clear what the direction was. And it was definitely clear in 2014 with Aurora and Redshift. They could have changed their license in 2015, but they didn’t. Why?
> Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model;
This claim is highly unrealistic. Offering managed services has been the hallmark of the cloud from day 1. The cloud is nothing more than managed solutions.
It's highly disingenuous to claim that it was not possible to expect a business dedicated to offer managed services to offer a managed service.
The issue is, I think, that acting in such a manner is supposed to cost you in community good will. The potential for bad PR can force you to act in a more ethical manner, but there's a big separation between the people with the checkbooks and the folks who are aware of the issues here. The courts are there for extraordinary circumstances but it's generally better for all parties to settle a dispute without litigation and AWS could just shovel some money in the direction of elastisearch.
I always get a laugh out of these for-profit companies trying to cater to a tech community open source ethos, and discovering there was a reason why companies weren’t doing this
Because they don't want to, or see no value in doing so. I've been downvoted to oblivion just by stating that contributions to popular OSS projects, especially those initiated,or heavily used by large tech companies,are nothing more than just free labour.
Amazon's business is commodity: they made books,one of the most precious things we,as a civilization could create,a commodity. The storage space, computing, even ML is being commoditised. Logistics will folow,then some more. The company's perspective and business goals are completely different than many would like to think.
> The storage space, computing, even ML is being commoditised
I don't see that happening anytime soon. There is still a market for hobbyist and boostrapped businesses who can't afford the insane prices offered AWS, Azure, GCP & Co. Storage, Computing and Bandwidth on these platform is inflated for the "enterprise and over-funded-startups" market.
Hetzner, Ionos, Scaleway and OVH are still order of magnitude below AWS in terms of prices. And the quality difference is in no way justifying the price difference. (Especially with Hetzer and Scaleway which are almost on par with cloud platforms)
> All changes to Elasticsearch were sent as upstream pull requests (#42066, #42658, #43284, #43839, #53643, #57271, #59563, #61400, #64513), and we then included the “oss” builds offered by Elastic in our distribution. This ensured that we were collaborating with the upstream developers and maintainers, and not creating a “fork” of the software.
With links on the issue numbers. Why should we not understand this as contributing back?
Disclosure: I work at Amazon on cloud infrastructure, but not directly on the codebase being discussed here.
Someone pointed out elsewhere:
*Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream.
That's counting emails. Unlike other Git-based projects like the Linux kernel, it seems a lot of commits are made with users.noreply.github.com email addresses. For example.
commit 8e413f85e8978da83db107aae51e5543d4779dba
Author: paulward24 <52216289+paulward24@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Wed Jul 3 04:37:07 2019 -0700
Ensure to access RecoveryState#fileDetails under lock
Closes #43840
The community did that in good faith. What's the incentive for the community to contribute to the project if Vendor XYZ is going to offer the same project with more optimizations?
The buggy whip community invested in buggy whip manufacturing too.
Sometimes step changes happen, and things are just different afterwards.
I see two related "changes in the world" here that are contributing to this current drama.''
1) the rise of SaaS and globally centralised cloud hosting.
2) the emergence of companies solely (or mostly) built on paying salaries to developers writing an open source software project. (Elastic/Mongo/Redis being the primary examples).
As I see it, the 30 year old "Open Source" principles didn't see these coming any more than the buggy whip industry saw the Model T coming.
Personally, I'd really like to see those three companies (and others/new entrants) come up with a workable new model for software licenses for some kind of "freely usable software" ("free" in the generic "no obligations" sense, not the GPL/Stallman "freedom" sense) written by salaried devs at for-profit companies. I think the world would be a better place with more software closer to the Stallman end of the license spectrum than the Oracle end. I don't think that's necessarily a given. It might well be true that in general, a for profit company cannot make enough money out of writing software and giving it away to keep teams of full time developers paid.
There is nothing unfair about being able to make optimizations of your own on top of the software. That freedom is in fact one of the core values of OSS. Any “fairness” judgements you make are irrelevant for as long as the license satisfies its goal and the software is freely available to everyone.
Fairness (ethics, moral judgement, justice) is inherently a different layer of our civilization than license (law, contracts). I'd say fairness is more important than any and all licenses ever.
Also, I think through history every law was made in the name of making law more just, bringing the legal system closer to an ideal of justice.
We also know that simply throwing out law and bringing back case by case judgments (eg. what kings and lords of old did) just gets us further from that ideal, hence we work on our laws and licenses. But that doesn't mean we should forget that they are imperfect and sometimes they need updating.
The irony is strong in this case, because Elastic started by making ES into an open core thing and putting every new feature into their business side. (The improvements they made to the basic ES clustering, indexing, sharding, Lucene integration, etc. are very valuable, and I'm not discounting them, but their added value is drastically reduced compared to the features. Just like AWS' added value for businesses is a lot more important than having yet another cool x-pack feature.)
MIT license is super simple, short way of saying "You must give me credit if you use this in the form of including this license and my copyright statement in software you distribute"
Apache license is a longer and more complicated version that is the same in spirit but also includes the agreement that the licensor does not sue the licensee over patent infringement for use of their contributions to the software or the cumalative software, unless the licensee makes a patent claim against the licensor in which case the license terminates
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 here.