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Comment by __emmerich | Hacker News Reader

Their licence is still proprietary, though. At the least people with a technical curiosity in X-Pack will be able to install it. Technically it's illegal, but Elastic probably doesn't care until the moment they start gaining momentum.

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If their license is still proprietary what do they mean by "opening" the code?

They mean you can see the code. Note that they never say they're "open sourcing" it - it's not open source by the Open Source Definition.

This is the license the X-Pack code is under: https://www.elastic.co/eula

I wouldn't put it past the Elastic team to include some sort of phone-home mechanism here.

Nor would I put it past them to consider legal demand letters as part of their sales funnel.

In 6.3, telemetry (‘phone home’) is an opt-in only feature for both the free and paid components of X-Pack. We won’t be tracking any identification, so even if users opt-in to telemetry, there is no way to turn that into a sales strategy.

Suing users is a pretty terrible business practice and not, at all, a funnel creation opportunity.

Re. License, there are a few FAQs on https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open#faq that may help clear up any misunderstandings. Free features are free and governed by the Elastic EULA but are enabled by default. Paid features are available through an opt-in trial and, if they help solve a problem, can be purchased.

<disclaimer: I work at Elastic in Developer Relations>

and this trial can't be disabled (to use them for an unlimited amount of time) by someone by modifying your source because your license prohibits that? Am I correct in that assumption?

Based on what exactly?

Based on a previous experience being in their sales funnel and speaking to their reps at re:Invent.

They have an incredible product that I can't live without, it's just incredibly painful trying to actually pay them money for something.

Honestly, I think their real play here is getting community contributions to fix stuff that's very broken and also to edge out Siren Solutions. SearchGuard, Kibi and Sentinl are all _very_ good tools.

I'm sorry to hear it was painful to pay us...I wish that wasn't the case.

If you want, I'd be happy to talk more about it so that we can understand where we can improve. Feel free to email me tyler.hannan<at>elastic.co

<disclaimer: I work at Elastic in Developer Relations>

Not OP. One reason i find it is hard to pay you is because there is no way to buy your product without talking to someone. The pricing is not listed anywhere on your website.

That changed Jan 1 while were in the middle of figuring out what we were going to pay them -- then some X-Pack features disappeared from the "Gold" plan and the cost they quoted us was _way up_ from what we were evaluating.

There actually still is a pricing page somewhere on the site, but you have to dig for it, and I don't think it's correct anymore.

I think open sourcing the code give opportunities to others to learn from the code and create own alternatives.

What drive the community to involve in their software

The main benefit may be that users can more easily use the code if they can read it. If you can see the code then you can understand how it works exactly, without relying on documentation to be accurate. You can also more easily debug your application if you have the source of third-party libraries.

For writing clones or alternatives, it might be better not to read any proprietary code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

You have a reason. That will be one of the main reasons. Sometimes I use open source projects to find a way to create something.

Check many solutions can give an idea how to solve the puzzle. Make this projects open source can give me an idea to create plugins. Ofcourse still need think for yourself if it fits your needs, quality and if you not are struggle with possible copyrights.

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