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Comment by LukeEF | Hacker News Reader

Special mention for this paragraph: 'we expect that a few of our competitors will attempt to spread all kinds of FUD around this change. Let me be clear to any naysayers. We believe deeply in the principles of free and open products, and of transparency with the community.' Get your offense in early and try not to mention open source!

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This.

I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have AWS make so much money out of it, to make the largest shareholder the richest man on earth, while contributing nothing back to any of the open source projects. This has to be fixed or we will see less and less developers open sourcing quality products

It's not open source though.

Yes, it is not. But who cares? What I care about as a user is repairability:

* can I inspect source and build it myself?

* can I fix it?

* can I share modifications with others?

Many of the new "cloud protection licenses" offer this, yet they are (by definition) not opensource.

I think this is the right way to look at things, after all, these were the orignal "why" arguments in favour of open source. If we can get the same benefits while also protecting open products from megacorps like AWS, that's a better licence than a true open source licence

> If we can get the same benefits while also protecting open products from megacorps like AWS, that's a better licence than a true open source licence

That's your opinion, of course. IMO, there's a type of magic that happens when software is under a truly non-restrictive license. You get a level of quality and reliability in the software that is unmatched by what you get with any proprietary equivalent.

Unfortunately, most people don't really believe in FOSS. And that's okay. But boy am I getting frustrated with these companies that are happy to preach about how "open source" is amazing, until someone else is making some profit with their software and then suddenly the (extremely vague) restrictive licenses start rolling out.

The only entity who says it's not "open source" is the OSI, which is mostly funded by corporations, who are in the business of cloud computing.

Both the Debian Free Software Guidelines[1] and the GNU Free Software Definition proscribe limiting fields of endeavor. The OSD[3] borrows heavily from the DFSG.

I remember reading (alas, I can't find my source) a spokesperson for the OSI admitting to the existence of licenses that meet the OSD that they don't want to be OSI-approved because they don't add enough value versus the cost of proliferation of licenses that are substantially similar.

[1] https://www.debian.org/intro/free

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw

[3] https://opensource.org/osd

These definitions were written a long ago, in a time when cloud computing wasn't even a buzzword yet.

But I read them and couldn't find anything addressing fields of endeavor. GNU's "four essential freedoms", which imho are a little naive in retrospect, don't say anything about this. They say anyone should be able to "sell copies", but SSPL doesn't disallow this either.

Debian obviously didn't address it either. They clarify: " They can even try to sell it. In practice, it costs essentially no money to make electronic copies of software. Supply and demand will keep the cost down."

I.e. they only allowed it because they thought the free market will take care of it, and didn't imagine how cloud provides will become monopolies of access.

"As a result, you can buy a Debian release on several CDs for just a few USD." - Lol.. that's like trying to apply lessons from the bible to modern life.

Just to broaden the discussion, "fields of endeavor" doesn't just mean cloud services, but also whether you can prevent your software from being used in weapons, or other such morally objectionable applications.

> GNU's "four essential freedoms", which imho are a little naive in retrospect, don't say anything about this.

"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."

That clearly includes purpose of running the progam as a cloud service and profiting from selling it SaaS-style to third parties.

I don't think it's reasonable to attribute motive to the contributors in this way. Changes like this protect the elastic enterprise, whether they align with the motives of contributors would have to be evaluated on a per-contributor basis.

I've made several contributions to ELK, and my only motive has been that it's useful open source software, and I want to make it more useful. I personally don't care who profits off the codebase, I think anybody should be free to. I personally would object to anybody trying to lock down how it can be used, and would see any attempt to do so as running completely counter to my personal motivations as a past contributor.

Which is exactly what I see Elastic doing here.

> I've made several contributions to ELK, and my only motive has been that it's useful open source software, and I want to make it more useful. I personally don't care who profits off the codebase, I think anybody should be free to. I personally would object to anybody trying to lock down how it can be used, and would see any attempt to do so as running completely counter to my personal motivations as a past contributor.

This x 10000. I couldn't agree more, thanks for putting that so clearly.

Frankly, I think a number of people in the Open Core movement have a psychological hangup around profit. They feel that if a company - particularly a large corporation - is making money using their software without "contributing back", that that should not be allowed. Well, if you don't want to allow it, fine, but don't pretend you're in the business of releasing free software - you're not. You want to be in the business of proprietary software, since only proprietary software lets you say "hey I don't want Jeff to profit off of my work without paying my for a proprietary license".

I very strongly agree. It's always seemed like a quintessential tragedy of the commons to me. Everybody benefits from open source software, no matter what they're doing. Proportionally, very few people/organisations contribute to open source, and I would guess that nobody contributes to every open source project that they consume. I've always seen one of the core aspects of the value of open source being the common utility they provide. The idea that an open source consumer should contribute back value in some way proportional to the value they derive runs counter to that. The moment you start to restrict access to open source software based on some model of deservedness, you start to undermine the principles of common good that a lot of open source values are based on.

that's one of the things that bugs me, old contributions like yours have the apache license, can they modify without your approval?

Legally, I’m sure their contributor license agreement gives them the full rights to do that. Which was my understanding at the time. I’ve contributed to lots of projects that have them, and I likely will again in the future.

F/OSS exists so that not everyone has to be subject to undifferentiated work, among serving other very high impact purposes. Think brew.sh, vim/Emacs, Eclipse IDE, Postgres, Java, Linux/Linaro etc;

Substitute AWS for "a software developer" and see if you feel the same way.

> I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have other software developers make so much money out of it... while contributing nothing back to any of the open source projects. This has to be fixed...

As someone who writes open-source, I'm always happy to see other developers use my code to build cool stuff, and I expect nothing in return.

I'm also happy to see small start-ups rise faster by using my software.

But if those theoretical start-ups, whose business wouldn't exist without my software, grew to dozens of employees, made millions of dollars, and still I wouldn't see a nickel.. That's when I would start to wonder, why am I doing this for free?

Incidentally, the bigger the company, the less likely it is to contribute back.

To conclude, that sounds like false equivalency to me. It does matter who is using it for free and profiting.

I write F/OSS full-time.

AWS does / did contribute patches to Elasticsearch.

The problem Elasticsearch has is, AWS shares none of the gigantic profits it makes from its Elasticsearch Service, which is a double whammy because it cannibalizes Elastic's own SaaS offering.

> To conclude, that sounds like false equivalency to me. It does matter who is using it for free and profiting.

You mean to say, Facebook must share a % of its WhatsApp profits with ejabberd, or ejabberd otherwise is right to SSPL their software?

Or, Google pay Oracle a share of the spoils because it is an "app container layer" on top of Java/JVM? And that Oracle is okay to switch to SSPL otherwise in search of those dollars?

Or, okay if CnFdn SSPLs k8s?

Also, if it matters whoever profits contributes back monetarily, may be the right way to do so would be via a Foundation. Using the Commons Clause or SSPL is not the answer, in my eyes.

> AWS does / did contribute patches to Elasticsearch.

That's a meaningless statement, since it could just as well mean that they contributed back 2 hours of work.

> * is okay to switch to SSPL ???

Yes, absolutely. Why not?

The article you linked doesn't mention anything about foundations. But let's agree not every open-source project can become one.

We support these principles just not enough to actually support them......

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