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Comment by bevacqua | Hacker News Reader

Where does Elastic claim SSPL is open source?

Also, why is SSPL not open source? As far as I can tell, it mostly just seems like the APGL, but taken to 11. I can definitely appreciate why it's a problematic license, but I don't think "not open source" is its problem.

It seems it has neither the OSI's blessing as an Open Source licence, nor the FSF's blessing as a Free Software licence. Can anyone comment on why not, given that the AGPL has the blessing of both organisations?

edit Here's an informative StackExchange comment. [0] Apparently it's a good deal stricter than the AGPL, and introduces much more legal uncertainty.

[0] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7523/

Yes, I could see someone putting forward the argument that the SSPL is so unusable that ElasticSearch isn't actually expecting anyone to use it, and therefore it's more of a marketing gimmic than a license.

https://opensource.org/LicenseReview122018

Good link, thanks. I don't think there's a equivalent response from the FSF, perhaps it was never submitted for FSF approval.

One of the core tenets of free software licensing is that there is a fair, symmetrical relationship for all parties involved.

Elastic obviously does not publish their own management infrastructure code under SSLP, so the reason for this license to exist is to make the playing field uneven as opposed to all the other free software licenses.

Basically, they can benefit from your code on top of and around ES, while you can't from theirs. This is actually the result of dual licensing but with other free licenses, at least the symmetry is maintained for the core product.

I am not making a judgement call here, just explaining what the distinction is.

Because you can't fork it and do whatever you want with it.

You can't? I mean presumably you can't fork it and re-license the fork, but that's not exactly new.

You can't "do whatever" with plain GPL-licensed code either yet linux is considered open and free source code.

I found myself asking the same question a few weeks ago. The StackExchange link is probably more comprehensive, but I wrote a bit about it as well, here: https://blog.mcquade.dev/why-is-the-sspl-not-an-open-source-...

The Elastic blog post announcing the change never says exactly those words, but it repeatedly talks about being an "open source company" with an "open source product" -- despite the fact that Elasticsearch is now available under a choice of two different licenses, neither of which is "open source" under any reasonable definition.

(The other option, the Elastic License, allows you to use the product in either source or binary form, but you may not make derivative works or compile your own binaries except for testing.)

> denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. ~ Oxford

Or the Open Source Definition from https://opensource.org/osd

On the license there are 3 main "propagation" clauses: Conveying Verbatim Copies / Conveying Modified Source Versions / Conveying Non-Source Forms

Furthermore: Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies / Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients

On the other hand, the "issue" seems to be an Aferro-like clause that conveying it as a service combined/linked with other software over a network _counts_ as distribution an gives a right to the users to request the source code that makes the service work.

Here is Google rejection of APGL on this basis: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

"open source" appears 19 times, but they very very carefully weasel-word their way away from saying they are still open source. but wow how close they come, how much it seems to imply they still are going to be open source. some examples:

> SSPL is a source-available license created by MongoDB to embody the principles of open source while providing protection against public cloud providers offering open source products as a service without contributing back.

forgive me for not immediately seeing that this is an "open source inspired" license, not open source.

> As previously mentioned, over the last three years, the market has evolved and the community has come to appreciate that open source companies need to better protect their software in order to maintain a high level of investment and innovation.

...by no longer releasing open source software

again, "we value the same principles as open source... but we're not going to be open source any more" obfuscation.

your doubt is unbecoming, bevacqua.

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