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Comment by pietrovismara | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, every relevant FOSS project should adopt a similar license to prevent exploitation from corporations.

There is some discussion on the P2P Foundation regarding copyfarleft/copyfair/copyjustright however in my experience even the most popular copyfarleft isn't as adopted. ( https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft )

I have been gathering resources regarding copyfarleft licensing and projects here: https://github.com/LibreCybernetics/awesome-copyfarleft

That's great, thank you for doing this!

I already knew about the Anti-Capitalist Software License but didn't know about the others. Copyfarleft is a great concept.

To make this work we need to build an ecosystem around these licenses and non-exploitative business models. The fist step is indeed to let people know such licenses/ideas exist.

They would no longer be FOSS if they did that.

In practice it would only affect corporate thieves, so I think it's actually necessary to protect the open source ecosystem.

Let's be clear here: You build something. You release it under a license that says, "do what you want with it, profit with it, I don't care". Then someone comes and builds on top of it, and you call them a thief? For using something you told them they could use without restriction?

Related: I find it really bizarre how many in the tech community seem to outright just not believe in capitalism...

SSPL isn't being used as an alternative to permissive licenses (e.g. MIT). It's being used to shore up the holes that AGPL doesn't cover[1], to enable the business model of "free for small guys, paid for by the big guys".

People want a license that says something like, "you can only use this if you also contribute to the commons, or if you pay for the privilege not to". SSPL is an attempt to be that. Maybe it doesn't do that job well, but don't confuse it as competing with permissive licenses.

[1]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up.h...

I know it’s not competing with permissive licenses. That’s my point. The people here acting like the fact that companies are profiting off of Apache 2.0 licensed code are being unreasonable was my point.

Separately, I think this move will just hurt Elastic Co in the long term. The organization I work for runs a 30 TB elastic cluster and we’re going to have to go drop Elasticsearch because of this change because we’re committed to using free and open source software. What a shame.

Good luck with a lot of wasted work power because you are sad that "big Corp" can't exploit anymore "small software house". Please, this is ridiculous.

Anyway, I'm sure many others like me are sympathetic to the cause and will support companies like elastic that take this kind of decision. I don't think elastic will miss you.

I work for a very well-known non-profit. You probably visit our site multiple times a week, if not per day. We're going to have to move off of Elasticsearch powering our article search, despite us not offering Elasticsearch as a service or anything remotely comparable, because we believe in running free software in production only.

So, I hope you enjoy taking the holier-than-thou stance. It must be nice up there.

> Honestly, every relevant FOSS project should adopt a similar license to prevent exploitation from corporations.

The correct FOSS way to do this is using a FOSS license, an SSPL is not one of these. AGPLv3 is and provides a nice protection.

Every project can choose it at the beginning if they choose. But it will tremendously hurt adoption and community.

if you don't like it, fork elastic v7 which is still open source and use it as you wish.

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