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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I feel this way about all similar licensing changes (Redis, Elastic among many others). It's basically a large company vs much larger company fight, and the losers are the thousands of individual contributors not affiliated with either one who have worked for free and can no longer use their work in the way they want. Moves like this are definitely eroding trust in open source in the long term.

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There's a fair amount of hyperbole in that statement. Most of the above products (Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, etc.) don't have "thousands of individual contributors" and are developed primarily by employees of the backing companies.

Second, external contributors can use it in their work in any way that they want so long as it's not in offering Elasticsearch-as-a-service. They can even use for offering Elasticsearch-as-a-service so long as it's based on the current Apache2-licensed code rather than the SSPL-licensed code that will be in effect as of the next Elasticsearch release.

There are certainly valid criticisms of this decision, but a blanket statement that "thousands of individual contributors" are the losers here is an exaggeration.

The quantity of the individual contributors seems to be the only stretch you seem to be able to point out, yet you go further to trying to defend the SSPL license as limiting a very narrow set of applications - despite lawyers and open source advocates almost unanimously having said the license text itself is ambiguous enough to cover a much larger set of use cases.

If you are not a lawyer and if this is not legal counsel, I'd suggest you leave your personal interpretations of a license that is broadly considered to be less permissive than advertised outside of civil discussion.

>There are certainly valid criticisms of this decision, but

Why the but? Obviously this decision hurts AWS but it also hurts a much broader group than them.

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