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Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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