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Comment by dhd415 | Hacker News Reader

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification. Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That makes it pretty clear that it's meant strictly for competition with AWS.

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Related article Uproar: MariaDB Corp. veers away from open source https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109213/open-source-uproar...

That's pretty ironic considering MariaDB's history.

Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. Maybe we can change the link to this post?

I kept feeling like I was reading the same thing over and over and just not finding out what exactly Amazon is doing now that it won't be able to do in the future. Skimming the links to the blog post and FAQ didn't help much.

Whatever it is it's pretty deep in the weeds. It looks like the intent is for most users to be unaffected; non-AWS cloud providers to be unaffected; even AWS's Elastic Cloud to be unaffected; but AWS has to stop doing something with specific regard to Elastic Search and I can't figure out what it is.

I read the whole linked article and was disappointed there was no explanation of the license changes they made - only justifications for the change.

I think the title covers that this is "why" the change occurred. Not the explanation of the license they changed to.

That’s fair, if perhaps a bit pedantic. I suppose I was expecting some explanation of why the language of the new license would address these “whys” as opposed to just a list of grievances.

> hack the source code to grant yourself access to our paid features without a subscription, or the use of modified versions in production.

I think the change that you can’t modify the code and use it yourself in production is a big change that is glossed over. ES is now free as in beer. You can look at the code but you can’t touch it or change what it does.

Edit: I was wrong about this. The license itself does not say this, but the blog post seemed to indicate that it was a change. I think it’s an exclusive inclusive or problem.

This is false. License [0] clearly states the conditions under which you can do it and they seem pretty reasonable. Nothing that a normal user, faced with an issue they want to fix, wouldn't accept. I imagine Amazon would have trouble accepting those and other terms, but that's the whole idea.

[0] https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license

No, you are both correct. You are talking about the SSPL, the parent poster you are replying to is talking about the Elastic License which does in fact prevent you from modifying the code and running it in production:

See 2.2 Restrictions: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/license...

With the dual-licensing you have a choice of Elastic license or SSPL, but they both have terms you might not like. And if you use the binaries you automatically use the free as in beer Elastic license.

> Then after a period of time, typically 3-4 years, but not more than 5 years, the restrictions lapse, and the source code automatically converts to an Open Source license, in our case Apache 2.0.

I’m not familiar with this type of license. Any idea how/when this time frame is decided? Is it 3-5 years from software release?

I guess I’m confused by the use of “automatically converts” with a vague timeline. If it’s automatic why isn’t the time of “automatic” conversion more definitively known? What’s the event that triggers the change?

Good explanation here: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

It’s from the day that the code is released under the license and the four years is the max under BSL (so that people know roughly what the “worst case scenario” it a BSL licensed software would be) but can be specified to be shorter by the one releasing code under it.

https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/

An individual instance of license will say "the covered code is usable under Foo license from Year-Month-Day"

Not sure if it's still the case but Ghostscript is or was like this - a licenseable current version possibly with extra commercially relevant features (e.g. PCL) plus an open source older version.

Edit: https://artifex.com/licensing/commercial/ notably this lets you avoid concerns about integrating GPL with your commercial offering.

Great post, thanks, had totally missed that, great that they are evaluating BSL as well, this should really get up there on the HN front page as well.

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