Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.
Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.
Exactly this.
Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model.
The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. Nope, it's all gaslighting. They don't need to make this license change, without it they'll still be a $50B business in a decade or less.
They're just having an immature childish response because, while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is also making boatloads of money, and that's not fair in their eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a whole is, but that's another rant)
The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working.
Enough blame for the current situation on all sides.
So, to call Elastic a successful open-source business model isn't quite accurate, and you're correct to point that out.
Elastic has indeed found a profitable business model: they have their own cloud (cloud.elastic.co). But for it to be profitable they need to cover the costs of both developing the Elastic stack, and running a SaaS. AWS only has to cover the cost of running a SaaS (since they are getting the stack for free) which gives them a HUGE cost-wise advantage.
To counter this advantage Elastic is asking them to partner with them like other cloud providers do (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba etc) but AWS has refused to do that.
Isn't it then fair for Elastic to restrict AWS from using their software?
I think this is precisely correct, and it's really strange to me that a company developing innovative software would decide to apache license all of their work but I still feel for them. I'm guessing that they wanted to build a thing and make some money off of it while mostly just contributing to moving tech forward and that's a super noble goal... but that noble goal would have been much better served by using a license better tailored to OSS free use for non-commercial purposes and pursuing individual agreements for commercial use.
Then again, if it was launched with such stringent requirements would so many contributors have helped them develop into such a usable product?
Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous.
However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again.
So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.
(sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough)
Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.
So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.
Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.
And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.
Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>?
So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.
They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.
They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:
> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming
Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
We might actually be better off with Amazon as the steward because they don’t need to make money on the software itself.
It would make a lot of sense for them to slowly close it down or modify it so that it eventually only makes sense to use it on their platform. Or something similar. And given what I've seen from their behaviour I would expect them to exploit whatever market leverage they can.
If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead.
The AGPL would ensure users of elasticsearch, whether hosted by elastic or AWS, have access to the source code of the software they're using.
... have to let Bezos et al. exploit it?
(And that's maybe not as bad a thing as it sounds on the surface. Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, HAProxy, Nginx, and probably hundreds of open source projects I can't even start to list don't seem to feel the need to come out swinging like Elastic/Mongo/Redis have. )
But Amazon is releasing their source code. Even more of it than Elastic.
Open source should be about optimisation. For example you have some infrastructure code (like LLVM, Linux kernel, etc.) that brings you little competitive advantage but you benefit from distributed maintenance - OSS is a perfect fit. And people using it but not contributing back is not really that big of a deal.
The incentives to upstream exist without licensing requirement - maintaining a fork which when the upstream knows nothing about what you're doing and could break you with every commit is not fun. You also lose on distributed review/support aspect. At the end of the day if someone finds a way to profit and not contribute back - how does that impact you ? Unless they are a direct competitor and you OSS something critical - in which case like people above said - you should rethink your business model.
Also OSS has a bunch of secondary benefits - recruiting, developer mindshare, etc.
I think viewing OSS as a generosity is not sustainable, and the incentives exist even without restrictive licensing.
Sure it's nice when you can motivate it like that but I feel that the long tail of open source projects doesn't fit your description but are projects driven by a few enthusiasts.
Brian Behlendorf didn't write Apache (or more accurately, patch NCSA httpd) out of "generosity", he was doing what was known back then as "scratching his own itch". Sure, he generously gave it away as well, but that was after he'd done the work to benefit _himself_.
Same with Larry Wall and Perl. He wrote the language he wanted, and shared it afterwards. He didn't write it out of generosity (and to be fair, he is 100% the sort of person who might have).
I think the dual license strategy Larry chose for Perl really shines light on his motivations, "use GPL if you want to, use the enormously more permissive Artistic License if you want to". He just wanted anybody who might find his software useful for any reason at all (including becoming insanely rich, if they could work out how to do so) to be able to use Perl.
But why would you very deliberately choose a software license which very explicitly distinguishes itself from normal proprietary software licenses by spelling out how it requires no payment and will always require no payment (and in some cases, explicitly prohibits anyone else from requiring payment!), and still maintain an expectation of payment?
What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.
Forking is the/a point in the sense that I can't think of a version of Open Source that is still Open Source but that doesn't allow forking -- that allowing for forking is a deliberate choice, not an accidental one.
Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...
Lower case open source is a term that I personally try not to use, specifically because of that confusion. I personally try to refer to that as source available or shared source when possible.
Stallman and the OSI do _not_ agree on "Libre software" and "Open Source" - in a quite fundamental way.
"The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
When I use Open Source (capitalized) I am arguing for Libre software with the values Stallman is talking about. The point of disagreement I have with Stallman is this -- Stallman argues that using the 'wrong' word to describe Libre software risks corrupting the movement. I argue that using a generally accepted word to describe the movement, and culturally reinforcing the common understanding of that word as a subset of Libre (ie, not just giving up saying "Open Source can mean whatever the Mongo devs want it to") is valuable enough to override those concerns.
Stallman goes on to argue that the Open Source movement doesn't care about Libre software, and we should not align with that movement. I argue that a very large contingent of the Open Source community does care about Libre software, and it is worth advocating to the remainder of the community that Open Source software is Libre software and that the real ideals of Open Source beyond just source availability can not exist without the ideals of Libre software.
Stallman and I disagree about whether or not we should use the term Open Source to describe Libre software, but we don't disagree about what Libre software is. Even Stallman admits that aside from some minor differences, the official OSI definition is mostly in alignment with Libre software. What Stallman is really disagreeing with is with the PR strategy. And the reason I'm not going to try and separate those terms is because I explicitly disagree with him that his strategy in this specific case is helpful, and because I and many other people in the community want to continue to fight for the idea that Open Source needs to be Libre.
Part of the reason we use Open Source to describe Libre software is because we don't believe that Mongo or Elasticsearch have the right to decide for us what Open Source means, and we're not willing to drop the issue, give up all of the good will and public recognition we've built around the term, and just go use something else that the public doesn't recognize. Because if we do, and we have any success at all, then pretty soon proprietary companies will start to co-opt that term too.
I don't see any indication that confusion over what the OSI meant by the term 'Open Source' is the reason why Mongo felt emboldened to write a new license that took away user freedoms. Mongo didn't argue that Open Source was different from Libre, they attacked the very spirit of both movements by implying that their focus on 'sustainability' and 'fairness' was somehow fixing flaws in the OSI/GNU definitions and making their software even more free. If we were all using the term Libre instead, nothing about Mongo's PR strategy with the SSPL would have changed, they would have still claimed that their license was reinforcing the 'spirit' of Libre software.
Conversations like this are just sort of pointless, where one side says it's supposed to be this and the other replies no, it should be that, when really open source software is just a thing that happened. It's up to us to define an ethics around it and to decide how we interact with other actors in the ecosystem who might not have the same principles and goals.
To have a discussion about how it should work, to make subjective value judgments like the ones these comments are full of, we need better arguments than 'the license says it's fine, so on what basis can you criticize Amazon's and/or Elastic's conduct here?' or 'but that's not nice!' or 'Amazon/Elastic has $XXXM revenue so they are bad'.
https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/
> Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.
>No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors.
I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.
Do you have numbers on how much AWS profits from Amazon Elastic Search service?
Have you checked the profits from Elastic for their offerings?
Have you compared them?
How do you quantify "insane"?
Honest questions. Just a data person.
So legally open source but socially closed source/non-commercial use?
They seriously have this entitled attitude that because you used the free software project that they started, that now they're entitled to that money. It's patently absurd. Imagine if Linus Torvalds went around with that attitude, claiming he deserves to be a trillionaire because of the absurd amount of value Linux has produced. (And ironically Linux is a more restrictive license than Elasticsearch)
Good point. When I willingly contribute to open source with no compensation, it's with the understanding that it's because my contribution is available to anyone under the same terms, I'm contributing to a "commons" open to all, willingly for the public good.
If anyone wants to use it for profit-making purposes, that's generally fine with me, because everyone can on an equal basis.
If instead the software is licensed such that one company has special rights to profit off of it that others don't... why would I donate my contributions for free to that company? Shouldn't I get a cut?
Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wanting to have the cake and eat it too.
I love having my opinion changed. Thanks for that.
The "free work from the community" either was contributed under the terms of a CLA that allows for relicensing, or members of the community all agreed to relicense their contributions, or that free work was removed entirely.
Elastic (and Mongo and RadisLabs) are trying to do something new.
Linux, without doubt, "reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community," to the point where although the original release was 100% Linus's own code and arguably "Linus's software", these days to a first approximation _none_ of the code is "his". The percentage of the ~27million LOC that is "linux" these days that were personally written by Linus is effectively zero.
Elastic is a company paying 500-1000 employees who I suspect (but haven't checked) contributed the majority of the code rather than it being "free work from the community". (And their ability to relicense the code suggests that any community contributed code was contributed under their CLA which meant the contributors explicitly granted Elastic future rights to relicense those contributions, so it's not like the "community" can pretend they didn't know this was possible.)
I don't know that Elastic's business model will work. I don't think there's any guarantee that it will. Part of me kinda hopes it does, because I suspect that the business success of "company backed venture capital funded free-as-in-beer software" might result in more and better software being available to use - perhaps software on such a large scale that "scratch your own itch" motivations have insurmountable ramp up difficulties. I personally think the jump[ from AntiRez's "scratch your own itch" redis, to RedisLab's "Widely Fortune500 adopted and enterprise ready Redis" is not a thing AntiRez wanted to stick around and do. And the world _might_ be a better place for the existence of the non-OSI approved software under license like RedisLabs "source available" one.
It'll be interesting t watch this play out over the next decade or so...
Just to add a bit more nuance, I think we tend to focus a lot on community contributions, but IMO the biggest benefit of FOSS is not that; it's adoption.
Even if Elastic writes 100% of the code, by making it open source, they are promoting the widespread adoption of their software. A project with a non-free license or a custom license is a non-starter at many (most?) companies, or at a minimum requires talking to legal which is a PITA.
So, even with no community contributions, Elastic would never have been able to get to where they're at now - making $500MM in revenue a year and at a $15B evaluation - if it weren't open source.
Now just to be clear, Elastic is totally allowed to close things up now that they've reaped the benefits. The beautiful irony is that, when you close source after you've reaped the benefits, by definition you've also hit the point where it's now obviously beneficial for a company like Amazon to make their own fork and keep their AWS Elasticsearch cash cow going.
So, ultimately the community is totally fine. Indeed Elastic has been going down this road for a few years now, so it's actually a good thing for us that this happened. Better to have an amicable divorce early rather than a messy one later. But I can't help but point out that Elastic has broken its promises and misled the community - to their detriment more than to ours.
This isn't an accident, it's in fact the whole point of open source that people can make open source forks when the original authors decide to no longer do open source.
I don't think there's much 'amicable' about it though in this case at the moment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867682
Do they want to have their cake and eat it too?
I don't think that's true, at least for software such as Elastic, Mongo and RedisLabs.
There are a lot of big companies that benefit from those, and might want to invest it, despite not being their direct revenue driver.
See for example the Cassandra database released by Facebook. Or how Amazon is going to invest in their Elastic fork now. Or how Linux is funded by dozens of companies (IBM, RedHat, Oracle...)
Or pretty much any programming language: I haven't seen a programming language that's not truly Open Source (as in the compiler/interpreter + API) for decades.
The kind of software where it's not going to work is where it's solving a business need for companies that are not software companies: but Open Source isn't common in those fields anyway.
You’d have to add a replicator button to the car so you make a copy and don’t actually take the original.
What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give it away freely, sell it.
Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with Elastic submitted patches to their codebase.
Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary.
Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them more money, it will just hurt their brand image and incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an open source vendor gives away their software for free, intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. It's completely backwards logic.
To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you yell at someone using your free software for commercial purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't owe you any money.
You people seem to think open source just means "source available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that.
[/unhinged rant]
Hmmm.... is that what happened or did AWS usurp Elastic's main stream of revenue providing an enterprise cloud platform, and in response they changed their licensing in an attempt to protect the viability of their company while minimizing the impact on contributors to the framework.. As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself.
You may disagree with this strategy, but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Because I think there is an issue of how people can sustain a business centered around open source.
I have been there during the first .com wave, so I know how hard it was, including what happens when the money stops flooding in.
If you can’t sustain a business around open sources, then don’t be open source.
Elastic chose to close their source but are now lying about it to make it look better than it is. AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.
Would you prefer more software to be released openly or less? Cause if you're making moves like Amazon did with their ES service, you're pushing the world towards "less."
I'm not too concerned with this, but it's strange to me that people are both trying to keep OSS licenses "pure" and advocating that companies release less of their code in the first place...
OSS was never about source availability - that’s just a form of cheap escrow and has fairly limited value. Open source is about user freedom to do whatever they want with the software - guaranteed freedoms.
This isn’t about “purity”, it’s about using a label on the tin that says “FREEDOM INSIDE” and then peeling the label off and telling a subset of users to pay up or give away any software code you’ve ever used to touch my software. We used to call that a “bait and switch” to be polite , though really it’s more like a shakedown.
Yup. This mentality drives me absolutely insane. People seem to regurgitate whatever propaganda fake-open-source-company-X tells them.
Sorry, I'm not going to feel bad that the $15B company that built their business off the backs of open source - which is totally fine - is upset that another company is competing with them. And the biggest irony is, Amazon's not eating Elastic's lunch, they're both eating respectable lunches. Elastic's built a great business, which they are now doing their best to ruin as quickly as possible.
You very profoundly and deeply misunderstand what the SSPL actually says, which is understandable because Elastic have helped promulgate this misinformation. Please go read the license. It is not straightforward, it's very vague and exposes an organization to enormous uncertainty. If you don't want to read the license itself, then start with https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearc...
Additionally, organizations that commit to running free software, are forced to drop Elasticsearch now (or more accurately, they're all going to just run the best fork of 7.1.0 and call it a day). So Elastic's statement that it doesn't impact users is just a complete lie.
Finally, this whole discussion is irrelevant because the license change won't actually protect Elastic's business. Amazon is going to behave no differently, except that now they have a better codebase to work with because they don't need to worry about Elastic rejecting pull requests that cannibalize their proprietary features.
> You may disagree with this strategy, but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Because I think there is an issue of how people can sustain a business centered around open source.
Absolutely not, I refuse to explain that for you, because you're reversing the responsibility here. If you want to build a company around giving away software for free, you better have a way to monetize the giving away of the software for free. There's plenty of strategies to do this, such as the famous "Commoditize your complement", OR you can be a redhat and sell enterprise support, OR you can be elastic and sell cloud services.
And guess what? Elastic HAS built a more than financially viable business with Apache 2.0 licenses. They pull in $500M revenue per year, with 40%+ y/y growth. They're valued at $15B right this moment. And you seriously believe that this organization is on the verge of bankruptcy?
Do the math, you're being tricked by a dishonest company. A company that so many of us had respect for until they started down this path a couple years ago.
And for the love of god, I implore everyone in this thread, please give up the whole "won't somebody think of the poor company?" argument. Open source is not a business model in and of itself. It never has been. If anything, the rise of these companies that build their brand image around being open source and then re-license to proprietary as soon as it's convenient is the literal problem. They're polluting the whole spirit of open source, which was always "I'm giving this away freely, and I don't ask for anything in return except you can't infringe my trademark" (for apache 2.0). You guys have the open source mentality totally backwards.
And don't get me wrong, I'm an AnCap. I'm as capitalist as it gets. So I'm not criticizing the mentality out of some misguided hatred of private ownership; rather, all I'm saying is if you talk the talk you better be prepared to walk the walk. All these entitled companies that make their software successful BECAUSE it's open source and the community feels safe building stacks upon it, and then clutch their pearls when someone else makes money from that software, are totally absurd and should be laughed at.
Sorry for the rant, I drank too much coffee today. But for the love of god, can't you see how, ethics of lying to the community aside, this licensing change doesn't even help protect Elastic's business interests, but rather just strengthens their competitors?
Ironically, it is exactly Amazon that seems to be demonstrating a way to develop an open source ElasticSearch fork and be financially viable, right?
If it's super non-competitive high, it is even more curious they seem to see it as such a threat. I'm becoming increasingly unsure if they actually see it as a threat, or if it's just like "nobody should be able to make money from our open source without giving us a cut".
Or is it just that all managed ES seems too expensive to you?
If I become dependent on it, one company can't control the pricing of people offering hosted services, because it's open source, nobody needs their permission to host it. "vendor lock-in" does not exist with open source.
If that was incompatible with ES's business model for a main stream of revenue, as the project IP holder they are welcome to change their license terms.
But what they're saying is that open source was incompatible with their business model.
It is what it is, but users clamoring for the ethical superiority of vendor lock-in and thinking that's somehow open source values is... weird to me.
I was just a free ES user, and feel fine with all of this. I don't see a bait and switch, I see a fundamentally changed market compared to 10 years ago where a business model that was perfectly reasonable is now very precarious in the face of the major cloud vendors, and a desperation move to protect their business, not some grand cynical plan.
If I needed to submit a patch I'm not gonna care about the project being "truly" open source vs just source-available.
But the more these "allowed" but kinda-dirty-feeling things happen, the less likely I am to choose a "true" open source license for any projects I may start...
Really? Everyone's cares are different, but I don't like contributing my time and programming output for free to proprietary software, for it's owner to make money off my work.
I don't mind contributing to open source, where anyone can make money off of it with no special privileges to some. It feels like contributing to a commons.
But contributing to proprietary software without getting compensated feels like getting taken advantage of to me.
When I speak of betrayal I'm more speaking in the general sense that under my value structure, it is immoral to lie to someone or to break promises, which is what Elastic did. They told people they would never make the Apache 2.0 code proprietary, and then they did it anyway. For a shitty reason at that.
I also think the world (particularly technology and laws) is a complicated place with a lot of history. The old timers tend to appreciate this a bit more. There’s a book out there about the “Death of Expertise”. People think they can learn a complex domain from some questionable YouTube videos and maybe blog posts or a book. They decry the experts. In fairness there are also a lot of charlatan experts out there.
Combine the two problems, and it is an opening for “outrage bandwagons” to form that claim to simplify the matter without actually understanding it. And companies try to exploit this comprehension gap to fulfill their agenda.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:
Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).
It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, and it's not really clear to me who would (for business reasons, not philosophy) switch to solr/other just because of the license switch.
It also makes perfect sense that AWS would release an apache-licensed fork - they have serious monopoly power - they con offer this service cheaper inside AWS, and the integrations can be smoother/better.
So really why be mad at either party? They both made good business choices it seems to me, maybe elastic will end up loosing out, but if that happens, I can't imagine that staying on the apache license would have saved their bacon.
It actually makes incredibly bad business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, because they won't get any more revenue as a result and have now forced a high-quality Apache 2.0 fork.
> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:
Well, they explicitly promised that they would stay Apache 2.0 licensed, which was a lie. And they're no longer open source software. So yeah that's a big deal in my book.
> Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).
I wasn't referring to Amazon, I was referring to the community overall. And don't get me wrong, the community will be fine because we'll have high-quality forks. I'm just pointing out the scumminess of what Elastic did for the company that claims to be the little guy getting exploited.
But they absolutely did pull the rug. Or as a better analogy, they shut the door behind themselves.
Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL?
But also
LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL)
OpenBGPD
OpenOSPFD
OpenNTPD
OpenSMTPD
OpenSSH