This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.
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?
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.
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'.