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Comment by Roybot | Hacker News Reader

Contributor efforts are remaining open source. The change in license goes into effect in the 7.11 release. Code contributed under Apache stays that way.

Typically open source projects have only a handful of core developers - with a large majority being pass-by contributors interested in fixing their problems/use case. Characterizing it to sound like all these developers are being slighted is strange.

Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic.

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> Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic.

Simply put, this is a naive and entitled attitude. And here's my proof of that: Elastic is a success story. They gave away software for free and turned it into a $15B business. And yet there's still people like you being apologists for their outright lies and intentionally misleading statements. I find it so incredibly absurd.

Elastic is tricking you into thinking that they are not an absurdly successful business. That's not true.

Oh, and one last time: This license change doesn't even protect their business, so it's totally pointless. It's just a business blunder. The SSPL will not make a difference to Amazon because they're not going to use the SSPL version of the code. It's so simple.

On the contrary, this is win-win for everyone: Amazon now has to make their fork competitive with Elastic's, so they'll have to invest more resources in open source development. Elastic is also still free to grab their Apache-licensed improvements.

Meanwhile, if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

> if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

Except Amazon has a moat: no egress fees and network effects. AWS is starting the race way ahead.

Elastic doesn't need to make more money than Amazon. They just need to be able to make enough to have a healthy business, and so far they've achieved that. $500MM yearly revenue with 40+% growth is nothing to scoff at.

It really seems like Elastic's motivation here is jealousy more than anything else. Which I understand from an emotional perspective, but from a logical perspective it's a big business blunder they've made IMO.

I totally agree, I think this is great for the community because the writing was on the wall ever since the initial X-pack source-available drama as well as the original OpenDistro drama.

I think this will be better for all involved.

> Code contributed under Apache stays that way.

IANAL but I think code doesn’t really belong to contributors if they agreed to sign their rights over with a CLA, no? Which is why I always feel iffy about CLA’s. I get why they’re needed but I don’t like what they enable.

But the code licensed as Apache 2.0 stays that way. The open code doesn't magically become closed source.

So AFAIK it’s not exactly so. One can actually change project license granted they have agreement of every single contributor to do so. Which they do since they had the CLA system from the start.

So theoretically they can even unpublish all the code if they want. It’s just probably not worth the reputation as damage.

IANAL though so I’d be very interested to hear a patent lawyer take on this.

IANAL either but I believe that if you release code under license A you can relicense it to license B, but anyone that obtained the code under license A will be able to keep on using it under that license.

A license is like a contract, and you can’t change a contract out of the blue without the permission of both sides. Otherwise licenses would be useless, as at any point someone could go “aha, I changed my license to the give-me-all-your-money license and you’re using my code, so pay up!”.

Since the license A in this case is an open source license, anyone that has a copy of the software with license A (such as amazon) will be able to share it again under license A. So effectively the old code base will always remain under license A, and only new changes will be fully protected by license B.

IANAL, but AFAIK while Amazon could ‘unpublish’ the code by removing it from their Github or something like that, there is no way to ‘unlicense’ it.

On a project without a CLA, you’ll have to ask permission to every contributor for a use that goes beyond the initially agreed to license. On a project with a CLA, the organisation to which the code has been licensed no longer needs to do that. The situation becomes similar to a project that only has one author and no outside contributors. So they can release a commercial version in parallel, or they can decide to change the license for new versions. But none of this magically changes the licence for old code: code once released stays under the license it was released under. Otherwise the whole system of Free and Open Source licences would be extremely brittle, if authors could just revoke their licences as they saw fit.

If one wants to contribute to something under an Apache license but exclude certain part, one is expected to explicitly point the exclusion out as in “this part is not delivered under Apache 2 license”.

You might want to read the Apache2 license text. It's not that complicated, at least not the in your case relevant section(s)

How exactly is what Elastic is doing helping the problem?

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