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Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

One thing which surprised me: Elastic has a market capitalization of ~$11B.

I think that changes some of the more floaty ethical concerns. This is not a David vs Goliath situation. This is Goliath vs Super-Goliath.

At this point, I'm much less interested in the drama of which mega-corp is screwing over the other. I'm more interested in: how does it affect me? When the titans are done trampling over the rest of us, which side benefits me the most?

Its too early to tell, but it seems like it'll be Amazon. The product is more open. They have a demonstrated history of great support. Yeah, they gouge us on networking and everything else, but at least they're the devil we know, and buying into the OpenSearch ecosystem has a greater probability of being the more open solution into the next decade.

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Uhmmm I’m pretty sure David vs Goliath is talking about scale between competition. Saying that $11B is Goliath just because you’re sitting at $1M doesn’t mean they’re not in a crazy mismatched fight against a $2T company. In the same way you could be in a David vs Goliath situation yourself if you with $1M in wealth tried to sue someone with $25K of wealth. Everything is relative. Doesn’t mean it’s not a crazy unfair mismatch that doesn’t deserve sympathy and regret.

When there are two large entities (and I take this to mean way larger than you or your company) then you’re better off rooting for the one that at least releases code you can use.

If OpenSearch is truely open then in theory you can find another provider. But for ElasticSearch you’re stuck with them.

> But for ElasticSearch you’re stuck with them.

I am a bit at a loss about that statement, you can run Elasticsearch on your on infrastructure

That is not entirely true, of course. Not if you don’t want to pay. As proof - just look at Amazon, they can’t (that’s why they forked it).

I don't think it's the freedom to run it anywhere. It's the freedom to run it anywhere and make changes to it that you don't contribute back:

1. Amazon wants to make private changes to the management layer for their cloud offering and not share those.

2. ES doesn't want that, so the 7.11+ license restricts it.

3. Amazon doesn't want to have to explain to their customers why their ES offering is stuck on v7.10, so they're changing the name of it.

4. Elastic was really hoping this wouldn't happen, but they overestimated the value of their brand and Amazon called their bluff.

So yeah, nominally OpenSearch is unrestricted, but realistically few other entities are in a position to make or benefit from the private modifications Amazon will be making. For us normal people, ES and OS are equivalent today, so it's more about how they're going to diverge over time in terms of fixes, features, whatever.

The SSPL directly prohibits offering the software as a service without releasing the source code of your entire operation regardless of if you change it or not:

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge...

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

AKA someone must be able to create aws.example.com if aws uses SSPL code. Not exactly the 'freedom to run it anywhere'.

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

Doesn't a lot of that hinge on what the "service" is? Like, if I run some generic knowledgebase website and use my own ES installation to provide user-facing search, does Elastic want to see my Ansible scripts? Or just the ones related to the search function?

If this interpretation holds, I feel like it could be a pretty big problem for companies like GitLab, who not only have deep integration with ElasticSearch, but offer it as a premium-tier feature:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/elasticsearch.html

Maybe this really is just a cash grab from the Elastic side, like, "it's too easy to self-host rather than paying for our SaaS offering, so now you need to pay us for many common self-hosting use cases also."

There's several lawyers who believe the wording would imply the problematic interpretation - /dev/lawyer is one on the internet, one from my anecdotes is the lawyer who advised the company I used to work at.

SSPL doesn't come up under free or open source licenses partly for this reason, actually.

> Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version.

This probably qualifies it as a service, but since it looks like gitlab doesn't install it or redistribute it Elastic isn't going to come after them (if they don't use SSPL code then SSPL doesn't apply). Plus, GitLab is effectively open-source, so they might meet the qualification for using SSPL anyways. Of course, I am not your/a lawyer.

> I run some generic knowledgebase website and use my own ES installation to provide user-facing search, does Elastic want to see my Ansible scripts?

According to Elastic, "it depends" - if you can just search by entering a term in the searchbox, you're probably fine; If you allow users to use Elastic's query language, you're very likely in violation. If you let your customers define Kibana dashboards, you're definitely in violation.

It's worth noting that you can do a custom deal with Elastic, as long as you pay whatever they ask & accept their terms (or renegotiate them, which is a fairly painful process) - so maybe GitLab did just that.

Great point. SSPL is basically the open source equivalent of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” In order to protect their IP from being “taken away” because of their original licensing decision, they basically chose a new license that’s effectively no longer open source (although it is “source available”).

Err, SSPL which Elasticsearch is licensed under isn't AGPL - it's a viral, proprietary license - not quite the copyleft we'd want if we wanted a fair playing field between all actors working on it.

It's a viral open source license, it literally requires open sourcing code, there's nothing proprietary about it except that we allow a council of elitist snots to decide what is and isn't Open Source(TM), and they have decided Google and Amazon support is more important than viable businesses which are building open source businesses.

The SSPL literally violates Freedom 0.

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

And though we're talking about open source instead of free software, without Freedom 0, the software still might as well be proprietary.

Edit: It also violates Rules 1, 5, 6 & 9 of the OSD. So no, let's not call it "open source"

Could you provide a link to explain how it violates "Rules 1, 5, 6 & 9 of the OSD"? Thanks

Common freaking sense reading.

https://opensource.org/osd

If you can't use the software because you're a cloud provider, that's rules 1, 5 and 6 easy.

If using it forces you to relicense all of your code under the SSPL that's rule 9.

It is well known at this point that the SSPL withdrew their request for recognition to the OSI because they do not meet the rules of the OSD.

by definition sspl only qualifies as a source available license but it restricts stuff in so many ways that it is basically propriatary, even for normal uses. btw. even open source licenses are not free or libre, they also restrict usages, just not as hard as most source available licenses. source code is not open if I'm restricted to use it in most cases without making everything open, it's available of course, but that limits my use case by a huge margin. even open source (osi) licenses do that, but in a way more fair manner, which does not discriminiate usages. heck I'm not even a fan of gpl 3 (especially agpl) , because I think they also discrimnate usages and are also poorly written (too much stuff that is hard to understand without a lawyer)

> If you can't use the software because you're a cloud provider, that's rules 1, 5 and 6 easy.

I may be mistaken but I thought cloud-providers can use it and offer it for others to use as well, they just can't charge for that. But I may be wrong.

This is incorrect, you are free to use the program if you wish, it just also, like the GPL, conveys requirements on open sourcing code you use with it. Open sourcing services without the necessary tools to run it isn't much good, so SSPL ensures the freedom to run your own better than GPL based licenses.

no. get it right. if you are not free to run the program without additional stipulations, especially stipulations that dictate how you license _your_ code, then you are not free to use the program as you wish.

Literally, "as you wish". Stipulations is "as we wish".

And you can read it from the OSI themselves: "The SSPL is Not an Open Source License" https://opensource.org/node/1099

The SSPL conveys no new stipulations not permitted by GPL-based licenses, it is just more inclusive in doing so.

If SSPL isn't open source, neither is the GPL.

GPL carries no restrictions if you don't distribute the software.

The AGPL on the other hand, was a huge mistake, IMO.

The AGPL was the first step in addressing a critical need to protect the users' right to run the software they use, the SSPL just continues that, as many services wouldn't be runnable without the support code around them.

I hear what you're saying, but those whose mission is to encourage open source software don't call the SSPL anything but a source-available, proprietary software license. Like literally the organization that defined what "open source software" is.

While you may disagree, you aren't going to convince me to take your word over theirs, especially when I have come to the same conclusions they did on my own.

On a moral principle, AGPL levels the playing field fairly much like the GPL license, just the terms of distribution are updated for an age of software as a service. No one is exempted to the rules in AGPL like SSPL - it is intentionally viral, even if you'd dislike using it in many of your projects (though I think it's fair to say lawyers don't like the ambiguity of the language).

Just like some projects are best under LGPL instead of GPL, AGPL has its place in the toolkit of free software licensing.

The principle of in the GNU manifesto would be that the software is available for anyone to use in the same way, such that Elastic isn't elevated to not disclose their closed source additions to the software.

At this point, they are directly violating that core principle as well as the uncontroversial OSI directive 6 which copyleftists like myself don't really have a problem with... So I'm not sure what the issue here would be other than you dislike the larger companies' involvement in OSS? I think myself and others would appreciate clarification.

Could Elastic's business model work if lucene were licensed SSPL?

I think it probably could not. And if lucene were licensed GPL, it would not be possible for ElasticSearch to use this new SSPL license, it would be have to be GPL too.

If you think this is about Elastic caring about openness and freedom, ask yourself why they don't drop the CLA for a DCO and let themselves be beholden to the same terms

Counterpoint: FSF and Mozilla require CLA too

Except that FSF and Mozilla are not usual for-profit companies with primary mission of making as much money as possible. Elastic on other side is and it's funded by VC money that want return on their investment.

Quoting the comment you're replying to:

> If OpenSearch is truely open then in theory you can find another provider

Those are the key words. With an open source solution someone else can offer a turn-key solution that benefits from economies of scale.

Uh...can they? Who's going to benefit from more "economies of scale" than Amazon, Alibaba?

Can Azure offer an OpenSearch service? Probably.

So the idea is you can move from AWS to Azure if you wanted to with open source services underneath.

Put another way, the $11B Goliath is .55% of Super Goliaths size.

It may be relative but it isn't proportionate. A 11B market cap company can field a similarly competent legal department as a 2T market cap company can. I, with 25k, absolutely could not afford the same lawyer someone with 1M.

Have you considered that guy with $1M won't be willing to drop like $50k (2x your net worth) on a lawyer just to squash you?

He must have possibility to earn $100k in process to do that. Well unless you really pissed him off.

If you earn $25k a year and he spends $50k in one year to take your cake. Well unless he really is your competitor that can make use of your defeat he still needs 2 years to get even. Then it probably is not easy money because there is always a risk he will not win. Maybe he can find better ways to earn more money than squashing some $25k guys.

Quite. I run a company with roughly £1.25M turnover per annum, so seem to fit the $1M guy example.

There is no way on earth that I would look at my "value" and compare it with a £50K "value" to decide on my legal "battle-worthiness." It is quite likely that we both have similar (to the same power of 10) insurance for whatever it is we are duking it out over. Anyway this is all a bit circumspect.

Against a company with billions to play with? I'll just keep my head down and crack on and hope not to be noticed 8)

It seems like the theme here is asymmetry in legal firepower & resources between entities.

I do personally feel like that the asymmetry is smaller between elastic and AWS than the say an indie dev and a company with $1M revenue for various reasons.

This doesn't mean that there still isn't a meaningful asymmetry between elastic and AWS.

I don't root for David because he's smaller. I root for him because he's small.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!

To be realistic and fair I don't believe part of Amazon that is doing fork of Elasticsearch is $2T, they have other stuff to do.

Just like the guy that is $1M worth is not going to blow all of his money just to squash some guy. He probably has more powerful friends and maybe some connections but I don't see dumping $0.5m on lawyers just because he can take piece of cake from the other guy that will make him $10k a year.

Imagine head of the department storming into Jeff Bezos office telling that he needs 20% of all Amazon worth to squash Elastic, that would be funny. Quick calc with 20% I assume would be $20B which would be only x2 of Elastic, so I don't see something like that happening.

just a math correction: 20% of $2T is $400b - or about 40x of Elastic

This argument is part of Amazon's PR campaign to tell devs to not feel sorry for Elastic because it's now a big company and they make money in the market. So, if you built a successful OSS and start to make money then it's ethical to clone any OSS and pushes projects out of the market because now it is "Goliath vs Super-Goliath".

Quite a few companies have proprietary products but have learned to make money selling services. One of them even has a 200B market cap and is called Oracle.

Nobody needs to feel sorry for anyone.

Right. But the question here is not about companies value in the market. Why changing the subject? This should be about the ethics behind Amazon's aggressive actions against OSS and its effect on the OSS industry.

The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread. Anyways, like I said, Elastic could've made money with a proprietary product but they chose OSS instead (and used Apache Lucene to build on).

AWS is just offering customers what they want and there are many other companies doing the same thing (IBM's Compose, Aiven, Instaclustr, etc). How is this against OSS? This is the OSS industry operating as intended.

> The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread.

As I said, it's a tactic to change the subject. Instead of focusing on actions with bad faith, change the subject by saying they have a lot of money so Amazon is allowed to be competitive and fork the code.

> AWS is just offering customers what they want.

No. it's not AWS improving some services. It's about a multi-billion dollar company launching a campaign against OSS. They did it with MongoDB and it continues. Some see these actions as justifiable. Because OSS should be MIT and maintainers should live with donations. Others, however, disagree. It can be OSS and profitable (without Amazon actions).

Forking OSS isn't bad faith. If you want to make people pay you, make your software proprietary. In that case, however, you wouldn't get the free ride into the market that being OSS gives you.

Yes. This is how you discourage people from doing OSS. "You can't stop me" argument leads to a slippery slope and if you care about the open-source you see it differently. Not because you can, but because of the consequences of your doing.

Why would open-source advocates want to stop people from doing the very thing that open-source exists to enable?

I get that this is inconvenient for Elastic, but it’s good for users.

By people you mean, the big tech who literally did zero effort to support OSS and do everything in their power to fully control the market even if this means pushing the open-source business model out of the market? Or abusing the OSS legal license?

I don’t see this as abuse, but rather an easily contemplated and straightforward use of the license.

What's straightforward about forking an open source project to get more money?

The license is not complex, but maybe the Wikipedia summary explanation of the license will help explain how it’s straightforward?

> The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation(ASF).[6] It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License

Well, I thought you are following the discussion here.

> "Amazon is allowed to be competitive"

Of course it is. Why wouldn't this be allowed?

> "fork the code"

That's the entire premise of OSS. Would it make a difference if they did it years ago? If not then what's the problem?

Again, the value AWS adds is in operational services because that's what customers want. Are you taking issue with all the other companies offering managed elasticsearch too?

Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?

They would have to triple-quintuple-backflip-down on "open." So, maybe? It depends on how much value is being created besides the code, in squishier parts of the business like service, support, pricing models, marketing, and so on.

But it's moot, since Apache Lucene is part of the Apache Software Foundation and has much stronger promises about its licensing and governance. Which is not a small reason why Lucene is the de facto standard for search technology.

Yeah. It just seems to say something if the license they are insisting is the "spirit of open source" that everyone downstream of them should be okay with... they are counting on not having to deal with upstream...

Elastic contributed to Lucene. (They have committers as PMCs.)

If Lucene had adopted SSPL they would have been forced to fork. But basically nothing really interesting happens at the Lucene level for ES anymore. (Sure, there's always a lot to speed up, optimize, etc. But anyone who buys ES needs the fancy stuff, security/audit/management, not a few percent more RAM efficiency.)

Sorry, but this is not true at all.

Some of the biggest changes within ES come from Lucene, like _massive_ reduction in memory footprint, enabling ES to use cases not even possible before.

This can't happen because Lucene is controlled by the ASF, not a commercial entity.

Allowing one of various foundations to take control of an open source project, can be beneficial for the community as its licensing is unlikely to change in the future. However it does present challenges for any future commercialization.

A good example of this is Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Kafka. LinkedIn, where Kafka was originally developed, transferred control of Kafka to the ASF. As the original developers, the Confluent team still has a lot of influence and contributes a lot of code to Kafka, but they do not wield absolute control. While this has presented some challenges to build a Kafka-centric business, and even led to them creating their own Kafka fork ("Confluent Server") they have still been successful. The community also has long-term confidence in the Kafka's license.

Your comment is interpreting as ES was naive by choosing open-source which allows AWS to fork the code. I read this argument all the time about OSS. Where does this conversation lead? I'll tell you: to end any meaningful attempt to create open-source code with a business model aka the end of OSS.

No, I never said any that and it makes no sense.

OSS doesn't have anything to do with business models. Anyone can create open-source software and many do. The whole point is that it's free to create, see and modify. Some companies choose business models which include open-source software, and that comes with advantages (increased popularity and growth) and disadvantages (free usage, forks of codebase).

The reality though is that tech has changed and customers don't want to buy software, they want services now. ES has been slow to offer this, and they still offer it poorly, which is why AWS and other companies have filled in the gap. This is how business competition works.

Please answer these questions: Do you have a problem with the other companies (which are smaller than Elastic) that offer managed elasticsearch? Do you have a problem with multiple companies offering hosted Wordpress? Do you have a problem with any company that sells software or services that use open-source components?

I hear you. This is a valid argument. But I see it both ways. I will offer an open-source and get something else in return. My problem is, Amazon is a taker and it's getting greedy and not giving back. So do you think it is legal? Yes, it is. Is it ethical? No. You are rooting for the big guy, many people do. I simply care about the collective good of the industry and I am for the open-source. Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.

I find it perfectly ethical to offer a service to customers based on open-source software. Again, nothing prevented ES from doing this for years, or sticking to only making proprietary addons. And again, there are several other companies offering the same services and many startups have built massive businesses on various open-source components.

Forks are a celebrated part of OSS and we only have more choice as customers now. The industry is better than ever. You keep ignoring these facts so at this point it's clear that you just have a personal bias against Amazon rather than a cohesive argument regarding OSS.

If Elastic's own SaaS isn't good enough to generate revenue that its keeps investors happy, and ii didn't survive, that'd be a shame. Making anti-OSS moves to salvage things though is a disgrace.

I mean, Elastic was successful because of license arbitrage; to complain about said arbitrage when Amazon does it is ... well, it's hard to feel a lot of sympathy.

Exactly this. Elastic search took open source code and turned it into a service to profit from it while making improvements to the code. Amazon is doing the same thing, except they’re keeping their contributions truly open source.

Quick point,.., as yours is valid... these days $11Bn market cap doe not represent cash in bank for development and R&D. It just reflects what the market think its worth. R&D , of which there has been a lot, and it continues, is hugely expensive.

After a decade and a third of QE, 11 bil is not really serious money. These days the unit of power on the capital markets is a trillion.

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