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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

"Amazon Announces Grafana Fork , Promises Amazing Things for the Community" (2021/05/08) [1]

On a more serious note: there is a bit of a trend in the licensing world. Mongo or ElasticSearch changes, or cool new projects like redpanda [2] launching with BSL.

Open source is still a very young business model. One that has provided a tremendous amount of value over the past decades, but we still need to figure out how to build sustainable businesses with it. Be it open core, more restrictive licenses, copyleft, dual licensing, ...

I just really hope that we don't slide back into the world of proprietary closed source. The danger is certainly there, and it will hit smaller companies the most.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/grafana/

[2] https://github.com/vectorizedio/redpanda

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Amazon forking ElasticSearch to keep its old license is a good thing, since ElasticSearch's new license is a proprietary visible-source license. Grafana's new license is still FOSS, so it's really not a fair comparison.

While it is true that Grafana's new license is still FOSS not every company, public cloud provider is willing to accept the AGPLv3 license[1]. Hence a fork with the old license is not unlikely.

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

True, but my point wasn't so much about the likelihood of a fork as whether or not it would be a good thing.

Google has the same OSS philosophy as Microsoft and the rest of the software community needs to pressure Google to change its stance on the AGPL.

That document is based on lies. AGPLv3 does not force you to make code running on a different server open-source.

Elastic made a massive blunder by open-sourcing Kibana. SumoLogic just took it and builtnon that. You open-source the underlying technology - not the product built on top of it.

Kibana was open source before they formed the company.

To be fair, Free Software was never a business model. It was a licensing model that forced to cooperate even such users who have incentives to grab the code, amend it, and disseminate the closed-source altered version. Free Software is about freedom to know exactly what you are running, and to share it. This us the value it tries to capture.

Various business models can be built around it. A license that restricts closed-source cloud use, like AGPL, still preserves the openness at least. It can be combined with a dual commercial license.

Mongo and ElasticSearch are completely different though. Related to those licenses: Has there been any clarification of what exactly you need to release for free if you use them to offer a SaaS?

> 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, under the terms of this License.

> “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.

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

I can think of a hundred questions based on that text. If I use S3 to store data for my Mongo SaaS, do I need to call Bezos and buy the complete source code of S3?

> If I use S3 to store data for my Mongo SaaS, do I need to call Bezos and buy the complete source code of S3?

Yes.

I have for a while now thought that the ethical source licenses are at least trying to do exactly what open source licenses are trying to do, just within a human rights framework.

The SSPL and other source available licenses on the other hand basically just take away the ability to make a meaningful fork, making the project proprietary. Sure it makes business sense, but someone might still feel the need to make an FOSS alternative.

That doesn't make sense as far as I can tell. You would need to release the source code of the managed service you built around MongoDB.

In SSPL you need to release sources for all software you use to build your service.

"AWS is a strategic partner, and given the commercial relationship AWS has with us for AMG, AWS and their AMG customers are not impacted by this change. We hope that other XaaS providers follow AWS’s lead in working with open source software companies in similarly sustainable ways." https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic...

Amazon is the biggest leecher in the industry. They haven't open-sourced any meaningful project back to the community and they even prevent its employees to work in any of them[1] on their free-time.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3axbeh/i...

I think firecracker is pretty meaningful.

Firecracker is a fork of Googles crossvm, not an original Amazon project.

I bet it wouldn't be open source otherwise.

Also, it's a more convenient and secure shell around kvm. It's valuable, but bit that meaningful.

Just to be clear, had Elastic chosen to relicense Elasticsearch under AGPL, there would likely be no issue with Amazon's usage of it and I doubt Amazon would have forked it in that case.

The problem for Amazon was strictly due to SSPL, not copyleft licenses in general.

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