Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing open-source about this license: "You cannot: Provide the products to others as a managed service; Circumvent the license key functionality or remove/obscure features protected by license keys".

View on HN

Could you say more? Is your issue with the license's content or branding?

I work at Airbyte and am genuinely curious about your view.

I have two issues in particular. The first issue is that you call this license open source, but each of those first two "You Cannot" points violate the Open Source Definition. The second issue is that it feels like a bait and switch: a lot of Airbyte users may have never started using it if it weren't open source, but now they're stuck having to either fork it or migrate away from it.

FWIW this has 0 impact on 99.9999% of our current or future users. The only practical limitation is that they cannot repackage Airbyte as a hosted service, which was only ever a threat from perhaps less than 10 players in total. Users can still build products on top of Airbyte, fork it (for their own use or even to build a product on top of it).

Extensive user surveys prior to this change didn't uncover a single user whose workflow would be impacted.

Just some context :)

Why didn't you switch to AGPL instead, like Grafana did?

Ultimately our goal is not to enforce that any derivations of Airbyte become public, so AGPL was much heavier than needed. By contrast, the Elastic License toes the line perfectly as it only places the restrictions mentioned above.

Why don't you dual license under the AGPL and Elastic License? Then it will still be totally FOSS, but people who don't like the AGPL can just use the Elastic License instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com