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Comment by glutamate | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what "open" means here, because it does not mean open source.

It means that our source code is open and transparent to all of our users. You can use it for free, modify it, or even re-distribute it - the main restriction is that you are not offering it as a managed service to third parties.

If you have a particular use-case in mind that you need but feel is limited, please let us know. Happy to talk through it and see how we can help.

I'm not really a prospective big user of this category; but i think your project looks super cool and you obviously know your stuff engineering-wise.

I think the use of no-hosting clause is super ambiguous here because the nature of the project itself is hosting and providing managed services of VMs, postgres etc for users - so anyone using ubicloud is in some sense providing a managed or hosted service.

How about licensing under GPL or AGPL with a commercial license option? Corporations are so GPL-phobic that they would probably pay you for a commercial license.

Ah, I see. The key part above is "to third parties". If you're using ubicloud to provide a managed/hosted service for yourself, or your company, that's wonderful. You could even be a massive organization and do that. It's just that you are not providing the managed service to other parties such as your customers - essentially, that you're not a hosting provider re-selling the software.

The ambiguity is in who is a third party. If I am a small digital agency and I have a hetzner server with ubicloud and I use it to host my clients websites, e.g 10 small businesses pay me $200/m each to host their wordpress websites, are they third parties? Can I do this?

This, with virtual certainty, permitted. I am a founder of Ubicloud, so, I suppose you can take that to the bank.

For guidelines, see:

https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq

Text:

I'm using Elasticsearch to put a search box on my cat-picture SaaS product.

This is permitted under ELv2. Meow!

I'm a contractor setting up Elasticsearch and Kibana for my clients to use internally.

This is permitted under ELv2, because you are not providing the software as a managed service.

My cat-picture SaaS product shows view-only Kibana dashboards of analytics on searches and views.

This is permitted under ELv2. The use of Kibana in this case is limited and this does not represent access to a substantial portion of the functionality of Kibana.

I am a Managed Service Provider (MSP) running Elasticsearch and Kibana for my customers.

If your customers do not access Elasticsearch and Kibana, this is permitted under ELv2. If your customers do have access to substantial portions of the functionality of either Elasticsearch and Kibana as part of your service, this may not be permitted.

I provide Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service, where my customers have direct access to substantial portions of the Elasticsearch APIs and Kibana UI.

This use is not permitted under the ELv2. Please reach out to us to discuss your options.

If you have questions about your specific scenario, please reach out to us at elastic_license@elastic.co.

Because, although they speak against AWS outrageous margins, they want a monopoly to secure high margins as well.

If they open sourced, they'd need to compete against copy cats.

This is understandable. They need to protect themselves and maybe become profitable.

I would just prefer they didn't pretend to be so much different from AWS, Azure or GCP. This isn't open. The source is publicized, but not open. They discriminate, which goes against the essence of the open source principle.

Also changing anything related to keys

If you don't intend to open source, why not use a term that doesn't mislead prospective users into thinking it's open source?

I'm not saying your intention is to mislead, but it's at least confusing and will almost surely mislead some.

Why not use "visible code", or "transparent code", whatever...

You are thinking of free (as in freedom) AND open-source (FOSS). Most people define open-source as just the source being open/public.

No, most people define "open source" as it is defined by the Open Source Institute.

That is probably why this project was careful to define itself as "Open" and did not use the term "open source". It is licensed under Elastic v2 which is generally known as a "source available" license

I don't see any problem with this as long as it is not advertised as open source, which it is not. Of course they are entirely within their rights to license their code as they see fit. I like to use open source software but I absolutely prefer source-available software over closed source solutions like their competitors (AWS, Azure, and GCP)

This is a good reminder to check the license before you adopt something. Just because the code is on Github, doesn't mean you can do anything with it.

You're certainly entitled to define it that way or anyway you want. Just be wary a lot don't share your definition, so using a more explicit and accurate term like FOSS is probablyyy better.

The settled-upon term is "source available".

The source is available (https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud) and the license says it's free to use so long as you don't use it to run a hosted service. It looks fairly 'open'?

Are u saying the code linked isn’t from the thing itself?

I'm saying that code linked is not open source licensed

It.. is?

How does it not? https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud

Open source does not mean "I can read the source code". Open source means release under an open source license and this is not the case here.

But as you said yourself the claim isn't 'open source', it's 'open', so...what do you want really?

I understand this complaint (I get both sides really) when it's a non OSI licence being called 'open source', but you can't just start extending that to the single words 'open' and 'source' too. 'I don't know what "source available" means, because it certainly doesn't mean available under open source licence', etc.

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