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SSPL is mainly bad for the companies that use the license. They cut themselves off from their own open source communities. Those typically reorganize around a fork, which then starts competing with the SSPL version for new users. Most of those users end up paying somebody else for hosting, support, etc. As a long term business strategy that seems misguided.

I think in a few years we'll look back and we'll see a bunch of mostly failing former OSS companies being milked by hedge funds or companies like Oracle, Salesforce, etc. for profit and a lot of thriving open source communities around the only thing that made those companies successful: forks of their software; pre-license change.

I'm well familiar with Opensearch now being the preferred choice over Elasticsearch as I am active doing consulting around both and the overwhelming majority of my clients defaults to Opensearch at this point. I'm neutral about this and still use Elasticsearch myself. But I can see the logic of my clients.

Morals and ethics don't really factor into this. All you need to do is follow the money, users, and developers. It's very predictable what happens: no company has a perpetual license on their loyalty or attention and that's exactly what you throw out of the window with SSPL.

> I'm well familiar with Opensearch now being the preferred choice over Elasticsearch

That's interesting feedback, I am using Elasticsearch and was looking into Opensearch as an alternative. What I see from their respective repositories is that Elasticsearch is more actively developed, it receives almot 3x commits in the same amount of time. Plus, as some of my clients want to install on-prem, it's not clear to me if you can get commercial support for on-prem installations.

Amazon won't have much interest in supporting on-prem. But I'm sure you can find independent companies that would be willing to help with this. I wouldn't know any one of them well enough to vouch for any at this point. But with a quick Google search I was able to pull out some company names.

There are enough companies going down this path that you should be able to get support.

> Technically the Apache License that Elasticsearch was using allowed that, but ethics should have prevented it.

The license conveys the intent of the authors. If the license explicitly allows something like "reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form" then clearly the authors who picked that license wanted people to be able to do those things. If they didn't want that, they'd have picked a different license to begin with. If you don't want companies to take your work and close the source, distributing it only in object form, then don't use a license that indicates you want that to be possible.

Cloud services are harder, since they don't involve distributing copies of the work, so an EULA like the AGPL is needed instead of just a copyright/patent/trademark license. But when they started they didn't pick one of these licenses, they picked a license that clearly indicated intent to allow their work to be closed & sold.

They instead picked one license, then complained when companies did what they intended them to be able to do, and swapped to a different license. This is why people blame MongoDB and nobody blames AWS. It's a "bait and switch" on MongoDB's part, not on AWS's.

> Cloud services are harder, since they don't involve distributing copies of the work, so an EULA like the AGPL is needed instead of just a copyright/patent/trademark license.

Cloud services can also eat the lunch of companies that are using AGPL. AGPL just makes it so that the service's fork of the code is available to the company and the company can incorporate it or part of it if they wish.

But in most cases I don't think it is being able to add proprietary things to their fork is what causes people to pick the service's offering over the company's offering when they decide they need to purchase support. Most will go with the cloud service's offering even if it has no proprietary things added because it is integrated with the other things they are using at the cloud service, and can be added to their existing support plan with that service.

AGPL wouldn't help in this situation either, as it focuses on the sharing of modifications of the original.

Imagine your child makes lemonade to sell and a friend drops by, they say it's OK for the friend to have some, and then said friend takes a good amount of that lemonade, sets up a stand beside your child's, and sells that lemonade which they just poured into their own container for less, or with cookies made by yet another. Is that OK? How would you feel?

This is what large cloud providers are doing.

So you put a nice restrictive license on the lemonade, and sure it makes your kid's customers unhappy, but at least it stops- oh wait, actually the other kid just made their own lemonade that's drop-in compatible and they still sell more.

The kid's customers have no reason to be unhappy. They come, pay for their lemonade and go. No problem if that other one goes off and makes their own; at least it's a more fair affair and they can honestly compete on actual merits. Although it still isn't even that fair IMO as the other is still using water and sugar that isn't theirs. They should be using all their own resources from scratch.

If only the license change could be retroactive so said cloud companies had to either go to something totally different or build from scratch with their own hired team, instead of only having to fork from the last version before the change. They still have it really good, and that's why they continue to call for and abuse permissive licenses.

> Technically the Apache License that Elasticsearch was using allowed that, but ethics should have prevented it.

There is no ethics in capitalism, only money at any cost.

This view of capitalism is relatively recent in origin. Prior to the adoption of the "shareholder value is the only purpose of a company" nonsense by Wall Street in the 1980s, it was understood that companies have obligations to their employees and their country.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should and certainly doesn't mean it is right to do so.

It's not always true, a small but growing number of companies have ethics and solid principles and are becoming B-Corp [1] certified. I am lucky enough to work for one of such companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)

there is ethics in FOSS and that is the conflict that this is about. companies are trying to build an ethical business and find that they are at a disadvantage against the non-ethical ones, so they are trying to find a license that enforces the ethics

Very well said.