5 ms·

No, no, no. Amazon is using the software in the way it was intended, legally and ethically. It's like companies published software under a license and never gav

No, no, no. Amazon is using the software in the way it was intended, legally and ethically. It's like companies published software under a license and never gave a thought to the consequences of the license they chose. If you license permissively, be prepared for your competitors to use it!

tootie 8y ago
Yeah but this is like eating an entire plate of free samples then asking for a refill. It's technically allowed but you're ruining for everyone else.
- ttul 8y ago
  Nuh-uh. Elastic made millions selling stuff on top of open source that was licensed permissively to create a market. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    > millions A company turned a modest profit? Say it isn't so! The guy who wrote ElasticSearch created a company to finance the development of the project. For most of their history, they released their source code under a permissive license in good faith. Amazon abused that good faith, so now Elastic continues to make the source code open and license it freely to customers and the open source community (just not competitors). I've got no beef with Amazon, but you're kidding yourself if you compare them with Elastic in terms of ambition, greed, commitment to open source, etc.
    - neom 8y ago
      Basically sounds like Redhat was the last Redhat. Docker, Mesosphere, ElasticSearch, Aquia etc be damned?
      - mbreese 8y ago
        Open source and venture capital do not mix well. I’m not sure I can think of any positive examples outside of OS vendors (Redhat), but there are many negative examples come to mind, going all the way back to Eazel. These debates go back decades.
        erik_seaberg 8y ago
        Open source work for hire can be a lifestyle business (it's not free until you agree to write it), but VC money wants some kind of sustained competitive advantage that drives huge scale.
- losteric 8y ago
  It's like a wizard invents an incantation for a free and infinite supply of apples. They freely give away that spell, facilitate improvements from others, encourage the world to use this great spell. Then, someone starts selling apple sauce and it makes lots of money. Now the wizard wants to get rich too... but their sauce isn't good enough, so they try to lock down the spell. People get upset. They helped improve the spell, why should the wizard get all the money? Or their livelihoods now depend on the spell, why are they suddenly forced to pay? Now the apple guy decided he's going to stop playing that game, and starts supporting/improving/evangelizing a restriction-free apple incantation. Story to be continued...
  - berbec 8y ago
    Harry Potter and the GPL Violator of Azkaban
    - kuwze 8y ago
      Uh... Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AGPL is more like it
  - tootie 8y ago
    That's not exactly the allegory I'm envisioning. More like future products are going to be less open for fear of being subsumed by cloud vendors. This story of Elastic is not too dissimilar to the story posted about Docker the other day. Docker Inc is in the process of being crushed by Google via Kubernetes. It's going to potentially stifle future open source enterprise software development.
weberc2 8y ago
Which is why Elastic changed their licensing, and now Amazon is playing the hapless victim.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  They are hardly playing the victim, they are moving forward in the way that is most advantageous to themselves.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  They're not playing the hapless victim. They're doing exactly what the open source license was designed to do and support. They're forking it because they don't like the direction of the current mainters, and are releasing their own open sourced updates to it. We've seen this happen repeatedly through many open source projects over the last couple of decades. Take the Jenkins/Hudson split, for example, or OpenWrt/LEDE, Node.js/IO.js, or to stretch even further back Mambo/Joomla. The whole purpose of the open source license is to ensure that you are always able to patch, support, and maintain what you're running. That you're not stuck depending on a single company to keep your software running. That you're always able to add missing features as you see them, etc. (obviously, the license you choose dictates whether you have to provide those back). By mixing up proprietary code with open source code Elastic betrayed those central ideals of open source, as have Nginx and any number of companies that have adopted this model. The reason why should be pretty obvious. By building the company model around premium modules, they have disincentivised themselves to fixing or enhancing the open source version of the software. Worse, they're not incentivised in any fashion to even accept patches that open source contributors provide that provide the missing features etc. By way of example, there's a fix for a common issue in Nginx that has landed in their upstream commercial version of Nginx, that hasn't made it in to the open source version (at least last I saw it hadn't, and the fix had been in upstream for quite a while). Nginx ignores DNS TTLs, and can seriously trip you up unless you happen to know to use a particular combination of variables and statically configured DNS resolvers in nginx to make it DNS TTL for servers it proxies too. The company behind Nginx has had zero incentive to provide that in the open source version, or accept patches that fix that behaviour. That leaves people tripping over the same bug for years on end, until they discover, just like so many before them, those blog posts that detail the behaviour and how to save yourselves from it. What each of these companies have done essentially makes actions like Amazon's actions here completely inevitable.

tootie 8y ago

Yeah but this is like eating an entire plate of free samples then asking for a refill. It's technically allowed but you're ruining for everyone else.

ttul 8y ago
Nuh-uh. Elastic made millions selling stuff on top of open source that was licensed permissively to create a market. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
- weberc2 8y ago
  > millions A company turned a modest profit? Say it isn't so! The guy who wrote ElasticSearch created a company to finance the development of the project. For most of their history, they released their source code under a permissive license in good faith. Amazon abused that good faith, so now Elastic continues to make the source code open and license it freely to customers and the open source community (just not competitors). I've got no beef with Amazon, but you're kidding yourself if you compare them with Elastic in terms of ambition, greed, commitment to open source, etc.
  - neom 8y ago
    Basically sounds like Redhat was the last Redhat. Docker, Mesosphere, ElasticSearch, Aquia etc be damned?
    - mbreese 8y ago
      Open source and venture capital do not mix well. I’m not sure I can think of any positive examples outside of OS vendors (Redhat), but there are many negative examples come to mind, going all the way back to Eazel. These debates go back decades.
      - erik_seaberg 8y ago
        Open source work for hire can be a lifestyle business (it's not free until you agree to write it), but VC money wants some kind of sustained competitive advantage that drives huge scale.
losteric 8y ago
It's like a wizard invents an incantation for a free and infinite supply of apples. They freely give away that spell, facilitate improvements from others, encourage the world to use this great spell. Then, someone starts selling apple sauce and it makes lots of money. Now the wizard wants to get rich too... but their sauce isn't good enough, so they try to lock down the spell. People get upset. They helped improve the spell, why should the wizard get all the money? Or their livelihoods now depend on the spell, why are they suddenly forced to pay? Now the apple guy decided he's going to stop playing that game, and starts supporting/improving/evangelizing a restriction-free apple incantation. Story to be continued...
- berbec 8y ago
  Harry Potter and the GPL Violator of Azkaban
  - kuwze 8y ago
    Uh... Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AGPL is more like it
- tootie 8y ago
  That's not exactly the allegory I'm envisioning. More like future products are going to be less open for fear of being subsumed by cloud vendors. This story of Elastic is not too dissimilar to the story posted about Docker the other day. Docker Inc is in the process of being crushed by Google via Kubernetes. It's going to potentially stifle future open source enterprise software development.

weberc2 8y ago

Which is why Elastic changed their licensing, and now Amazon is playing the hapless victim.

maxerickson 8y ago
They are hardly playing the victim, they are moving forward in the way that is most advantageous to themselves.
Twirrim 8y ago
They're not playing the hapless victim. They're doing exactly what the open source license was designed to do and support. They're forking it because they don't like the direction of the current mainters, and are releasing their own open sourced updates to it. We've seen this happen repeatedly through many open source projects over the last couple of decades. Take the Jenkins/Hudson split, for example, or OpenWrt/LEDE, Node.js/IO.js, or to stretch even further back Mambo/Joomla. The whole purpose of the open source license is to ensure that you are always able to patch, support, and maintain what you're running. That you're not stuck depending on a single company to keep your software running. That you're always able to add missing features as you see them, etc. (obviously, the license you choose dictates whether you have to provide those back). By mixing up proprietary code with open source code Elastic betrayed those central ideals of open source, as have Nginx and any number of companies that have adopted this model. The reason why should be pretty obvious. By building the company model around premium modules, they have disincentivised themselves to fixing or enhancing the open source version of the software. Worse, they're not incentivised in any fashion to even accept patches that open source contributors provide that provide the missing features etc. By way of example, there's a fix for a common issue in Nginx that has landed in their upstream commercial version of Nginx, that hasn't made it in to the open source version (at least last I saw it hadn't, and the fix had been in upstream for quite a while). Nginx ignores DNS TTLs, and can seriously trip you up unless you happen to know to use a particular combination of variables and statically configured DNS resolvers in nginx to make it DNS TTL for servers it proxies too. The company behind Nginx has had zero incentive to provide that in the open source version, or accept patches that fix that behaviour. That leaves people tripping over the same bug for years on end, until they discover, just like so many before them, those blog posts that detail the behaviour and how to save yourselves from it. What each of these companies have done essentially makes actions like Amazon's actions here completely inevitable.