8 ms·

Open Source Needs Open Source Companies

199 points by luu 8y ago

vore 8y ago
While Amazon is most definitely not the best messenger to be delivering this message, they're correct in drawing a bright line between what is open source and what is proprietary. From an open source contributor's point of view, if Elastic is just going to exclusively license your contribution under their proprietary license, then you're just doing unpaid labor for Elastic and all its customers with no benefit to the open source community. From an open source developer's point of view, you want to make sure that if you do use Elasticsearch in your software, you absolutely don't want to subject the rest of your software to Elastic's proprietary license just because of confusion around what code is licensed with what. There is nothing wrong with monetizing open source software (people need to eat, after all), but claiming software as open source while having a very nebulous code licensing situation is not open source at all.
- deleted 8y ago
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- kemitchell 8y ago
  If you contribute code to a project under Apache 2.0 terms, or a CLA without any copyright assignment, how can a company license it "exclusively ... under their proprietary license"? You mentioned subjecting an entire project that uses Elastic proprietary code to their proprietary license. Are you confusing source-available terms for copyleft terms? The licensing situation for Elastic work is far less nebulous than for much other open source, both legally, and in public notices. See: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... Way easier to look at than the nightmare that is 100-character SPDX license expressions for distribution packages.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    > If you contribute code to a project under Apache 2.0 terms Apache 2.0 is applied per source file, not per the whole project. This is unlike copyleft licenses like the GPL, which have a demand for the whole project to be licensed under GPL-compatible terms. In other words, for a repository that mixes Apache 2.0 with proprietary code, your contribution isn't necessarily licensed under Apache 2.0, unless you're explicit about it (e.g. the source file has the license header). That said, even if the license if liberal (like Apache 2.0 is), that doesn't mean anybody can change it without your approval. This is a common misconception with liberal licenses. Just because the license is very permissive, that doesn't mean you can copy / paste that code and re-license it in any way you want, without explicit permission from the author. So you're correct in that regard.
    - kemitchell 8y ago
      Apache 2 can be applied to whole projects. It doesn’t say anything to the contrary. That’s very common in language communities with strong packaging norms, like npm and Ruby.
benatkin 8y ago
From a comment on the Elastic post earlier today: "We build something on Elastic - and trying to work with them to get licensing was at best a major PITA. In ~2017 Elastic decided they wanted to go Enterprise Only. They started to charge $100k for x-pack, though one could get a dev license for $50K. We quickly built a SQL parser for Elastic, an alerting engine, some other bits. These are all bits that just went poof yesterday when Amazon released opendistro - and I couldn't be happier. Sure we'll have to slice out a bunch of code, but at the end of the day it didn't have value to our core business." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370085 The trouble is, once an open source company puts essential stuff under a shared source license, and calls it open source, you don't know if that's all they're going to do, or if they're going to keep charging more, or putting more essential stuff under a non open source license. The simplicity that drew people into using the open source product is gone, and there's an uncertain future. It's hard to find an open core product that has only enterprise features in its enterprise offering. For instance, in Greylog2, views and a user audit log would be useful to pretty much anyone. [1] And people would probably be happy to implement and contribute it themselves. And the company wouldn't merge it in because it competes with their enterprise offering. With nginx, a feature whose usefulness is not limited to enterprise that is only in nginx plus is dynamic reconfiguration, which can be used to implement rolling restarts. [2] [1]: https://www.graylog.org/products/open-source-vs-enterprise https://www.graylog.org/products/open-source-vs-enterprise [2]: https://www.nginx.com/blog/dynamic-reconfiguration-with-nginx-plus/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/dynamic-reconfiguration-with-ngin...
DVassallo 8y ago
Despite Amazon's posturing about its care for open source, Elastic's response was pathetic. If Elastic doesn't like their Apache 2.0 software getting forked, maybe they're the ones with "fake altruism or benevolence" (their words). If Elastic is feeling threatened by AWS, they've chosen the wrong business model.
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- throwaway12iii 8y ago
  > Despite Amazon's posturing about its care for open source, Elastic's response was pathetic. If Elastic doesn't like their Apache 2.0 software getting forked, maybe they're the ones with "fake altruism or benevolence" (their words). If Elastic is feeling threatened by AWS, they've chosen the wrong business model. You still have stocks in Amazon? You worked there for eight years apparently. You are part of the problem. You took part in all their tax dodging, open source exploiting bullshit. You took their massive pay and fucked over lots of people. You're the one who is pathetic.
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  - dang 8y ago
    Personal attack is unacceptable on HN. We've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- thayne 8y ago
  From what I could tell from the response, Elastic didn't have a problem with Amazon forking their product. It was more rebuttal of Amazon's claims that Elastic doesn't really support open source.
  - 8y ago
pjmlp 8y ago
It is easy, if you want the FOSS dream to keep alive, pay the developers for the software. Donations, buy their books, subscriptions, distribution CDs, whatever. Otherwise don't come around complaining how their are selling themselves, while not being willing to pay for the tools of trade.
- techntoke 8y ago
  Yeah, hear that Amazon? Start supporting the projects that you use in your own company.
- supermw 8y ago
  This is really the only viable way to support FOSS. Considering the amount of money some people make in tech, they should allocate a % of that to donating to open source projects each year. But no, nothing’s going to change the way we live because we can always take but never give, and now things are changing for the worse.
  - ttoinou 8y ago
    Could be great to have a way to automatically know all the FOSS / freeware software one uses and donate to all them at once
eesmith 8y ago
The blog comment is absolutely correct. I distribute open source software. I give a big advantage to those willing to pay me through a support contract. And as for the (unwritten) "promise the maintainer made", that social contract goes both ways. If that exists, then what of the promise that users will support the maintainer? Remember esr's hyping of the "gift culture" to open source? In practice it's balderdash. Or as Zed Shaw puts it: > There was sort of like this unwritten contract in open source that we had; the unwritten contract with corporations was if you wrote open source that they were using, you got some sort of job, or consulting fees, or at least some respect so that way you could find jobs. > ... I started to realize that “No, that contract has completely been rewritten. It’s totally different now. If you write open source, you’re not gonna get a job”, and now what’s been happening - and part of my tweet storm and whatnot about open source - is that it’s gone the opposite direction, where what I see is sort of like almost direct action to prevent open source developers from making money… Quoted from https://changelog.com/podcast/300 https://changelog.com/podcast/300 .
- pjmlp 8y ago
  There was also the unwritten contract that users of open source would support their developers. Instead, every time someone posts something where they are trying to make a living out of their open source dream, there is a pile of posts complaining about having to pay even 0.01 to them, posting free alternatives with half of the features, or forking the project. Even on a place like HN, which was supposed to be about creating companies in first place.
  - weego 8y ago
    What's the point of living in an artifical bubble leading people down the wrong path? Building software doesn't guarantee that it's worth anything to anyone else. If it is and is meaningfully better than free alternatives they will pay. If not then that's literally the life of an 'entrepreneur'. Similarly with OSS, no one de facto deserves funding just because they maintain open source software, popular or not. And if you think that companies will support you and play ball with your own whims then you're living in a fantasy world. The crux is the naivety of the people involved. If you don't like that CompanyX will use or fork your code with no financial contributions then don't use those licenses and roll the dice to see how that works out for you like any other business. Those freedoms they grant you are granted to everyone whether a one man band or a global enterprise. If you want to play pick and choose then you're using the wrong definition of 'free'
sheetjs 8y ago
The entire crux of the post's commentary is an intentional misinterpretation of the original post. The motivating quote with the actual context is: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely Amazon's core complaint is: > Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. The Elastic license itself professes to include code that isn't covered under the original Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... > Within the "x-pack" folder, source code in a given file is licensed under the > Elastic License, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file or a > LICENSE file present in the directory subtree declares a separate license. If Elastic wants to adopt an open core model, that's perfectly fine, but mixing the open source and proprietary bits in the same repo is messy and should raise eyebrows. What Amazon seems to be asserting is that a project that is open source shouldn't change the license terms. That is not an assertion, as this blog post claims, that the original developers must maintain the project indefinitely.
- __fu 8y ago
  https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open explains why and what was done pretty clearly imo.
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- csdreamer7 8y ago
  > If Elastic wants to adopt an open core model, that's perfectly fine, but mixing the open source and proprietary bits in the same repo is messy and should raise eyebrows. GitLab recently proposed a similar action. See the below link for the trouble they had maintaining two codes bases for one application. I have dealt with git submodules-it is not fun. https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/21/merging-ce-and-ee-codebases/ https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/21/merging-ce-and-ee-codeba... This is what GitLab proposed. I thought they handled it very transparently. Other companies should take note. The gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee repositories are replaced with a single gitlab repository, with all open issues and merge requests moved into the single repository. All frontend assets (JavaScript, CSS, images, views) will be open sourced under the MIT license. All proprietary backend code is located in the /ee repository. All documentation is merged together and clearly states which features belong to which feature set. Documentation is already licensed under CC-BY-SA.
bibyte 8y ago
I agree. It sucks when some giant company forks your project and gives you nothing. But that's exactly the point of open source licences. If Elastic doesn't like getting their projects forked why did they use Apache 2.0 in the first place ? They could have used a proprietary licence.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Exactly, don't like GPL? Don't come around complaining companies are taking advantage of business friendly licensing.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Choose GPL - enterprise customers scare to touch your product, no consulting, no fees, no nothing. Choose "business friendly licensing" - Amazon sell your product as a service, then fork it away.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Users that are allergic to pay for their tools get GPL. Users that understand businesses needs money to strive pay for a commercial license.
    - bibyte 8y ago
      Then choose a proprietary licence. Enterprise customers will not be afraid to touch your code and nobody will be able to fork it without your permission.
      - tanilama 8y ago
        Then it is hard to get initial customers to build a healthy user base and compete with close source competitors. After all if I am paying upfront I would expect a very different user experience, and more entitled to demand more. Open source just scales better in that regard. It is low barrier, low maintainence, and self organized. Had it be proprietary Elasticsearch will never see the day of going public. So open source is how it initially comes to being, then they find there is commercial opportunity in it, and for a long time, those objectives can coexist. But open source is open source. I don't think it guarantees you can make money of it. You are open sourcing your code, then accusing other parties for using it under the license permission, is ... contradictary. There is after all, an element of freedom in the open source dogma since its founding, be it this free or that free. I am not a fan of SV vulture capital approach of building commercial for profitable companies around established open source projects. They are not doing anything different than Amazon in my opinion. If more and more essential features are moving to closed source land, then the open source is broken way before Amazon took over. So let money do money's stuff, and open source be open source. It has a definition anyway, if that what that code is permitted to be used, so be it. I have personal repos that has thousands of stars. I thought for a very short period of time, had I not open source it might give me additional several grand of income, after all there are several companies contact me. But I know it is too late to think that way, I already enjoy all the attention can exposure by open sourcing it, now I wish I can eat the cake and have it? That is no magic open source could offer. Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon Employee.
strenholme 8y ago
OK, Amazon, I agree. We need more open source out there. Let’s start by releasing your Bookerly font under an open font license, just like how Google released their corresponding Literata font under the SIL Open Font license.
Jedi72 8y ago
I am so surprised people here are taking Amazons side. Whilst technically yes open-source implies open, the movement was never about giving away free stuff to mutli-national conglomerates, who themselves do hardly any open-source. With Amazon, its all take. Take take take.
- dgellow 8y ago
  Well if that’s what people want they have copyleft licenses. Open Source isn’t Free Software, even if they are close to each other.
- Operyl 8y ago
  Eh... rarely is a pretty harsh outlook. We forget that these companies tend to have their employees supplying patches and features to many open source projects that matter (like the Linux kernel), working on standards, etc.
  - dhd415 8y ago
    Amazon's record with OSS contributions is notoriously poor. For example, see their refusal to allow their query routing extensions to pgbouncer to be used on anything other than AWS: https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3 https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3 There's certainly room to criticize Elastic for their approach to OSS and/or their response to Amazon here, but Amazon's "open-sourcing" of a bundle of the OSS bits of Elasticsearch plus a few third-party OSS plugins is nothing other than self-serving, opportunistic PR.
- pferde 8y ago
  The license they used was and is exactly about giving away free stuff to anyone who cares to take it. Including multi-national conglomerates.
- Zarel 8y ago
  I thought Amazon was open-sourcing their ElasticSearch fork? Did I misinterpret what's going on?
- 8y ago
tannhaeuser 8y ago
The "Open Source" rhetoric and appeal to a mythical "Open Source Community" seems out of place coming from both Elastic and AWS when the truth is that both companies, and their developers, need compensation, or simply wouldn't exist otherwise. Elastic uses Apache Licensing to make inroads (do they have outside contributors?), and AWS needs commodity software to sell infrastructure. Why not be honest about it?
ilovecaching 8y ago
Open source will always be a tool used by corporations to do terrible things. That's why corporations backed it over Stallman's free software movement. They knew that someone like Stallman, who actually wanted to give users power over their computing, was fundamentally going to stop them from being total sleezebags. Open source gives them the ability to pretend to care, while using the software in nefarious ways.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
If the MBA's were looking for a system to commoditize the nerds, they could not have come up with a better system than open source. A nerd writes an scalable, robust, communication library and makes it open source. Do the big bucks go to the nerd? The one time popular kid in high school, pays a college student to wrap it in a chat app and becomes a billionaire. Nerds write a database. The database is opensource so they get a pittance. The business people put the database behind a web service and make billions. Nerds write a full text search engine. Do they get rich? No, but the business people sell it as a SAAS and get rich. The nerds reward: They get to work as drones for the business people, who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company. I cannot see our current open source environment lasting 20 years. Relying on support is going to be more and more of a problem. What scenario do you think will make the Fortune 500 CEO happy: a) You bought support for open source product X from small company YZ which developed and open sourced X but which no body has heard of, or b) that you bought a support contract from fellow Fortune 500 company C which everybody has heard of, but does not contribute any upstream changes to X?
- strenholme 8y ago
  “who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company” Ah, yes, the infamous “inventions” clause which pretty much any and all developers need to sign to get a job. Here in California, we have a key exception encoded in law: Anything I do on my own time, with my own gear, not related to my day job is something I can release as open source code. And there are starting to be companies with “open source Fridays” out there who can and do let people openly work on open source while on the clock.
joking 8y ago
What people seems to forget frequently is that a lot of the value proposition from elasticsearch comes from lucene, which is an Apache foundation project. And they are able to deliver more value over it because it's permissive Apache license. It's not like elasticsearch built everything from the scratch and there are others approfiting from it.
stunt 8y ago
Amazon talking about open source is funny. Don't let them divide the community they never contribute to. Talking is easy Amazon.
mhd 8y ago
There's more than just companies or people working in their free time. This might not be very popular for the libertarian fringe, but state support is an option that's probably better than other models. And we already got that to a large degree, with plenty of software coming from universities or state-funded research projects. Granted, that might not be the next Javascript framework one needs to fill developer ennui.
zokier 8y ago
What I think is that Open Source needs less of these sort of "Open Source companies". Especially the kind that are mostly focused in abusing open source to peddle their proprietary software.
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krupan 8y ago
It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?
moocowtruck 8y ago
so I don't get it, why don't people use GPL3/AGPL3 etc ?it seems like it allows projects to make money on their products, and also be free software at the same time. when things are licensed APL2 mit bsd etc whatever do people expect an implicit agreement where we want them to promise they won't use it anyway they want?
kstenerud 8y ago
The quoted quote: "At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution... does not advantage any one company over another. " The actual, original quote from the AWS blog: "At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another." It's a misquoting, designed to change the meaning to suit his needs. Once you read the original blog post in its entirety, this guy's arguments lose their foundational premise.

199 points by luu 8y ago

vore 8y ago

While Amazon is most definitely not the best messenger to be delivering this message, they're correct in drawing a bright line between what is open source and what is proprietary. From an open source contributor's point of view, if Elastic is just going to exclusively license your contribution under their proprietary license, then you're just doing unpaid labor for Elastic and all its customers with no benefit to the open source community. From an open source developer's point of view, you want to make sure that if you do use Elasticsearch in your software, you absolutely don't want to subject the rest of your software to Elastic's proprietary license just because of confusion around what code is licensed with what. There is nothing wrong with monetizing open source software (people need to eat, after all), but claiming software as open source while having a very nebulous code licensing situation is not open source at all.

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kemitchell 8y ago
If you contribute code to a project under Apache 2.0 terms, or a CLA without any copyright assignment, how can a company license it "exclusively ... under their proprietary license"? You mentioned subjecting an entire project that uses Elastic proprietary code to their proprietary license. Are you confusing source-available terms for copyleft terms? The licensing situation for Elastic work is far less nebulous than for much other open source, both legally, and in public notices. See: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... Way easier to look at than the nightmare that is 100-character SPDX license expressions for distribution packages.
- bad_user 8y ago
  > If you contribute code to a project under Apache 2.0 terms Apache 2.0 is applied per source file, not per the whole project. This is unlike copyleft licenses like the GPL, which have a demand for the whole project to be licensed under GPL-compatible terms. In other words, for a repository that mixes Apache 2.0 with proprietary code, your contribution isn't necessarily licensed under Apache 2.0, unless you're explicit about it (e.g. the source file has the license header). That said, even if the license if liberal (like Apache 2.0 is), that doesn't mean anybody can change it without your approval. This is a common misconception with liberal licenses. Just because the license is very permissive, that doesn't mean you can copy / paste that code and re-license it in any way you want, without explicit permission from the author. So you're correct in that regard.
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    Apache 2 can be applied to whole projects. It doesn’t say anything to the contrary. That’s very common in language communities with strong packaging norms, like npm and Ruby.

benatkin 8y ago

From a comment on the Elastic post earlier today: "We build something on Elastic - and trying to work with them to get licensing was at best a major PITA. In ~2017 Elastic decided they wanted to go Enterprise Only. They started to charge $100k for x-pack, though one could get a dev license for $50K. We quickly built a SQL parser for Elastic, an alerting engine, some other bits. These are all bits that just went poof yesterday when Amazon released opendistro - and I couldn't be happier. Sure we'll have to slice out a bunch of code, but at the end of the day it didn't have value to our core business." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370085 The trouble is, once an open source company puts essential stuff under a shared source license, and calls it open source, you don't know if that's all they're going to do, or if they're going to keep charging more, or putting more essential stuff under a non open source license. The simplicity that drew people into using the open source product is gone, and there's an uncertain future. It's hard to find an open core product that has only enterprise features in its enterprise offering. For instance, in Greylog2, views and a user audit log would be useful to pretty much anyone. [1] And people would probably be happy to implement and contribute it themselves. And the company wouldn't merge it in because it competes with their enterprise offering. With nginx, a feature whose usefulness is not limited to enterprise that is only in nginx plus is dynamic reconfiguration, which can be used to implement rolling restarts. [2] [1]: https://www.graylog.org/products/open-source-vs-enterprise https://www.graylog.org/products/open-source-vs-enterprise [2]: https://www.nginx.com/blog/dynamic-reconfiguration-with-nginx-plus/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/dynamic-reconfiguration-with-ngin...

DVassallo 8y ago

Despite Amazon's posturing about its care for open source, Elastic's response was pathetic. If Elastic doesn't like their Apache 2.0 software getting forked, maybe they're the ones with "fake altruism or benevolence" (their words). If Elastic is feeling threatened by AWS, they've chosen the wrong business model.

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throwaway12iii 8y ago
> Despite Amazon's posturing about its care for open source, Elastic's response was pathetic. If Elastic doesn't like their Apache 2.0 software getting forked, maybe they're the ones with "fake altruism or benevolence" (their words). If Elastic is feeling threatened by AWS, they've chosen the wrong business model. You still have stocks in Amazon? You worked there for eight years apparently. You are part of the problem. You took part in all their tax dodging, open source exploiting bullshit. You took their massive pay and fucked over lots of people. You're the one who is pathetic.
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- dang 8y ago
  Personal attack is unacceptable on HN. We've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
thayne 8y ago
From what I could tell from the response, Elastic didn't have a problem with Amazon forking their product. It was more rebuttal of Amazon's claims that Elastic doesn't really support open source.
- 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

It is easy, if you want the FOSS dream to keep alive, pay the developers for the software. Donations, buy their books, subscriptions, distribution CDs, whatever. Otherwise don't come around complaining how their are selling themselves, while not being willing to pay for the tools of trade.

techntoke 8y ago
Yeah, hear that Amazon? Start supporting the projects that you use in your own company.
supermw 8y ago
This is really the only viable way to support FOSS. Considering the amount of money some people make in tech, they should allocate a % of that to donating to open source projects each year. But no, nothing’s going to change the way we live because we can always take but never give, and now things are changing for the worse.
- ttoinou 8y ago
  Could be great to have a way to automatically know all the FOSS / freeware software one uses and donate to all them at once

eesmith 8y ago

The blog comment is absolutely correct. I distribute open source software. I give a big advantage to those willing to pay me through a support contract. And as for the (unwritten) "promise the maintainer made", that social contract goes both ways. If that exists, then what of the promise that users will support the maintainer? Remember esr's hyping of the "gift culture" to open source? In practice it's balderdash. Or as Zed Shaw puts it: > There was sort of like this unwritten contract in open source that we had; the unwritten contract with corporations was if you wrote open source that they were using, you got some sort of job, or consulting fees, or at least some respect so that way you could find jobs. > ... I started to realize that “No, that contract has completely been rewritten. It’s totally different now. If you write open source, you’re not gonna get a job”, and now what’s been happening - and part of my tweet storm and whatnot about open source - is that it’s gone the opposite direction, where what I see is sort of like almost direct action to prevent open source developers from making money… Quoted from https://changelog.com/podcast/300 https://changelog.com/podcast/300 .

pjmlp 8y ago
There was also the unwritten contract that users of open source would support their developers. Instead, every time someone posts something where they are trying to make a living out of their open source dream, there is a pile of posts complaining about having to pay even 0.01 to them, posting free alternatives with half of the features, or forking the project. Even on a place like HN, which was supposed to be about creating companies in first place.
- weego 8y ago
  What's the point of living in an artifical bubble leading people down the wrong path? Building software doesn't guarantee that it's worth anything to anyone else. If it is and is meaningfully better than free alternatives they will pay. If not then that's literally the life of an 'entrepreneur'. Similarly with OSS, no one de facto deserves funding just because they maintain open source software, popular or not. And if you think that companies will support you and play ball with your own whims then you're living in a fantasy world. The crux is the naivety of the people involved. If you don't like that CompanyX will use or fork your code with no financial contributions then don't use those licenses and roll the dice to see how that works out for you like any other business. Those freedoms they grant you are granted to everyone whether a one man band or a global enterprise. If you want to play pick and choose then you're using the wrong definition of 'free'

sheetjs 8y ago

The entire crux of the post's commentary is an intentional misinterpretation of the original post. The motivating quote with the actual context is: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely Amazon's core complaint is: > Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. The Elastic license itself professes to include code that isn't covered under the original Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... > Within the "x-pack" folder, source code in a given file is licensed under the > Elastic License, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file or a > LICENSE file present in the directory subtree declares a separate license. If Elastic wants to adopt an open core model, that's perfectly fine, but mixing the open source and proprietary bits in the same repo is messy and should raise eyebrows. What Amazon seems to be asserting is that a project that is open source shouldn't change the license terms. That is not an assertion, as this blog post claims, that the original developers must maintain the project indefinitely.

__fu 8y ago
https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open explains why and what was done pretty clearly imo.
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csdreamer7 8y ago
> If Elastic wants to adopt an open core model, that's perfectly fine, but mixing the open source and proprietary bits in the same repo is messy and should raise eyebrows. GitLab recently proposed a similar action. See the below link for the trouble they had maintaining two codes bases for one application. I have dealt with git submodules-it is not fun. https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/21/merging-ce-and-ee-codebases/ https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/21/merging-ce-and-ee-codeba... This is what GitLab proposed. I thought they handled it very transparently. Other companies should take note. The gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee repositories are replaced with a single gitlab repository, with all open issues and merge requests moved into the single repository. All frontend assets (JavaScript, CSS, images, views) will be open sourced under the MIT license. All proprietary backend code is located in the /ee repository. All documentation is merged together and clearly states which features belong to which feature set. Documentation is already licensed under CC-BY-SA.

bibyte 8y ago

I agree. It sucks when some giant company forks your project and gives you nothing. But that's exactly the point of open source licences. If Elastic doesn't like getting their projects forked why did they use Apache 2.0 in the first place ? They could have used a proprietary licence.

pjmlp 8y ago
Exactly, don't like GPL? Don't come around complaining companies are taking advantage of business friendly licensing.
- snaky 8y ago
  Choose GPL - enterprise customers scare to touch your product, no consulting, no fees, no nothing. Choose "business friendly licensing" - Amazon sell your product as a service, then fork it away.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Users that are allergic to pay for their tools get GPL. Users that understand businesses needs money to strive pay for a commercial license.
  - bibyte 8y ago
    Then choose a proprietary licence. Enterprise customers will not be afraid to touch your code and nobody will be able to fork it without your permission.
    - tanilama 8y ago
      Then it is hard to get initial customers to build a healthy user base and compete with close source competitors. After all if I am paying upfront I would expect a very different user experience, and more entitled to demand more. Open source just scales better in that regard. It is low barrier, low maintainence, and self organized. Had it be proprietary Elasticsearch will never see the day of going public. So open source is how it initially comes to being, then they find there is commercial opportunity in it, and for a long time, those objectives can coexist. But open source is open source. I don't think it guarantees you can make money of it. You are open sourcing your code, then accusing other parties for using it under the license permission, is ... contradictary. There is after all, an element of freedom in the open source dogma since its founding, be it this free or that free. I am not a fan of SV vulture capital approach of building commercial for profitable companies around established open source projects. They are not doing anything different than Amazon in my opinion. If more and more essential features are moving to closed source land, then the open source is broken way before Amazon took over. So let money do money's stuff, and open source be open source. It has a definition anyway, if that what that code is permitted to be used, so be it. I have personal repos that has thousands of stars. I thought for a very short period of time, had I not open source it might give me additional several grand of income, after all there are several companies contact me. But I know it is too late to think that way, I already enjoy all the attention can exposure by open sourcing it, now I wish I can eat the cake and have it? That is no magic open source could offer. Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon Employee.

strenholme 8y ago

OK, Amazon, I agree. We need more open source out there. Let’s start by releasing your Bookerly font under an open font license, just like how Google released their corresponding Literata font under the SIL Open Font license.

Jedi72 8y ago

I am so surprised people here are taking Amazons side. Whilst technically yes open-source implies open, the movement was never about giving away free stuff to mutli-national conglomerates, who themselves do hardly any open-source. With Amazon, its all take. Take take take.

dgellow 8y ago
Well if that’s what people want they have copyleft licenses. Open Source isn’t Free Software, even if they are close to each other.
Operyl 8y ago
Eh... rarely is a pretty harsh outlook. We forget that these companies tend to have their employees supplying patches and features to many open source projects that matter (like the Linux kernel), working on standards, etc.
- dhd415 8y ago
  Amazon's record with OSS contributions is notoriously poor. For example, see their refusal to allow their query routing extensions to pgbouncer to be used on anything other than AWS: https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3 https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3 There's certainly room to criticize Elastic for their approach to OSS and/or their response to Amazon here, but Amazon's "open-sourcing" of a bundle of the OSS bits of Elasticsearch plus a few third-party OSS plugins is nothing other than self-serving, opportunistic PR.
pferde 8y ago
The license they used was and is exactly about giving away free stuff to anyone who cares to take it. Including multi-national conglomerates.
Zarel 8y ago
I thought Amazon was open-sourcing their ElasticSearch fork? Did I misinterpret what's going on?
8y ago

tannhaeuser 8y ago

The "Open Source" rhetoric and appeal to a mythical "Open Source Community" seems out of place coming from both Elastic and AWS when the truth is that both companies, and their developers, need compensation, or simply wouldn't exist otherwise. Elastic uses Apache Licensing to make inroads (do they have outside contributors?), and AWS needs commodity software to sell infrastructure. Why not be honest about it?

ilovecaching 8y ago

Open source will always be a tool used by corporations to do terrible things. That's why corporations backed it over Stallman's free software movement. They knew that someone like Stallman, who actually wanted to give users power over their computing, was fundamentally going to stop them from being total sleezebags. Open source gives them the ability to pretend to care, while using the software in nefarious ways.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

If the MBA's were looking for a system to commoditize the nerds, they could not have come up with a better system than open source. A nerd writes an scalable, robust, communication library and makes it open source. Do the big bucks go to the nerd? The one time popular kid in high school, pays a college student to wrap it in a chat app and becomes a billionaire. Nerds write a database. The database is opensource so they get a pittance. The business people put the database behind a web service and make billions. Nerds write a full text search engine. Do they get rich? No, but the business people sell it as a SAAS and get rich. The nerds reward: They get to work as drones for the business people, who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company. I cannot see our current open source environment lasting 20 years. Relying on support is going to be more and more of a problem. What scenario do you think will make the Fortune 500 CEO happy: a) You bought support for open source product X from small company YZ which developed and open sourced X but which no body has heard of, or b) that you bought a support contract from fellow Fortune 500 company C which everybody has heard of, but does not contribute any upstream changes to X?

strenholme 8y ago
“who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company” Ah, yes, the infamous “inventions” clause which pretty much any and all developers need to sign to get a job. Here in California, we have a key exception encoded in law: Anything I do on my own time, with my own gear, not related to my day job is something I can release as open source code. And there are starting to be companies with “open source Fridays” out there who can and do let people openly work on open source while on the clock.

joking 8y ago

What people seems to forget frequently is that a lot of the value proposition from elasticsearch comes from lucene, which is an Apache foundation project. And they are able to deliver more value over it because it's permissive Apache license. It's not like elasticsearch built everything from the scratch and there are others approfiting from it.

stunt 8y ago

Amazon talking about open source is funny. Don't let them divide the community they never contribute to. Talking is easy Amazon.

mhd 8y ago

There's more than just companies or people working in their free time. This might not be very popular for the libertarian fringe, but state support is an option that's probably better than other models. And we already got that to a large degree, with plenty of software coming from universities or state-funded research projects. Granted, that might not be the next Javascript framework one needs to fill developer ennui.

zokier 8y ago

What I think is that Open Source needs less of these sort of "Open Source companies". Especially the kind that are mostly focused in abusing open source to peddle their proprietary software.

deleted 8y ago

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krupan 8y ago

It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?

moocowtruck 8y ago

so I don't get it, why don't people use GPL3/AGPL3 etc ?it seems like it allows projects to make money on their products, and also be free software at the same time. when things are licensed APL2 mit bsd etc whatever do people expect an implicit agreement where we want them to promise they won't use it anyway they want?

kstenerud 8y ago

The quoted quote: "At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution... does not advantage any one company over another. " The actual, original quote from the AWS blog: "At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another." It's a misquoting, designed to change the meaning to suit his needs. Once you read the original blog post in its entirety, this guy's arguments lose their foundational premise.