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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 w

by 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.

by vore 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

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.