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"protection against public cloud providers offering open source products as a service without contributing back". I have no issue with whatever license they ch

"protection against public cloud providers offering open source products as a service without contributing back". I have no issue with whatever license they choose, but let's be honest, its not about contributing back to these projects, its inserting a poison pill clause that they know cloud providers can't meet. Specifically, by contributing back they mean, per the license: "If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the *Service Source Code* available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License."

nopzor 6y ago
contributing back can mean monetarily. i’m sure elastic would be willing to sell a commercial license to a cloud provider if the deal makes sense.
- brasetvik 6y ago
  They already do. https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-partners-with-alibaba-cloud-to-deliver-elasticsearch-on-alibaba-cloud https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-partners-with-ali...
- arpinum 6y ago
  Thats fine, but then don't title the blog post "Doubling down on open", make it "Creating a more profitable business model".
  - christophilus 6y ago
    Those aren’t necessarily contradictory titles. Large OSS projects require funding, or they run a serious risk of stagnation. If there are massively profitable corporations using OSS and contributing nothing back, or even actively competing with the project, then a more profitable business model may be the best thing an OSS project can do to ensure its longevity.
shawnz 6y ago
Elasticsearch couldn't exist without the open source Lucene project which is at its core. Lucene is licensed under the permissive Apache license which is why Elastic is able to release proprietary paid modules that link with it. Now they are closing the same holes that they themselves used to create their product. Contributing back is definitely the last thing on their minds.
- bevacqua 6y ago
  Elastic contributes massively to Lucene, so this is a false dichotomy
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Thanks for pointing this out. Red Hat (my employer currently) is typically in the same boat here and it drives me crazy how people don't think about that before criticizing. People love to say, "Red Hat couldn't exist without <project>" which is true, but what they don't realize is that a ton (sometimes all) of the development of that upstream project is done by Red Hat employees. Without that a lot of projects may not even exist. There are no doubt "open source" companies that take more than they give, but it's a little more nuanced and complicated than people make it out to be.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    Would Elastic be in a position to "close source" / "re-license" their code if Lucene itself wasn't permissively licensed? Your argument's putting the cart before the horse.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      No, offering your code under Apache/MIT is a bell you can't unring. You can stop offering future changes under the license, but everything up to the point where you change the license is available forever.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    And guess what, when a corporation uses Elasticsearch in a serious way they will inevitably end up contributing back. It's actually easier to just get a change merged upstream rather than to manage a whole fork, unless the upstream is really hard to get patches merged with. The whole narrative of "company X is offering Elasticsearch as a service and not contributing back!" is ridiculous. First of all, the whole point of free software is that somebody somewhere is going to be making money with that software, and that's okay, regardless of contribution. Second of all, in practice companies like Elastic will always exaggerate the extent to which corporations aren't "contributing back". What they really mean is Amazon isn't contributing financially to Elastic Co. That's what they're pissed about, and that's why they clearly wish they were actually in the business of proprietary software (which they now are)
eloff 6y ago
What do you expect them to do though? If they want to be viable as a business they need to place some restrictions so they can have a monopoly on some aspect in order to derive profit. If they're not viable as a business, they die and nobody benefits from that. It's this kind of all or nothing criticism that has made me rethink open source. I'm releasing a product this year, and it's going to start under a proprietary license. Because it seems you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. At least commercial closed source products don't attract this kind of criticism.
- shawnz 6y ago
  Agreed, if their hosted cloud services and premium features aren't viable as a business, and they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place.
  - andlarry 6y ago
    You can run the SSPL'd code, you can view the SSPL code, if you change the SSPL code then contribute back if you distribute your changes. If you run a service providing the SSPL code, contribute the management layer back as well. It gets more code into the open, where's the disconnect?
    - shawnz 6y ago
      I am not concerned with the code of other users' management layers. I am concerned with being able to use the code of this product in the way I want to use it. Copyleft is not important to me, I see permissive licensing as being a bigger priority for freedom.
      - andlarry 6y ago
        > they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place. If something satisfies the four freedoms [0], it is free software. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

nopzor 6y ago

contributing back can mean monetarily. i’m sure elastic would be willing to sell a commercial license to a cloud provider if the deal makes sense.

brasetvik 6y ago
They already do. https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-partners-with-alibaba-cloud-to-deliver-elasticsearch-on-alibaba-cloud https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-partners-with-ali...
arpinum 6y ago
Thats fine, but then don't title the blog post "Doubling down on open", make it "Creating a more profitable business model".
- christophilus 6y ago
  Those aren’t necessarily contradictory titles. Large OSS projects require funding, or they run a serious risk of stagnation. If there are massively profitable corporations using OSS and contributing nothing back, or even actively competing with the project, then a more profitable business model may be the best thing an OSS project can do to ensure its longevity.

shawnz 6y ago

Elasticsearch couldn't exist without the open source Lucene project which is at its core. Lucene is licensed under the permissive Apache license which is why Elastic is able to release proprietary paid modules that link with it. Now they are closing the same holes that they themselves used to create their product. Contributing back is definitely the last thing on their minds.

bevacqua 6y ago
Elastic contributes massively to Lucene, so this is a false dichotomy
- freedomben 6y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. Red Hat (my employer currently) is typically in the same boat here and it drives me crazy how people don't think about that before criticizing. People love to say, "Red Hat couldn't exist without <project>" which is true, but what they don't realize is that a ton (sometimes all) of the development of that upstream project is done by Red Hat employees. Without that a lot of projects may not even exist. There are no doubt "open source" companies that take more than they give, but it's a little more nuanced and complicated than people make it out to be.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Would Elastic be in a position to "close source" / "re-license" their code if Lucene itself wasn't permissively licensed? Your argument's putting the cart before the horse.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    No, offering your code under Apache/MIT is a bell you can't unring. You can stop offering future changes under the license, but everything up to the point where you change the license is available forever.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  And guess what, when a corporation uses Elasticsearch in a serious way they will inevitably end up contributing back. It's actually easier to just get a change merged upstream rather than to manage a whole fork, unless the upstream is really hard to get patches merged with. The whole narrative of "company X is offering Elasticsearch as a service and not contributing back!" is ridiculous. First of all, the whole point of free software is that somebody somewhere is going to be making money with that software, and that's okay, regardless of contribution. Second of all, in practice companies like Elastic will always exaggerate the extent to which corporations aren't "contributing back". What they really mean is Amazon isn't contributing financially to Elastic Co. That's what they're pissed about, and that's why they clearly wish they were actually in the business of proprietary software (which they now are)

eloff 6y ago

What do you expect them to do though? If they want to be viable as a business they need to place some restrictions so they can have a monopoly on some aspect in order to derive profit. If they're not viable as a business, they die and nobody benefits from that. It's this kind of all or nothing criticism that has made me rethink open source. I'm releasing a product this year, and it's going to start under a proprietary license. Because it seems you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. At least commercial closed source products don't attract this kind of criticism.

shawnz 6y ago
Agreed, if their hosted cloud services and premium features aren't viable as a business, and they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place.
- andlarry 6y ago
  You can run the SSPL'd code, you can view the SSPL code, if you change the SSPL code then contribute back if you distribute your changes. If you run a service providing the SSPL code, contribute the management layer back as well. It gets more code into the open, where's the disconnect?
  - shawnz 6y ago
    I am not concerned with the code of other users' management layers. I am concerned with being able to use the code of this product in the way I want to use it. Copyleft is not important to me, I see permissive licensing as being a bigger priority for freedom.
    - andlarry 6y ago
      > they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place. If something satisfies the four freedoms [0], it is free software. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en