4 ms·

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

by 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
      - shawnz 6y ago
        How does SSPL satisfy GNU's "freedom 0", to run the program for any purpose?
        zaarn 6y ago
        In the same way the AGPL satisfies it, you can run it for any purpose if you provide the source code to users.
        shawnz 6y ago
        Well, the linked page indicated that copyleft is something that applies only to distribution and not use, but I guess the AGPL shows that that's not true. Nonetheless I don't agree with the GNU's claim that copyleft doesn't reduce freedoms. Of course a permissive license provides more freedoms: it's right there in the name But this issue isn't really about permissive vs copyleft licensing anyway: Had Apache used a copyleft license with Lucene, Elasticsearch would have never existed.
        zaarn 6y ago
        But Amazon is hardly offering Lucene as a SaaS offering, don't they?
        shawnz 6y ago
        If they did, should that mean Elasticsearch can't?
        zaarn 6y ago
        I don't see the point there. Lucene is a library, you can hardly offer it as SaaS. It's gluework. On the other hand, Elastic is much more enduser software, which is much more routinely abused for SaaS hosting by larger corporations.
arpinum 6y ago
I expect Elastic to not pretend they are doing this in the spirit of getting contributions back. Just say that this is in the interests of their business model.
freedomben 6y ago
It's a vocal minority that slings the hate. There are tons of people that appreciate open source with exceptions to prevent managed offerings by cloud providers as long as self-hosting to support your own stuff is allowed (including ability to customize/extend/patch). I for one will (with a few exceptions) only pay for a product that is open source (at least enough so that I can self-host for my own product if I want should things change). Vendor lock-in is a serious problem and concern for many, and open source is how you address that concern. The best example is GitLab, which gets a ton of money from me that would otherwise go to GitHub (which I like better) if GH were open source. By going proprietary you avoid the vocal minority on the internet, but you also (silently) shrink your potential customer pool. Especially with the AWS/Parler stuff, there are even more people that want the option to self-host in case they get de-platformed if the Overton Window continues to shift. May I ask what your product is? Just curious :-)
- eloff 6y ago
  > It's a vocal minority that slings the hate. That's usually the case. > at least enough so that I can self-host for my own product ... Vendor lock-in is a serious problem I'm leery of vendor lock-in myself. Self-hosted will be the only way to run my product in the beginning, and the cloud service will follow when it's popular enough to make sense. > May I ask what your product is? Just curious :-) I haven't published the website yet (it will be at https://flowstate.dev https://flowstate.dev), but it's a framework/runtime for building backend APIs using SQL and JavaScript. It lets you run SQL queries from the browser, among other things. Which sounds crazy, but it actually works well. Once I have a hosted cloud service it becomes a backend-as-a-service platform kind of like Parse or Firebase. I'm not against open-sourcing it down the road, but it can't be an OSI license, and I'll wait until it's big enough that I'm less worried about competitors just lifting my source code. I know copyright laws protect against that, but that only matters if you have the resources to litigate. I do want my users to be able to dig into the source if the documentation is lacking, and also to patch/modify it if they need to - so I need some kind of source-visible license down the road. I think I would also add a clause that if the company goes under or gets acquired and shutdown then all source code gets published under the Apache 2 license.
PeterZaitsev 6y ago
This "We need it for survival" is bullshit. With Elastic being public company you can see their revenue growing 60% last year.... with Apache 2.0 license. It is not the case what we've been loosing revenue for years due to AWS competition and this is the last action of the last resort. This is simply about speeding up the growth at expense of your users which is of course sugarcoated as "it is good for you"
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > speeding up the growth at expense of your users Rather at the "expense" of Amazon AWS
- DetroitThrow 6y ago
  I wish comms were more honest about this, they'd earn more trust than just telling the community SSPL is now an OSS license despite what OSI has shot back about it, and that this is some type of necessary evil.

by eloff 6y ago

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
    - shawnz 6y ago
      How does SSPL satisfy GNU's "freedom 0", to run the program for any purpose?
      - zaarn 6y ago
        In the same way the AGPL satisfies it, you can run it for any purpose if you provide the source code to users.
        shawnz 6y ago
        Well, the linked page indicated that copyleft is something that applies only to distribution and not use, but I guess the AGPL shows that that's not true. Nonetheless I don't agree with the GNU's claim that copyleft doesn't reduce freedoms. Of course a permissive license provides more freedoms: it's right there in the name But this issue isn't really about permissive vs copyleft licensing anyway: Had Apache used a copyleft license with Lucene, Elasticsearch would have never existed.
        zaarn 6y ago
        But Amazon is hardly offering Lucene as a SaaS offering, don't they?
        shawnz 6y ago
        If they did, should that mean Elasticsearch can't?
        zaarn 6y ago
        I don't see the point there. Lucene is a library, you can hardly offer it as SaaS. It's gluework. On the other hand, Elastic is much more enduser software, which is much more routinely abused for SaaS hosting by larger corporations.

arpinum 6y ago

I expect Elastic to not pretend they are doing this in the spirit of getting contributions back. Just say that this is in the interests of their business model.

freedomben 6y ago

It's a vocal minority that slings the hate. There are tons of people that appreciate open source with exceptions to prevent managed offerings by cloud providers as long as self-hosting to support your own stuff is allowed (including ability to customize/extend/patch). I for one will (with a few exceptions) only pay for a product that is open source (at least enough so that I can self-host for my own product if I want should things change). Vendor lock-in is a serious problem and concern for many, and open source is how you address that concern. The best example is GitLab, which gets a ton of money from me that would otherwise go to GitHub (which I like better) if GH were open source. By going proprietary you avoid the vocal minority on the internet, but you also (silently) shrink your potential customer pool. Especially with the AWS/Parler stuff, there are even more people that want the option to self-host in case they get de-platformed if the Overton Window continues to shift. May I ask what your product is? Just curious :-)

eloff 6y ago
> It's a vocal minority that slings the hate. That's usually the case. > at least enough so that I can self-host for my own product ... Vendor lock-in is a serious problem I'm leery of vendor lock-in myself. Self-hosted will be the only way to run my product in the beginning, and the cloud service will follow when it's popular enough to make sense. > May I ask what your product is? Just curious :-) I haven't published the website yet (it will be at https://flowstate.dev https://flowstate.dev), but it's a framework/runtime for building backend APIs using SQL and JavaScript. It lets you run SQL queries from the browser, among other things. Which sounds crazy, but it actually works well. Once I have a hosted cloud service it becomes a backend-as-a-service platform kind of like Parse or Firebase. I'm not against open-sourcing it down the road, but it can't be an OSI license, and I'll wait until it's big enough that I'm less worried about competitors just lifting my source code. I know copyright laws protect against that, but that only matters if you have the resources to litigate. I do want my users to be able to dig into the source if the documentation is lacking, and also to patch/modify it if they need to - so I need some kind of source-visible license down the road. I think I would also add a clause that if the company goes under or gets acquired and shutdown then all source code gets published under the Apache 2 license.

PeterZaitsev 6y ago

This "We need it for survival" is bullshit. With Elastic being public company you can see their revenue growing 60% last year.... with Apache 2.0 license. It is not the case what we've been loosing revenue for years due to AWS competition and this is the last action of the last resort. This is simply about speeding up the growth at expense of your users which is of course sugarcoated as "it is good for you"

cutemonster 6y ago
> speeding up the growth at expense of your users Rather at the "expense" of Amazon AWS
DetroitThrow 6y ago
I wish comms were more honest about this, they'd earn more trust than just telling the community SSPL is now an OSS license despite what OSI has shot back about it, and that this is some type of necessary evil.