16 ms·

Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic

149 points by arghwhat 6y ago

WJW 6y ago
> Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage. It seems more likely that people were using Elastic because it works well and is free, not because it's open source. Still, companies are indeed their own best friends first and friends of their customers and employees second.
- 015a 6y ago
  Users don't generally care that the source is available for the purposes of reading it, or even modifying it. They care that the source is available because its a signal of their freedom to use the software how they wish; whether that's hosting with Elastic, hosting with AWS, or hosting it themselves. Any license which restricts a user's ability to use the software how they wish is no open source license. And the OSI has so far supported this; the SSPL is not an OSI approved license, despite being submitted for approval by MongoDB then retracted a year later.
  - wyattjoh 6y ago
    > Any license which restricts a user's ability to use the software how they wish is no open source license That's the thing though. The only thing (from my naive understanding) that SSPL limits is a business (Like Amazon) from offering Elasticsearch as a service. If an organization (Like Amazon) wanted to use Elasticsearch internally (to say, power some part of their shopping platform), they are free to do so with this license. It's essentially protecting Elastic's business model, which quite honestly, should be the bare minimum offered by any open source product.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      There's nothing wrong with using a licensing model like the one you describe. If don't want Amazon to use your software, then license it as such, whatever. However, that software is not open source. Furthermore, if you change a project which is open source, to a licensing model which is not, it's a dick move. It's not important if the needs of the business are "reasonable", we could argue about that but it's beside the point. Open source has no relationship with the requirements of your business. It has a specific meaning, and if you betray those principles, you betray the people who trusted you on those terms.
  - fabianhjr 6y ago
    There are plenty closed-source (or rather not-open-source) source-available licenses and software. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Source-available_software https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Source-available_software > Any license which restricts a user's ability to use the software how they wish is no open source license. Then is AGPL not open source? It has requirments/restrictions on modified privative usage/distribution.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      AGPL does not restrict how you use the software, rather, it requires that you offer the same freedoms to your users as the original license offered to you. You can sell AGPL'd software.
      - fabianhjr 6y ago
        > AGPL does not restrict how you use the software, rather, it requires that you offer the same freedoms to your users as the original license offered to you. You can sell AGPL'd software. But doesn't SSPL allow you to offer ElasticSearch-as-a-Service as long as you contribute the source code that makes it work? Many have commented on how that requirement is a no-go for AWS however they are not a priori forbidden by the license from doing so.
        ddevault 6y ago
        Elastic explicitly addresses the question of open source in their FAQ: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing#does-this-mean-that-elasticsearch-and-kibana-are-no-longer-open-source https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing#does-this-mean-... Mongo has tried to get the OSI to approve it, but ultimately withdraw the license. The precise semantics of how much or how little the license diverges from the requirements of open source is an interesting topic for another time. For one, no other license, copyleft or otherwise, extends your obligations to software which is not actually a derivative work, which if nothing else requires a novel interpretation of the OSD. For now, though, I'd rather focus on the conclusion: this license does not qualify as open source, and that betrays those who choose to use or contribute to Elastic on the basis of its open source nature. They didn't get on board with the project in order to see how a dubious new license would hold up under scrutiny. This change was made for dubiously-justified commercial reasons on the false presumption that Elastic has the sole right to exploit Elasticsearch (and Kibana) for profit, software that they have shared ownership over (including in terms of copyright) with the broader community. They were allowed to do this, by the letter of the law, but it is fucked up regardless.
throw03172019 6y ago
I thought their license update prohibits making a service that directly sells Elasticsearch? Did I miss that they are moving to closed source?
- TheChaplain 6y ago
  Nope, code is still available as before and you can make changes and run the code at home/work whatever. It's just if you try to sell ES as a service, then you gotta provide your changes to the public.
  - chme 6y ago
    > It's just if you try to sell ES as a service, then you gotta provide your changes to the public. Doesn't this sound a bit like AGPL?
    - karavelov 6y ago
      You can run service using AGPL software, you just have to open source your modifications.
      - chme 6y ago
        Right, isn't that what the person I replied to said?
    - fabianhjr 6y ago
      Yes, but only for ElasticSearch as a service so having ElasticSearch on your backend won't generally require the distribution of the linked source code.
      - chme 6y ago
        So there is a distinction between running a ElasticSearch engine with custom changes in your backend and offering a ElasticSearch engine with custom changes to others as a backend? For a non-lawyer that seems very sketchy... I could understand that people would need some legal advice for that, to understand this stuff in detail...
byefruit 6y ago
The post feels very self-entitled and needlessly inflammatory. Elastic's changing their license. No contributions are being stripped of their open source license. You always have the last open source licensed version to go back to and fork if you like. What this author is upset about is that Elastic are no longer providing updates under a license the author feels they are entitled to. Maybe the author should fork the project and maintain it under an open license themselves?
- 015a 6y ago
  AWS is the company which did this, with Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Turns out, AWS is more user and FOSS-friendly than the "open source company" which created the software in the first place. A surprising twist.
  - byefruit 6y ago
    Is it? Do you really feel AWS' model is healthy for free software in the long term if business models around the creation and maintenance of open source projects disappear? I would say Google's approach of partnering with maintainers instead of competing with them is healthier, though only just.
    - Pet_Ant 6y ago
      I don't know if open-source _businesses_ are healthy for open-source. It seems to fit much better with community volunteer projects without the pressure of trying to develop a business model around them: which feels like the root of the problem. Sponsoring developers with Patreon and donation runs has worked in the past and given us great projects.
      - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
        There is evidence to the contrary that seems to be relevant here. To wit, it's an "open-source business" providing the open source software people apparently feel very strongly about, not a "community volunteer project without the pressure".
Fellshard 6y ago
This smells to me like puritanical, idealized FOSS for a perfectable world, as opposed to pragmatic FOSS for the real world.
- lewiscollard 6y ago
  > as opposed to pragmatic FOSS Call it whatever you like, but it's not "pragmatic FOSS", it's not "FOSS" at all. It is neither free (by the FSF's definition, which goes back to at least 1986), nor open source (by the definition first published in 1998, derived from the DFSG published in 1997). > for the real world The "real world" in which Elastic's revenues, as the article points out, were $427 million last year. And please don't use this cheap rhetorical trick wherein anyone with different priorities must get back to the "real world" (defined loosely as "whatever I say it is").
  - frenchy 6y ago
    > it's not "FOSS" at all Source? I don't remember the url, but the other day someone posted a link to an opinion posted by someone at OSI back when Elastic was thinking of getting certification that basically said: "This licence would probably satisify the OSI defintion, but it's a bad license because it's too vague and you should use the AGPL-3 instead".
    - lewiscollard 6y ago
      I have not read the opinion you refer to, but Elastic themselves admit "it is not an OSI approved license and is not considered open source".[0] > but it's a bad license because it's too vague That has historically[1] been a reason for the free & open source communities to reject licenses; nobody wants cavernous uncertainties about what you can and cannot do under a license's terms. [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification [1] See, e.g., why the FSF rejected the original Artistic License. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLicense https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLi...
- rpdillon 6y ago
m0llusk 6y ago
On the good side it seems like all this controversy is good advertising for Elasticsearch as a product and as a useful code base.
- the-dude 6y ago
  There is no such thing as bad publicity.
darig 6y ago
Trademark office says otherwise, my guy.
JarlUlvi 6y ago
Another AWS apologist...
Jonnax 6y ago
Who is this person? Are they a contributor to Elastic? Or just putting words into their mouths?
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  Nope, but he is a well known Open Source developer and he is good with words. To give the story a bit more context, I always felt that Elastic built on Lucene without giving much back. And, while Lucene is not the standard for clarity itself, the open source code of Elastic is very hard to understand and it has very few comments, AFAIR. It did not feel like the core team was proudly sharing.
  - Chyzwar 6y ago
    If anything elastic is contributing to lucene. https://www.elastic.co/blog/this-year-in-apache-lucene-2019 https://www.elastic.co/blog/this-year-in-apache-lucene-2019
    - ignaloidas 6y ago
      Just as much as their much-hated Amazon https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-apache-lucene/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a...
  - jasontedor 6y ago
    Jason from Elastic here. >To give the story a bit more context, I always felt that Elastic built on Lucene without giving much back. I would love to understand why you have this perspective? Investing in and contributing to Lucene is a core part of the Elasticsearch team. We contribute more to Lucene than any other organization, some of our employees are amongst the top committers, and several of our employees are members of the Lucene PMC. We give back to and [celebrate][0] Lucene openly. We love Lucene. Disclaimer: I am an engineer on the Elasticsearch team; I welcome any and all feedback. [0]: https://www.elastic.co/celebrating-lucene https://www.elastic.co/celebrating-lucene
chme 6y ago
I am currently struggling a bit to understand this, so please correct me if I am wrong. So if I understand this right: Elasticsearch was under the Apache 2.0 license, which, contrary to FOSS-licensed (GPL and co.), allows derivatives to be under a different license. Now they changed to a proprietary source-available license, because Amazon. If that is true, then I don't understand this: Contributors that have contributed to an open-source Apache 2.0 licensed project should have understood, that contributing to such a project means that they don't have the same protections to their work as with a FOSS project and that big companies can just take your contributions and give nothing in return.
- ddevault 6y ago
  It doesn't actually have anything to do with the choice of the Apache license, though you would still be correct in that case. Elastic made users sign a CLA which signs over contributor rights for distribution without any conditions whatsoever, which means that for all they care Elastic could have relicensed it as closed-source, proprietary software. The point is not that they couldn't do this, but that it's a dick move which betrays the trust of their community, and is ultimately harmful to the goals of open source.
  - chme 6y ago
    > The point is not that they couldn't do this, but that it's a dick move which betrays the trust of their community, and is ultimately harmful to the goals of open source. I understand that a re-licensing to proprietary from upstream it self is really annoying and hurtful to the open-source project itself. However the only distinction of upstream doing this with a CLA and somebody else is that upstream can reuse use the project name, infrastructure, etc. Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else? It could also be the beginning of something new: See OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      >Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else? Yep: the community is built around the upstream project, and has a lot invested in their continued existence as an open source entity. This move will force the community to start from scratch to build a new entity which continues to meet those guarantees - something Elastic plans to capitalize on by capturing more users on its paid offering while the open source community struggles to set up a new entity at the same level of sophistication from scratch. The community is not without options, but that doesn't change the fact that what Elastic has done is wrong. Note: HN has been rate limiting me rather strictly today, so I'm losing my ability to keep up with this discussion. Sorry.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jaaron 6y ago
I'm surprised to see the reaction here on HN, but I'm starting to realize I'm from an older generation of open source contributors and don't share the values of some here. The point of open source wasn't to enable viable business models for companies like Elastic. The ASL is commercial-friendly, but the design of the license wasn't to enable any specific business model. It was to ensure the widest range of freedoms. A lot is made of the way Amazon is "taking advantage" of the license, but they aren't. They're doing exactly what is allowed, what anyone is allowed. IMHO, if you're releasing your work under an ASL-like license, then you're making a specific promise to the community about the freedoms related to your code. You're making a promise to all the adopters and contributors. The license is a promise (literally a contract) about what to expect from each other so that we can all contribute on the project together. When an actor unilaterally changes that agreement, it's understandable some may be upset. And while I know it's trendy of HN to discount non-profits like Apache as out of touch or old-school, they serve an important function in the open source ecosystem. As a non-profit, Apache doesn't really care too much what Amazon or any big or small tech company does with the code, as long as the original code remains open source and there is a community that can continue to work on it. The continuation of the community is paramount, above and beyond any one company's business model. We want software, particularly internet middleware, to be stable and last for generations. When we take a long term view for the health of the interview, Elastic's move is great for Elastic, but not for the internet as a whole. Consider where we'll be if/when Elastic collapses. Right now, Elastic has plenty of fans, but we have no guarantee that they will remain competent, competitive, and innovative over time. If their hosted service suffers, their new license ensures that no one else can compete. The advantage of broadly supported open source projects is that they can out last any one company (e.g. Sun) or any one person, so that we can build a technical commons for the future.
- ywei3410 6y ago
  The problem is that there are /two/ aims; one which people agree on, and the second which people disagree on. The first is source /must/ be available and /modifiable/; on that all proponents of FOSS are agreed; exactly for the reasons you've stated. The second is that we want /more/ FOSS software; not less. How we achieve that is essentially where people differ. The issue with big companies which contribute nothing or very little back to the ecosystem is the tragedy of the commons. Eventually, the number of people working on FOSS will dwindle and we won't /have/ FOSS alternatives or communities. For the record, I don't even think that AWS are the worst offenders. I've worked at places which refused to even contribute bug reports or patches to upstream systems.
Isinlor 6y ago
It's clear that the author should not contribute to Apache 2.0 projects, because they do not like freedoms this license provides. They should contribute to projects whose licenses do not allow changing terms of the license easily. That's it.
mrRandomGuy 6y ago
This post reeks of entitlement
jitendrac 6y ago
Keeping personal opinions aside, Elastic has all the rights what they are doing and from the point of view of an organization, I respect their move. We always have the last liberally/permissive open-sourced version of it which we can fork and do whatever we want.
inshadows 6y ago
IANAL If I fork the commit before license change, rename everything to not clash with trademarks, can I then pick commits from their repo into my still-Apache licensed forks? EDIT: Can I use SSPL licensed software in my commercial server-side application for free?
- rognjen 6y ago
  As far as I understand it, you couldn't because the following commits would use be under the new license. And if I remember correctly from some other similar case, picking a commit might create a new version which is then entirely under the new licence. IANAL either though.
rognjen 6y ago
I honestly don't understand how this got so out of control. First of all while there are so many contributors the vast majority of commits seem to be by elastic team members. Secondly, elastic provides a lot more than just the code. Third, they're a for profit company and have been from the beginning. So with all of that in mind to me the change seemed perfectly reasonable. Materially it doesn't really change much for anyone other than Amazon. Last year CockroachDB did the exact same thing and I don't recall anywhere near the outrage. Perhaps it might be because it's significantly less popular but everyone out on their soap boxes now surely should have been making noise then as well. Furthermore, a lot of these arguments seem to be very black and white. You either are or aren't open source. Surely there are shades. Surely the OSI definition isn't the only one. Surely being able to contribute, modify and run for your own purposes still counts for something. It really is the case that everyone wants OSS but no one wants to pay for it.

149 points by arghwhat 6y ago

WJW 6y ago

> Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage. It seems more likely that people were using Elastic because it works well and is free, not because it's open source. Still, companies are indeed their own best friends first and friends of their customers and employees second.

015a 6y ago
Users don't generally care that the source is available for the purposes of reading it, or even modifying it. They care that the source is available because its a signal of their freedom to use the software how they wish; whether that's hosting with Elastic, hosting with AWS, or hosting it themselves. Any license which restricts a user's ability to use the software how they wish is no open source license. And the OSI has so far supported this; the SSPL is not an OSI approved license, despite being submitted for approval by MongoDB then retracted a year later.
- wyattjoh 6y ago
  > Any license which restricts a user's ability to use the software how they wish is no open source license That's the thing though. The only thing (from my naive understanding) that SSPL limits is a business (Like Amazon) from offering Elasticsearch as a service. If an organization (Like Amazon) wanted to use Elasticsearch internally (to say, power some part of their shopping platform), they are free to do so with this license. It's essentially protecting Elastic's business model, which quite honestly, should be the bare minimum offered by any open source product.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    There's nothing wrong with using a licensing model like the one you describe. If don't want Amazon to use your software, then license it as such, whatever. However, that software is not open source. Furthermore, if you change a project which is open source, to a licensing model which is not, it's a dick move. It's not important if the needs of the business are "reasonable", we could argue about that but it's beside the point. Open source has no relationship with the requirements of your business. It has a specific meaning, and if you betray those principles, you betray the people who trusted you on those terms.
- fabianhjr 6y ago
  There are plenty closed-source (or rather not-open-source) source-available licenses and software. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Source-available_software https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Source-available_software > Any license which restricts a user's ability to use the software how they wish is no open source license. Then is AGPL not open source? It has requirments/restrictions on modified privative usage/distribution.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    AGPL does not restrict how you use the software, rather, it requires that you offer the same freedoms to your users as the original license offered to you. You can sell AGPL'd software.
    - fabianhjr 6y ago
      > AGPL does not restrict how you use the software, rather, it requires that you offer the same freedoms to your users as the original license offered to you. You can sell AGPL'd software. But doesn't SSPL allow you to offer ElasticSearch-as-a-Service as long as you contribute the source code that makes it work? Many have commented on how that requirement is a no-go for AWS however they are not a priori forbidden by the license from doing so.
      - ddevault 6y ago
        Elastic explicitly addresses the question of open source in their FAQ: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing#does-this-mean-that-elasticsearch-and-kibana-are-no-longer-open-source https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing#does-this-mean-... Mongo has tried to get the OSI to approve it, but ultimately withdraw the license. The precise semantics of how much or how little the license diverges from the requirements of open source is an interesting topic for another time. For one, no other license, copyleft or otherwise, extends your obligations to software which is not actually a derivative work, which if nothing else requires a novel interpretation of the OSD. For now, though, I'd rather focus on the conclusion: this license does not qualify as open source, and that betrays those who choose to use or contribute to Elastic on the basis of its open source nature. They didn't get on board with the project in order to see how a dubious new license would hold up under scrutiny. This change was made for dubiously-justified commercial reasons on the false presumption that Elastic has the sole right to exploit Elasticsearch (and Kibana) for profit, software that they have shared ownership over (including in terms of copyright) with the broader community. They were allowed to do this, by the letter of the law, but it is fucked up regardless.

throw03172019 6y ago

I thought their license update prohibits making a service that directly sells Elasticsearch? Did I miss that they are moving to closed source?

TheChaplain 6y ago
Nope, code is still available as before and you can make changes and run the code at home/work whatever. It's just if you try to sell ES as a service, then you gotta provide your changes to the public.
- chme 6y ago
  > It's just if you try to sell ES as a service, then you gotta provide your changes to the public. Doesn't this sound a bit like AGPL?
  - karavelov 6y ago
    You can run service using AGPL software, you just have to open source your modifications.
    - chme 6y ago
      Right, isn't that what the person I replied to said?
  - fabianhjr 6y ago
    Yes, but only for ElasticSearch as a service so having ElasticSearch on your backend won't generally require the distribution of the linked source code.
    - chme 6y ago
      So there is a distinction between running a ElasticSearch engine with custom changes in your backend and offering a ElasticSearch engine with custom changes to others as a backend? For a non-lawyer that seems very sketchy... I could understand that people would need some legal advice for that, to understand this stuff in detail...

byefruit 6y ago

The post feels very self-entitled and needlessly inflammatory. Elastic's changing their license. No contributions are being stripped of their open source license. You always have the last open source licensed version to go back to and fork if you like. What this author is upset about is that Elastic are no longer providing updates under a license the author feels they are entitled to. Maybe the author should fork the project and maintain it under an open license themselves?

015a 6y ago
AWS is the company which did this, with Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Turns out, AWS is more user and FOSS-friendly than the "open source company" which created the software in the first place. A surprising twist.
- byefruit 6y ago
  Is it? Do you really feel AWS' model is healthy for free software in the long term if business models around the creation and maintenance of open source projects disappear? I would say Google's approach of partnering with maintainers instead of competing with them is healthier, though only just.
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    I don't know if open-source _businesses_ are healthy for open-source. It seems to fit much better with community volunteer projects without the pressure of trying to develop a business model around them: which feels like the root of the problem. Sponsoring developers with Patreon and donation runs has worked in the past and given us great projects.
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
      There is evidence to the contrary that seems to be relevant here. To wit, it's an "open-source business" providing the open source software people apparently feel very strongly about, not a "community volunteer project without the pressure".

Fellshard 6y ago

This smells to me like puritanical, idealized FOSS for a perfectable world, as opposed to pragmatic FOSS for the real world.

lewiscollard 6y ago
> as opposed to pragmatic FOSS Call it whatever you like, but it's not "pragmatic FOSS", it's not "FOSS" at all. It is neither free (by the FSF's definition, which goes back to at least 1986), nor open source (by the definition first published in 1998, derived from the DFSG published in 1997). > for the real world The "real world" in which Elastic's revenues, as the article points out, were $427 million last year. And please don't use this cheap rhetorical trick wherein anyone with different priorities must get back to the "real world" (defined loosely as "whatever I say it is").
- frenchy 6y ago
  > it's not "FOSS" at all Source? I don't remember the url, but the other day someone posted a link to an opinion posted by someone at OSI back when Elastic was thinking of getting certification that basically said: "This licence would probably satisify the OSI defintion, but it's a bad license because it's too vague and you should use the AGPL-3 instead".
  - lewiscollard 6y ago
    I have not read the opinion you refer to, but Elastic themselves admit "it is not an OSI approved license and is not considered open source".[0] > but it's a bad license because it's too vague That has historically[1] been a reason for the free & open source communities to reject licenses; nobody wants cavernous uncertainties about what you can and cannot do under a license's terms. [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification [1] See, e.g., why the FSF rejected the original Artistic License. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLicense https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLi...
rpdillon 6y ago

m0llusk 6y ago

On the good side it seems like all this controversy is good advertising for Elasticsearch as a product and as a useful code base.

the-dude 6y ago
There is no such thing as bad publicity.

darig 6y ago

Trademark office says otherwise, my guy.

JarlUlvi 6y ago

Another AWS apologist...

Jonnax 6y ago

Who is this person? Are they a contributor to Elastic? Or just putting words into their mouths?

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
Nope, but he is a well known Open Source developer and he is good with words. To give the story a bit more context, I always felt that Elastic built on Lucene without giving much back. And, while Lucene is not the standard for clarity itself, the open source code of Elastic is very hard to understand and it has very few comments, AFAIR. It did not feel like the core team was proudly sharing.
- Chyzwar 6y ago
  If anything elastic is contributing to lucene. https://www.elastic.co/blog/this-year-in-apache-lucene-2019 https://www.elastic.co/blog/this-year-in-apache-lucene-2019
  - ignaloidas 6y ago
    Just as much as their much-hated Amazon https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-apache-lucene/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a...
- jasontedor 6y ago
  Jason from Elastic here. >To give the story a bit more context, I always felt that Elastic built on Lucene without giving much back. I would love to understand why you have this perspective? Investing in and contributing to Lucene is a core part of the Elasticsearch team. We contribute more to Lucene than any other organization, some of our employees are amongst the top committers, and several of our employees are members of the Lucene PMC. We give back to and [celebrate][0] Lucene openly. We love Lucene. Disclaimer: I am an engineer on the Elasticsearch team; I welcome any and all feedback. [0]: https://www.elastic.co/celebrating-lucene https://www.elastic.co/celebrating-lucene

chme 6y ago

I am currently struggling a bit to understand this, so please correct me if I am wrong. So if I understand this right: Elasticsearch was under the Apache 2.0 license, which, contrary to FOSS-licensed (GPL and co.), allows derivatives to be under a different license. Now they changed to a proprietary source-available license, because Amazon. If that is true, then I don't understand this: Contributors that have contributed to an open-source Apache 2.0 licensed project should have understood, that contributing to such a project means that they don't have the same protections to their work as with a FOSS project and that big companies can just take your contributions and give nothing in return.

ddevault 6y ago
It doesn't actually have anything to do with the choice of the Apache license, though you would still be correct in that case. Elastic made users sign a CLA which signs over contributor rights for distribution without any conditions whatsoever, which means that for all they care Elastic could have relicensed it as closed-source, proprietary software. The point is not that they couldn't do this, but that it's a dick move which betrays the trust of their community, and is ultimately harmful to the goals of open source.
- chme 6y ago
  > The point is not that they couldn't do this, but that it's a dick move which betrays the trust of their community, and is ultimately harmful to the goals of open source. I understand that a re-licensing to proprietary from upstream it self is really annoying and hurtful to the open-source project itself. However the only distinction of upstream doing this with a CLA and somebody else is that upstream can reuse use the project name, infrastructure, etc. Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else? It could also be the beginning of something new: See OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    >Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else? Yep: the community is built around the upstream project, and has a lot invested in their continued existence as an open source entity. This move will force the community to start from scratch to build a new entity which continues to meet those guarantees - something Elastic plans to capitalize on by capturing more users on its paid offering while the open source community struggles to set up a new entity at the same level of sophistication from scratch. The community is not without options, but that doesn't change the fact that what Elastic has done is wrong. Note: HN has been rate limiting me rather strictly today, so I'm losing my ability to keep up with this discussion. Sorry.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jaaron 6y ago

I'm surprised to see the reaction here on HN, but I'm starting to realize I'm from an older generation of open source contributors and don't share the values of some here. The point of open source wasn't to enable viable business models for companies like Elastic. The ASL is commercial-friendly, but the design of the license wasn't to enable any specific business model. It was to ensure the widest range of freedoms. A lot is made of the way Amazon is "taking advantage" of the license, but they aren't. They're doing exactly what is allowed, what anyone is allowed. IMHO, if you're releasing your work under an ASL-like license, then you're making a specific promise to the community about the freedoms related to your code. You're making a promise to all the adopters and contributors. The license is a promise (literally a contract) about what to expect from each other so that we can all contribute on the project together. When an actor unilaterally changes that agreement, it's understandable some may be upset. And while I know it's trendy of HN to discount non-profits like Apache as out of touch or old-school, they serve an important function in the open source ecosystem. As a non-profit, Apache doesn't really care too much what Amazon or any big or small tech company does with the code, as long as the original code remains open source and there is a community that can continue to work on it. The continuation of the community is paramount, above and beyond any one company's business model. We want software, particularly internet middleware, to be stable and last for generations. When we take a long term view for the health of the interview, Elastic's move is great for Elastic, but not for the internet as a whole. Consider where we'll be if/when Elastic collapses. Right now, Elastic has plenty of fans, but we have no guarantee that they will remain competent, competitive, and innovative over time. If their hosted service suffers, their new license ensures that no one else can compete. The advantage of broadly supported open source projects is that they can out last any one company (e.g. Sun) or any one person, so that we can build a technical commons for the future.

ywei3410 6y ago
The problem is that there are /two/ aims; one which people agree on, and the second which people disagree on. The first is source /must/ be available and /modifiable/; on that all proponents of FOSS are agreed; exactly for the reasons you've stated. The second is that we want /more/ FOSS software; not less. How we achieve that is essentially where people differ. The issue with big companies which contribute nothing or very little back to the ecosystem is the tragedy of the commons. Eventually, the number of people working on FOSS will dwindle and we won't /have/ FOSS alternatives or communities. For the record, I don't even think that AWS are the worst offenders. I've worked at places which refused to even contribute bug reports or patches to upstream systems.

Isinlor 6y ago

It's clear that the author should not contribute to Apache 2.0 projects, because they do not like freedoms this license provides. They should contribute to projects whose licenses do not allow changing terms of the license easily. That's it.

mrRandomGuy 6y ago

This post reeks of entitlement

jitendrac 6y ago

Keeping personal opinions aside, Elastic has all the rights what they are doing and from the point of view of an organization, I respect their move. We always have the last liberally/permissive open-sourced version of it which we can fork and do whatever we want.

inshadows 6y ago

IANAL If I fork the commit before license change, rename everything to not clash with trademarks, can I then pick commits from their repo into my still-Apache licensed forks? EDIT: Can I use SSPL licensed software in my commercial server-side application for free?

rognjen 6y ago
As far as I understand it, you couldn't because the following commits would use be under the new license. And if I remember correctly from some other similar case, picking a commit might create a new version which is then entirely under the new licence. IANAL either though.

rognjen 6y ago

I honestly don't understand how this got so out of control. First of all while there are so many contributors the vast majority of commits seem to be by elastic team members. Secondly, elastic provides a lot more than just the code. Third, they're a for profit company and have been from the beginning. So with all of that in mind to me the change seemed perfectly reasonable. Materially it doesn't really change much for anyone other than Amazon. Last year CockroachDB did the exact same thing and I don't recall anywhere near the outrage. Perhaps it might be because it's significantly less popular but everyone out on their soap boxes now surely should have been making noise then as well. Furthermore, a lot of these arguments seem to be very black and white. You either are or aren't open source. Surely there are shades. Surely the OSI definition isn't the only one. Surely being able to contribute, modify and run for your own purposes still counts for something. It really is the case that everyone wants OSS but no one wants to pay for it.