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Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Yet it would'

Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor, which was never a realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to cost so much, I guess.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The lesson I’m taking away from this is just use a license like they’re using now from day 1. Sure, if your whole business model is “sell a SaaS”, then making the whole offering an open source product that is simple for other people to host and offer an equivalent (or, if integrated with other offerings you don’t have, often more compelling) service is a bad choice. But people choose open source licensing for a reason, and against competing software, a proprietary license can be a negative feature which makes it harder to grow mindshare and prove out utility.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  > that is simple for other people to host Literally one of the selling points of ES amongst my peers was that it was easier to set up to host in a multi-node cloud than the earlier Solr. Which is great, good for them! But... yeah.
__blockcipher__ 6y ago
> Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so - because they're (a) no longer an open-source company [except for beats/etc which only works in the context of the now-proprietary elasticsearch/kibana], and (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0
- syshum 6y ago
  This is where the Free Software, ideology, and the "open Source" ideology really show its difference I view SSPL as a Copy Left style License for the SaaS age. They picked the wrong license in the first place with Apache, they should have used GPL, AGPL, or some other copy left anyway I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off the work for their own commercial offers while giving nothing back
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    I suspect the Free Software foundation would strongly disagree. Copyleft licenses such as AGPL are open source licenses, because they preserve user freedom. The SSPL is not an open source license (and likely not even Copyleft) because it restricts user freedom that have usually been guaranteed by FLOSS. https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099 Open source isn’t about guaranteeing a for-profit company a business model. “Leeching” is irrelevant (and also just Elastic marketing propaganda). User freedom is the whole point.
    - syshum 6y ago
      Elastic marketing did not come up with describing AWS or any of the other big tech companies as leeches. That has been around for a very long time I am aware FSF would disagree with my position, AGPL is better than SSPL. As to OSI, I have losts of issue with OSI as an organization, and when they state "But Elastic’s relicensing is not evidence of any failure of the open source licensing model or a gap in open source licenses. " they are simply wrong There is a clear gap in open source licenses when it comes to dealing with SaaS, the fact they do no see this gap is very telling. the Free Software community saw this problem and thus the AGPL was born, something like AGPL is needed for open source, but OSI refused to even acknowledge there is a problem let alone look for solutions to it //And no Free Software is not the same as Open Source Software, they should not be linked as being the same edit: >>User freedom is the whole point. Free Software is about user freedom Open Source is about Developer Freedom, that has always been the big difference. Apache, MIT, BSD etc are all licenses that allow devs to take code, use it in commerical products. That is why you see places like GitHub default to these non-copy left licenses. Free Software is about copy left, GPL and the like. Because it gives USERS freedom
kbenson 6y ago
> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)? One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental. I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.
- dnautics 6y ago
  > I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative. Amazing. I think capitalism wouldn't be hurt if occasionally companies made the choice to end themselves "get out while you're no top" and distribute their wealth to the stakeholders, ideally with some sort of bonus to the terminal employees. Of course, the employees might not like that, but it is an attitude of entitlement (if an understandable one) to think that you should have a job for life.
  - liuliu 6y ago
    Agreed. This is quite insightful bit from kbenson. It explains well the mystery I was wondering for a while: why company wrote the code in the first place cannot compete successfully against others who supposedly have less expertise and has to rely on license change to defend their moat. Software matures, and the expertise transfers to many other people while it matures. That shared expertise enters into public common for good. Natural and beautiful.
bigiain 6y ago
> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Maybe. I can no longer tick the "does it use an approved open source license" compliance checkbox any more. Sadly, for me, there's now a very strong incentive to move forward with an Apache2.0 licensed Amazon fork instead of the Elastic one.
- sg47 6y ago
  How many developers does AWS have contributing to ES vs Elastic? Besides those 9 PRs, what has AWS contributed back to ES?
  - somethingwitty1 6y ago
    The article does say they made 230+ contributions last year to the OSS Elastic is (was?) built on. Not sure how one counts those, but perhaps it helped Elastic as well?
- lscotte 6y ago
  Interesting. ElasticSearch might have OpenOffice'd or Hudson'd themselves.
  - basilgohar 6y ago
    I would call this MongoDB'd themselves. Except that also would imply that people are still interested in MongoDB. I think their license move probably just accelerated the decline in interest in their product.
    - sullivanmatt 6y ago
      Mongo adoption has risen at a rapid rate, and cloud services now make up nearly 40% of their revenue (which, in turn, allows the company to push those $$$ into the core product). Your statement, while a common view on HN, is not correct. Just because tech bros have moved on towards other interests has not meant that adoption of Mongo has faltered. (I am not affiliated with, nor own stock in, MongoDB, Inc in any way)
xxs 6y ago
> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. While true, personally I'd not be willing to contribute to such a project. Of course, such a license would require legal blessing, which in itself is a lot of (paper) work. What if, the company decides to change the license in an year?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  I think it’s significant in this case that most of the development of ES and the underlying engine is done by Elastic. This re-licensing is only of interest because it means most ongoing work on the project will now happen under the new license. If that was not the case nobody would care, the contributors could fork back to Apache 2.0 and continue. After all, the ElasticSearch license used up until 7.1 also allows me to fork the project under a new restrictive license, but nobody is likely to care if I did.
StopHammoTime 6y ago
It wouldn't have been picked up by the community if it weren't Open Source. Yes, you may have used it if the current product just appeared on the market with a source available license but that's not what happened. People used and recommended the software for years because it was Open Source. People contributed to the project because it was Open Source. It became popular BECAUSE of Open Source. Your argument doesn't work because you wouldn't have known about it if it wasn't Open Source.
bawolff 6y ago
> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. It would have prevented its use in a previous company i worked at (largely for ideaological not practical concerns). > Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor, which was never a realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to cost so much, I guess. That seems like a silly conclusion. Amazon is being a good actor by all accounts. On top of that Elastic is like a 15 billion dollar company, if that's not working, i need to get going on a business venture that doesnt work. Anyways what makes you think they would be succesful if they used the license from day 1. Having your cake and eating it too only works if you switch halfway through.
signal11 6y ago
> The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1 You’re welcome to license under SSPL (or AGPL) if you wish. But if you want commercial customers (or even users), you’ll have to bear in mind that licenses like SSPL are a “no” (or at least, requires legal review) in many commercial entities, including startups. Licenses like SSPL won’t give you the growth a new entrant could potentially get with a more commercially friendly FOSS license, because your potential users/customers will see it as a proprietary product and evaluate you as such. In Elastic’s specific case, iirc a major competitor for them was the proprietary Splunk, so Elastic being FOSS really helped their case. Had they been SSPL from day 1, their growth trajectory would have likely been different.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> The lesson I’m taking away from this is just use a license like they’re using now from day 1. Sure, if your whole business model is “sell a SaaS”, then making the whole offering an open source product that is simple for other people to host and offer an equivalent (or, if integrated with other offerings you don’t have, often more compelling) service is a bad choice. But people choose open source licensing for a reason, and against competing software, a proprietary license can be a negative feature which makes it harder to grow mindshare and prove out utility.

jrochkind1 6y ago
> that is simple for other people to host Literally one of the selling points of ES amongst my peers was that it was easier to set up to host in a multi-node cloud than the earlier Solr. Which is great, good for them! But... yeah.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

> Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so - because they're (a) no longer an open-source company [except for beats/etc which only works in the context of the now-proprietary elasticsearch/kibana], and (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0

syshum 6y ago
This is where the Free Software, ideology, and the "open Source" ideology really show its difference I view SSPL as a Copy Left style License for the SaaS age. They picked the wrong license in the first place with Apache, they should have used GPL, AGPL, or some other copy left anyway I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off the work for their own commercial offers while giving nothing back
- parasubvert 6y ago
  I suspect the Free Software foundation would strongly disagree. Copyleft licenses such as AGPL are open source licenses, because they preserve user freedom. The SSPL is not an open source license (and likely not even Copyleft) because it restricts user freedom that have usually been guaranteed by FLOSS. https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099 Open source isn’t about guaranteeing a for-profit company a business model. “Leeching” is irrelevant (and also just Elastic marketing propaganda). User freedom is the whole point.
  - syshum 6y ago
    Elastic marketing did not come up with describing AWS or any of the other big tech companies as leeches. That has been around for a very long time I am aware FSF would disagree with my position, AGPL is better than SSPL. As to OSI, I have losts of issue with OSI as an organization, and when they state "But Elastic’s relicensing is not evidence of any failure of the open source licensing model or a gap in open source licenses. " they are simply wrong There is a clear gap in open source licenses when it comes to dealing with SaaS, the fact they do no see this gap is very telling. the Free Software community saw this problem and thus the AGPL was born, something like AGPL is needed for open source, but OSI refused to even acknowledge there is a problem let alone look for solutions to it //And no Free Software is not the same as Open Source Software, they should not be linked as being the same edit: >>User freedom is the whole point. Free Software is about user freedom Open Source is about Developer Freedom, that has always been the big difference. Apache, MIT, BSD etc are all licenses that allow devs to take code, use it in commerical products. That is why you see places like GitHub default to these non-copy left licenses. Free Software is about copy left, GPL and the like. Because it gives USERS freedom

kbenson 6y ago

> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)? One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental. I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.

dnautics 6y ago
> I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative. Amazing. I think capitalism wouldn't be hurt if occasionally companies made the choice to end themselves "get out while you're no top" and distribute their wealth to the stakeholders, ideally with some sort of bonus to the terminal employees. Of course, the employees might not like that, but it is an attitude of entitlement (if an understandable one) to think that you should have a job for life.
- liuliu 6y ago
  Agreed. This is quite insightful bit from kbenson. It explains well the mystery I was wondering for a while: why company wrote the code in the first place cannot compete successfully against others who supposedly have less expertise and has to rely on license change to defend their moat. Software matures, and the expertise transfers to many other people while it matures. That shared expertise enters into public common for good. Natural and beautiful.

bigiain 6y ago

> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Maybe. I can no longer tick the "does it use an approved open source license" compliance checkbox any more. Sadly, for me, there's now a very strong incentive to move forward with an Apache2.0 licensed Amazon fork instead of the Elastic one.

sg47 6y ago
How many developers does AWS have contributing to ES vs Elastic? Besides those 9 PRs, what has AWS contributed back to ES?
- somethingwitty1 6y ago
  The article does say they made 230+ contributions last year to the OSS Elastic is (was?) built on. Not sure how one counts those, but perhaps it helped Elastic as well?
lscotte 6y ago
Interesting. ElasticSearch might have OpenOffice'd or Hudson'd themselves.
- basilgohar 6y ago
  I would call this MongoDB'd themselves. Except that also would imply that people are still interested in MongoDB. I think their license move probably just accelerated the decline in interest in their product.
  - sullivanmatt 6y ago
    Mongo adoption has risen at a rapid rate, and cloud services now make up nearly 40% of their revenue (which, in turn, allows the company to push those $$$ into the core product). Your statement, while a common view on HN, is not correct. Just because tech bros have moved on towards other interests has not meant that adoption of Mongo has faltered. (I am not affiliated with, nor own stock in, MongoDB, Inc in any way)

xxs 6y ago

> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. While true, personally I'd not be willing to contribute to such a project. Of course, such a license would require legal blessing, which in itself is a lot of (paper) work. What if, the company decides to change the license in an year?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
I think it’s significant in this case that most of the development of ES and the underlying engine is done by Elastic. This re-licensing is only of interest because it means most ongoing work on the project will now happen under the new license. If that was not the case nobody would care, the contributors could fork back to Apache 2.0 and continue. After all, the ElasticSearch license used up until 7.1 also allows me to fork the project under a new restrictive license, but nobody is likely to care if I did.

StopHammoTime 6y ago

It wouldn't have been picked up by the community if it weren't Open Source. Yes, you may have used it if the current product just appeared on the market with a source available license but that's not what happened. People used and recommended the software for years because it was Open Source. People contributed to the project because it was Open Source. It became popular BECAUSE of Open Source. Your argument doesn't work because you wouldn't have known about it if it wasn't Open Source.

bawolff 6y ago

> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. It would have prevented its use in a previous company i worked at (largely for ideaological not practical concerns). > Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor, which was never a realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to cost so much, I guess. That seems like a silly conclusion. Amazon is being a good actor by all accounts. On top of that Elastic is like a 15 billion dollar company, if that's not working, i need to get going on a business venture that doesnt work. Anyways what makes you think they would be succesful if they used the license from day 1. Having your cake and eating it too only works if you switch halfway through.

signal11 6y ago

> The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1 You’re welcome to license under SSPL (or AGPL) if you wish. But if you want commercial customers (or even users), you’ll have to bear in mind that licenses like SSPL are a “no” (or at least, requires legal review) in many commercial entities, including startups. Licenses like SSPL won’t give you the growth a new entrant could potentially get with a more commercially friendly FOSS license, because your potential users/customers will see it as a proprietary product and evaluate you as such. In Elastic’s specific case, iirc a major competitor for them was the proprietary Splunk, so Elastic being FOSS really helped their case. Had they been SSPL from day 1, their growth trajectory would have likely been different.