7 ms·

This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.

worldsayshi 6y ago
My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again. So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.
- glogla 6y ago
  That's a very good description. Thank you. (sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough)
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Yeah let's talk about greed for a second. Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment. So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in. Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway. And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack. Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>? So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought. They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for. They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this: > The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
  - glogla 6y ago
    > Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist Yes, that's why you and people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society) will never agree on matters of ethics and morality. The gist of it is that what Amazon is doing is exploitative - and some people think that's despicable even if legal - and some people think being exploitative is just smart business play - why leave money on the table? Those two groups of people will never agree, not matter how long will they shout at each other.
    - julianmarq 6y ago
      > people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society) Do you really think that liking open source is in any way correlated with politics?[1] I'd like to read a source on that one, because it's certainly not been my experience. Maybe we've contributed to different projects and/or read different people. But even that aside, you think that everyone who likes open source is condemning amazon and on elastic's side? That is even more suspect. Just as an example, the creator of sourcehut has been criticizing elastic all week, and all of his posts—at least one of them explicitly saying that Amazon is definitely allowed to do what it's doing—have reached the front page here. And he's someone whose "liking open source" credentials are good enough, I think. [1]: I'm not even going to get into other implication, that wanting to improve society is also in any way related to any given political leaning.
    - parasubvert 6y ago
      Except What Elastic is doing is fundamentally opposed to open source, and what Amazon is doing is fundamentally aligned. At least according to the OSI, who last I checked, really care about open source ideals. https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099
      - bigiain 6y ago
        It's not like the OSI and the FSF haven't got at least a few major differences about "ideals" though. Pretty sure rms is 100% convinced _both_ sides of this disagreement are morally wrong.
- chc 6y ago
  Amazon's forks will still be Apache-licensed, so if there's a tit-for-tat element here, it appears to be Amazon responding to Elastic's abandonment of open-source.
  - glogla 6y ago
    Depends if they actually develop it. For other open source software, they usually keep improvements (say, improvements to Spark working with S3 from EMR, to give example from my area) to themselves in proprietary modules.
  - worldsayshi 6y ago
    Yeah, and here I feel that there's something missing in my description. While I think Elastics move is bad I definitely don't feel like Amazon is the good guy here either. I feel that there's a good chance that Amazon steam rolls Elastic and then five ten years away the community is worse off.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Open Source makes the most sense when your position is “I made this because it solved a problem I had and am giving it away so that it might solve problems for you.” We might actually be better off with Amazon as the steward because they don’t need to make money on the software itself.
      - worldsayshi 6y ago
        > need to make money on the software itself. It would make a lot of sense for them to slowly close it down or modify it so that it eventually only makes sense to use it on their platform. Or something similar. And given what I've seen from their behaviour I would expect them to exploit whatever market leverage they can.
        liuliu 6y ago
        What you described is exactly what Elastic doing now, and it triggers a fork. We will be fine if it happens again.
- TheDong 6y ago
  > Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward. If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead. The AGPL would ensure users of elasticsearch, whether hosted by elastic or AWS, have access to the source code of the software they're using.
  - worldsayshi 6y ago
    A restrictive licence limits the potential value that the code can bring to the world. To maximize the value you bring as an open source developer you can't expect returns (to the community), only hope for it.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      > To maximize the value you ... ... have to let Bezos et al. exploit it? (And that's maybe not as bad a thing as it sounds on the surface. Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, HAProxy, Nginx, and probably hundreds of open source projects I can't even start to list don't seem to feel the need to come out swinging like Elastic/Mongo/Redis have. )
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    > If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead. But Amazon is releasing their source code. Even more of it than Elastic.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  > Open source is a type of generosity. Open source should be about optimisation. For example you have some infrastructure code (like LLVM, Linux kernel, etc.) that brings you little competitive advantage but you benefit from distributed maintenance - OSS is a perfect fit. And people using it but not contributing back is not really that big of a deal. The incentives to upstream exist without licensing requirement - maintaining a fork which when the upstream knows nothing about what you're doing and could break you with every commit is not fun. You also lose on distributed review/support aspect. At the end of the day if someone finds a way to profit and not contribute back - how does that impact you ? Unless they are a direct competitor and you OSS something critical - in which case like people above said - you should rethink your business model. Also OSS has a bunch of secondary benefits - recruiting, developer mindshare, etc. I think viewing OSS as a generosity is not sustainable, and the incentives exist even without restrictive licensing.
  - worldsayshi 6y ago
    > Open source should be about optimisation. Sure it's nice when you can motivate it like that but I feel that the long tail of open source projects doesn't fit your description but are projects driven by a few enthusiasts.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Maybe? Brian Behlendorf didn't write Apache (or more accurately, patch NCSA httpd) out of "generosity", he was doing what was known back then as "scratching his own itch". Sure, he generously gave it away as well, but that was after he'd done the work to benefit _himself_. Same with Larry Wall and Perl. He wrote the language he wanted, and shared it afterwards. He didn't write it out of generosity (and to be fair, he is 100% the sort of person who might have). I think the dual license strategy Larry chose for Perl really shines light on his motivations, "use GPL if you want to, use the enormously more permissive Artistic License if you want to". He just wanted anybody who might find his software useful for any reason at all (including becoming insanely rich, if they could work out how to do so) to be able to use Perl.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  I don't get it. I can understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about payback and with no expectation of reciprocity. I can also understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about reciprocity while having some expectation of reciprocity (like, "I'll do someone a favor, and it sure would be nice if they return a favor one day"). But why would you very deliberately choose a software license which very explicitly distinguishes itself from normal proprietary software licenses by spelling out how it requires no payment and will always require no payment (and in some cases, explicitly prohibits anyone else from requiring payment!), and still maintain an expectation of payment?
Seanambers 6y ago
Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to contribute to free software. But when others can live in mansions because of it, maybe not so much :)
caconym_ 6y ago
> This is the whole point of open source. What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.
- danShumway 6y ago
  I think GP meant that allowing for forks is the point of Open Source. Which I would argue is kind of a big point of Open Source -- the point isn't who's doing the forking or who's profiting -- but the point is that forks like this are intentionally allowed.
  - caconym_ 6y ago
    Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point, either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I should rephrase to say it's a point. I could see someone arguing that forking is just a component of the deeper philosophical attitude about how people can use and distribute and modify code in general. Forking is the/a point in the sense that I can't think of a version of Open Source that is still Open Source but that doesn't allow forking -- that allowing for forking is a deliberate choice, not an accidental one.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"? Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...
sciurus 6y ago
Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ > Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.
- wpaladin 6y ago
  Kafka is an ASF project, and not controlled by Confluent. There is nothing stopping anyone from offering a hosted Kafka. You seem to be conflating Kafka with Confluent's own products. >No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors. I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.

worldsayshi 6y ago

My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again. So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.

glogla 6y ago
That's a very good description. Thank you. (sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough)
__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Yeah let's talk about greed for a second. Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment. So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in. Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway. And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack. Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>? So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought. They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for. They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this: > The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
- glogla 6y ago
  > Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist Yes, that's why you and people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society) will never agree on matters of ethics and morality. The gist of it is that what Amazon is doing is exploitative - and some people think that's despicable even if legal - and some people think being exploitative is just smart business play - why leave money on the table? Those two groups of people will never agree, not matter how long will they shout at each other.
  - julianmarq 6y ago
    > people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society) Do you really think that liking open source is in any way correlated with politics?[1] I'd like to read a source on that one, because it's certainly not been my experience. Maybe we've contributed to different projects and/or read different people. But even that aside, you think that everyone who likes open source is condemning amazon and on elastic's side? That is even more suspect. Just as an example, the creator of sourcehut has been criticizing elastic all week, and all of his posts—at least one of them explicitly saying that Amazon is definitely allowed to do what it's doing—have reached the front page here. And he's someone whose "liking open source" credentials are good enough, I think. [1]: I'm not even going to get into other implication, that wanting to improve society is also in any way related to any given political leaning.
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    Except What Elastic is doing is fundamentally opposed to open source, and what Amazon is doing is fundamentally aligned. At least according to the OSI, who last I checked, really care about open source ideals. https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099
    - bigiain 6y ago
      It's not like the OSI and the FSF haven't got at least a few major differences about "ideals" though. Pretty sure rms is 100% convinced _both_ sides of this disagreement are morally wrong.
chc 6y ago
Amazon's forks will still be Apache-licensed, so if there's a tit-for-tat element here, it appears to be Amazon responding to Elastic's abandonment of open-source.
- glogla 6y ago
  Depends if they actually develop it. For other open source software, they usually keep improvements (say, improvements to Spark working with S3 from EMR, to give example from my area) to themselves in proprietary modules.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  Yeah, and here I feel that there's something missing in my description. While I think Elastics move is bad I definitely don't feel like Amazon is the good guy here either. I feel that there's a good chance that Amazon steam rolls Elastic and then five ten years away the community is worse off.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Open Source makes the most sense when your position is “I made this because it solved a problem I had and am giving it away so that it might solve problems for you.” We might actually be better off with Amazon as the steward because they don’t need to make money on the software itself.
    - worldsayshi 6y ago
      > need to make money on the software itself. It would make a lot of sense for them to slowly close it down or modify it so that it eventually only makes sense to use it on their platform. Or something similar. And given what I've seen from their behaviour I would expect them to exploit whatever market leverage they can.
      - liuliu 6y ago
        What you described is exactly what Elastic doing now, and it triggers a fork. We will be fine if it happens again.
TheDong 6y ago
> Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward. If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead. The AGPL would ensure users of elasticsearch, whether hosted by elastic or AWS, have access to the source code of the software they're using.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  A restrictive licence limits the potential value that the code can bring to the world. To maximize the value you bring as an open source developer you can't expect returns (to the community), only hope for it.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > To maximize the value you ... ... have to let Bezos et al. exploit it? (And that's maybe not as bad a thing as it sounds on the surface. Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, HAProxy, Nginx, and probably hundreds of open source projects I can't even start to list don't seem to feel the need to come out swinging like Elastic/Mongo/Redis have. )
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead. But Amazon is releasing their source code. Even more of it than Elastic.
reader_mode 6y ago
> Open source is a type of generosity. Open source should be about optimisation. For example you have some infrastructure code (like LLVM, Linux kernel, etc.) that brings you little competitive advantage but you benefit from distributed maintenance - OSS is a perfect fit. And people using it but not contributing back is not really that big of a deal. The incentives to upstream exist without licensing requirement - maintaining a fork which when the upstream knows nothing about what you're doing and could break you with every commit is not fun. You also lose on distributed review/support aspect. At the end of the day if someone finds a way to profit and not contribute back - how does that impact you ? Unless they are a direct competitor and you OSS something critical - in which case like people above said - you should rethink your business model. Also OSS has a bunch of secondary benefits - recruiting, developer mindshare, etc. I think viewing OSS as a generosity is not sustainable, and the incentives exist even without restrictive licensing.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  > Open source should be about optimisation. Sure it's nice when you can motivate it like that but I feel that the long tail of open source projects doesn't fit your description but are projects driven by a few enthusiasts.
bigiain 6y ago
Maybe? Brian Behlendorf didn't write Apache (or more accurately, patch NCSA httpd) out of "generosity", he was doing what was known back then as "scratching his own itch". Sure, he generously gave it away as well, but that was after he'd done the work to benefit _himself_. Same with Larry Wall and Perl. He wrote the language he wanted, and shared it afterwards. He didn't write it out of generosity (and to be fair, he is 100% the sort of person who might have). I think the dual license strategy Larry chose for Perl really shines light on his motivations, "use GPL if you want to, use the enormously more permissive Artistic License if you want to". He just wanted anybody who might find his software useful for any reason at all (including becoming insanely rich, if they could work out how to do so) to be able to use Perl.
tshaddox 6y ago
I don't get it. I can understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about payback and with no expectation of reciprocity. I can also understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about reciprocity while having some expectation of reciprocity (like, "I'll do someone a favor, and it sure would be nice if they return a favor one day"). But why would you very deliberately choose a software license which very explicitly distinguishes itself from normal proprietary software licenses by spelling out how it requires no payment and will always require no payment (and in some cases, explicitly prohibits anyone else from requiring payment!), and still maintain an expectation of payment?

Seanambers 6y ago

Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to contribute to free software. But when others can live in mansions because of it, maybe not so much :)

caconym_ 6y ago

> This is the whole point of open source. What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.

danShumway 6y ago
I think GP meant that allowing for forks is the point of Open Source. Which I would argue is kind of a big point of Open Source -- the point isn't who's doing the forking or who's profiting -- but the point is that forks like this are intentionally allowed.
- caconym_ 6y ago
  Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point, either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I should rephrase to say it's a point. I could see someone arguing that forking is just a component of the deeper philosophical attitude about how people can use and distribute and modify code in general. Forking is the/a point in the sense that I can't think of a version of Open Source that is still Open Source but that doesn't allow forking -- that allowing for forking is a deliberate choice, not an accidental one.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"? Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...

sciurus 6y ago

Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ > Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.

wpaladin 6y ago
Kafka is an ASF project, and not controlled by Confluent. There is nothing stopping anyone from offering a hosted Kafka. You seem to be conflating Kafka with Confluent's own products. >No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors. I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.