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AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague fo

AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague for the legal team to confidently understand the "bounds" of the copyleft license. Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like Elastic because companies like Amazon didn't "take" profits from Elastic (and others). What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them. The "cost" of being a FOSS company was lower than the "reaped" benefits of the network effects. That has shifted with "predatory" behavior from companies like Amazon. That abuse of the "vulnerability" in the FOSS ecosystem is a tragedy of the commons. It means that companies have to be more cautious about what they choose to open source. This is just my opinion, of course. As a founder of a software company though, I see this as a real struggle. I would prefer have https://refinery.io https://refinery.io be an entirely open source tool and we make money via supporting the ecosystem. Unfortunately, it just isn't clear cut. The best option that I see today is a model like what MongoDB and CockroachDB have with licenses like BSL. But, they're not truly "open source". And that sucks. We are living in a time where there are no good answers in the face of exploitative behavior by companies like Amazon. It means companies like mine have to maintain a proprietary platform in order to make money. As a developer, it hurts my ideals. As a business owner, it's a risk I can't afford to take. That's why this behavior is a problem for FOSS.

skywhopper 6y ago
None of this is new. GNU was founded and developed its licenses to address this issue. But there’s a tradeoff. One that GNU happily accepts. But there has never been a “code of honor” in this space. Give me a break. Companies have been offering Apache- and GPL- licensed software as a service for longer than Elastic has been a company. Elastic wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They overplayed their hand here and now they’re paying the price. They’ll likely soon lose control of the code base. But that’s the whole point of open source.
- jknoepfler 6y ago
  People getting mad about a code of honor in a decades old, brutal business environment is truly bizarre to me. This isn't a playground pickup game, it's business.
  - clankyclanker 6y ago
    The business is several decades younger than the ethics.
- bccdee 6y ago
  The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. Suppose Elastic does lose control of their codebase, and it winds up getting maintained entirely by AWS. Then what's to stop AWS from taking their forked Apache2 code closed-source? Bam, no more ElasticSearch. Without professional maintainers, CVEs will pile up and it will gradually become abandonware. Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich. The dream is that Elastic can keep maintaining ES but ES remains Apache2. Given AWS's presence in the market, it seems like that's not an especially viable option. For Elastic to keep maintaining ES while switching ES to a more restrictive license which doesn't prevent normal use cases but hamstrings AWS is less desirable, but still preferable to Elastic folding, because ES remains a tool which we can all use and patch as needed to power our own services.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    > The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.
hodgesrm 6y ago
> What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them. I've run a couple of COSS companies and have a few arrows in the back on this subject. The 'code of honor' is not enough to float even a small company. I don't think it ever was. Most people simply won't pay if they don't have to. It's not just a matter of money. Buying software in established companies can be a head-exploding hassle--as in 6 months of fighting procurement. Plus those do-a-good-deed contracts have a habit of disappearing as soon as there's a budget crunch or the enlightened manager who pushed it through moves to something else. I'm not knocking such contracts in any way. They are kind of like crowdfunding for OSS and can be lifesavers. But it's naive to build a company on them. To have a profitable COSS business you need to sell something sticky that customers need and can't get elsewhere, so there's a real exchange of value.
- mrybczyn 6y ago
  "sell something sticky" Amazon unsticks anything that isn't nailed down...
spoonjim 6y ago
The people expecting a “code of honor” in American capitalism are hopelessly naive. You may as well ask a lion to observe a code of honor and not target any sickly antelopes.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  A strong lion may seemingly indulge such a code of honor for a while - not because of honor, but because healthy antelopes taste better and the lion is fast enough to catch them. But these conditions can change at any moment. This mirrors how, in general, markets approach human values. They're a nice thing to have if you can afford them, perhaps you can mention them in your marketing - but the moment competition threatens your margins, you'll drop these values to stay competitive. Ethics is a market inefficiency, and expecting companies to behave ethically over time if not explicitly forced to is, indeed, naive.
pessimizer 6y ago
In these specific contexts, it's important to stop using the term "FOSS." It just clouds the issue. FOSS is Free Software and software so permissively licensed that it could be relicensed and extended as Free Software. Open Source is simply giving up your ownership of the code one wrote, and this Spirit of Open Source is when one pretends that people won't actually take advantage of explicit grant of rights for reasons. Open Source is for getting popular, and all of the arguments that Open Source people make against Free Software are about the ability to get popular (corporate usage and corporate contributors.) The reason companies use Open Source is because when you license something that way, it's theirs now. They're investing in their own property. Free Software doesn't intend to have this problem, and if it sees a problem, it fixes the bug. You don't own Free Software, you own the devices that you install it on. You still might end up competing with someone, but you'll never fall behind.
- freeqaz 6y ago
  This comment is really insightful. Thank you for the perspective! It's an interesting idea to think that "Free Software" creates a sort of "distributed code base". In the sense that "code will be eventually pushed to the main repo when the patch is created". That's an interesting perspective.
  - unilynx 6y ago
    Not necessarily. "Just" making it free software (eg slapping a GPL v2 on Elasticsearch) doesn't require AWS to share any changes to the codebase, and wouldn't have prevented the current AWS/Elastic drama as it wouldn't have prevented AWS from monetizing Elasticsearch. Now AGPL might have, if it was used from the start... not because it would prevent any monitization, but because it might bring enough legal uncertainty for AWS to even consider using it
    - freeqaz 6y ago
      Agreed! No silver bullet. AWS is able to extract value regardless of the license being used.
- 6y ago
d1zzy 6y ago
So, according to some in this thread, as a business owner you are "exploiting open source" by taking more permissively licensed code and making money off it. Shame on you! /s

skywhopper 6y ago

None of this is new. GNU was founded and developed its licenses to address this issue. But there’s a tradeoff. One that GNU happily accepts. But there has never been a “code of honor” in this space. Give me a break. Companies have been offering Apache- and GPL- licensed software as a service for longer than Elastic has been a company. Elastic wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They overplayed their hand here and now they’re paying the price. They’ll likely soon lose control of the code base. But that’s the whole point of open source.

jknoepfler 6y ago
People getting mad about a code of honor in a decades old, brutal business environment is truly bizarre to me. This isn't a playground pickup game, it's business.
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  The business is several decades younger than the ethics.
bccdee 6y ago
The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. Suppose Elastic does lose control of their codebase, and it winds up getting maintained entirely by AWS. Then what's to stop AWS from taking their forked Apache2 code closed-source? Bam, no more ElasticSearch. Without professional maintainers, CVEs will pile up and it will gradually become abandonware. Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich. The dream is that Elastic can keep maintaining ES but ES remains Apache2. Given AWS's presence in the market, it seems like that's not an especially viable option. For Elastic to keep maintaining ES while switching ES to a more restrictive license which doesn't prevent normal use cases but hamstrings AWS is less desirable, but still preferable to Elastic folding, because ES remains a tool which we can all use and patch as needed to power our own services.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.

hodgesrm 6y ago

> What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them. I've run a couple of COSS companies and have a few arrows in the back on this subject. The 'code of honor' is not enough to float even a small company. I don't think it ever was. Most people simply won't pay if they don't have to. It's not just a matter of money. Buying software in established companies can be a head-exploding hassle--as in 6 months of fighting procurement. Plus those do-a-good-deed contracts have a habit of disappearing as soon as there's a budget crunch or the enlightened manager who pushed it through moves to something else. I'm not knocking such contracts in any way. They are kind of like crowdfunding for OSS and can be lifesavers. But it's naive to build a company on them. To have a profitable COSS business you need to sell something sticky that customers need and can't get elsewhere, so there's a real exchange of value.

mrybczyn 6y ago
"sell something sticky" Amazon unsticks anything that isn't nailed down...

spoonjim 6y ago

The people expecting a “code of honor” in American capitalism are hopelessly naive. You may as well ask a lion to observe a code of honor and not target any sickly antelopes.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
A strong lion may seemingly indulge such a code of honor for a while - not because of honor, but because healthy antelopes taste better and the lion is fast enough to catch them. But these conditions can change at any moment. This mirrors how, in general, markets approach human values. They're a nice thing to have if you can afford them, perhaps you can mention them in your marketing - but the moment competition threatens your margins, you'll drop these values to stay competitive. Ethics is a market inefficiency, and expecting companies to behave ethically over time if not explicitly forced to is, indeed, naive.

pessimizer 6y ago

In these specific contexts, it's important to stop using the term "FOSS." It just clouds the issue. FOSS is Free Software and software so permissively licensed that it could be relicensed and extended as Free Software. Open Source is simply giving up your ownership of the code one wrote, and this Spirit of Open Source is when one pretends that people won't actually take advantage of explicit grant of rights for reasons. Open Source is for getting popular, and all of the arguments that Open Source people make against Free Software are about the ability to get popular (corporate usage and corporate contributors.) The reason companies use Open Source is because when you license something that way, it's theirs now. They're investing in their own property. Free Software doesn't intend to have this problem, and if it sees a problem, it fixes the bug. You don't own Free Software, you own the devices that you install it on. You still might end up competing with someone, but you'll never fall behind.

freeqaz 6y ago
This comment is really insightful. Thank you for the perspective! It's an interesting idea to think that "Free Software" creates a sort of "distributed code base". In the sense that "code will be eventually pushed to the main repo when the patch is created". That's an interesting perspective.
- unilynx 6y ago
  Not necessarily. "Just" making it free software (eg slapping a GPL v2 on Elasticsearch) doesn't require AWS to share any changes to the codebase, and wouldn't have prevented the current AWS/Elastic drama as it wouldn't have prevented AWS from monetizing Elasticsearch. Now AGPL might have, if it was used from the start... not because it would prevent any monitization, but because it might bring enough legal uncertainty for AWS to even consider using it
  - freeqaz 6y ago
    Agreed! No silver bullet. AWS is able to extract value regardless of the license being used.
6y ago

d1zzy 6y ago

So, according to some in this thread, as a business owner you are "exploiting open source" by taking more permissively licensed code and making money off it. Shame on you! /s