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Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES. I

Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES. In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license. https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-belong-to-Elastic.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...

kodah 6y ago
Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends. The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos. Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea. The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  What? It was always known. Why do you think UNIX companies agreed on MIT license for the basic X Windows infrastructure, but then Motif was commercial on top? Or how UNIX clones and Windows have used parts of BSD. 40 years now, more than known.
  - vnakL 6y ago
    Indeed, BSD projects have always provided corporations with free labor. The BSD operating systems themselves have been largely spared from hostile forks because they are too large and no corporation wants to maintain a fork, macOS being the obvious counterexample. But even macOS cannot eclipse FreeBSD. Smaller projects should be wary. The should start with AGPL and resist efforts coming from corporations or other open source projects to strongarm them into downgrading the license to BSD or MIT. Especially when such other projects have convoluted licenses themselves that are only declared open source by fiat due to their historical importance at some point.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      There another obvious counterexample, PS 4 OS, not sure if PS 5 still uses it.
- jiofih 6y ago
  Elastic is a public company worth 15B dollars now. Not the underdog. > at what threshold should someone ... stop caring You’re not caring about OSS, but about keeping your turf and “ownership” of a product that is not yours. There really is no question here that Elastic is the one doing the “corporation” move and not the other way around. > to undermine the business that was setup to sustain it Successful OSS don’t need one business to sustain them, they rely on the combined efforts of their users - including Amazon. They have no reason to undermine a project that makes them money.
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    They're an underdog when compared to Amazon…

kodah 6y ago

Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends. The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos. Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea. The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.

pjmlp 6y ago
What? It was always known. Why do you think UNIX companies agreed on MIT license for the basic X Windows infrastructure, but then Motif was commercial on top? Or how UNIX clones and Windows have used parts of BSD. 40 years now, more than known.
- vnakL 6y ago
  Indeed, BSD projects have always provided corporations with free labor. The BSD operating systems themselves have been largely spared from hostile forks because they are too large and no corporation wants to maintain a fork, macOS being the obvious counterexample. But even macOS cannot eclipse FreeBSD. Smaller projects should be wary. The should start with AGPL and resist efforts coming from corporations or other open source projects to strongarm them into downgrading the license to BSD or MIT. Especially when such other projects have convoluted licenses themselves that are only declared open source by fiat due to their historical importance at some point.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    There another obvious counterexample, PS 4 OS, not sure if PS 5 still uses it.
jiofih 6y ago
Elastic is a public company worth 15B dollars now. Not the underdog. > at what threshold should someone ... stop caring You’re not caring about OSS, but about keeping your turf and “ownership” of a product that is not yours. There really is no question here that Elastic is the one doing the “corporation” move and not the other way around. > to undermine the business that was setup to sustain it Successful OSS don’t need one business to sustain them, they rely on the combined efforts of their users - including Amazon. They have no reason to undermine a project that makes them money.
- youngtaff 6y ago
  They're an underdog when compared to Amazon…