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> What is “not ok” is the fact that switching to a GPL based license forces projects depending on the code like CrateDB to use a fork since it kills the busines

by berkes 6y ago

> What is “not ok” is the fact that switching to a GPL based license forces projects depending on the code like CrateDB to use a fork since it kills the business model. If your business model cannot survive when a critical upstream piece of your infrastructure moves to GPL, you probably have a bad business model to begin with. They say: > We would never have chosen Elasticsearch in the first place, had it been licensed under the GPL as some of our customers (and many large enterprises do by default) banned GPL licensed software from their application stacks for legal risks. Which is completely new to me. There are numerous examples of software that has a successfull business model, and is GPL or GPL compatible. From WordPress to MySQL, and from ProtonMail to PostgreSQL (GPL compatible). Used in enterprise, and other large organisations, just fine. It sounds like they are making up excuses for not wanting to fully Open Source their code; which is fine. But don't blame upstream for your reluctance or inability to adhere to this.

temp667 6y ago
PostgreSQL is explicitly NOT GPL (it's basically a very permissive BSD / MIT style license). More here: https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/ See section and links for "Why not the GNU General Public License?" It's not GPL for some of the same reasons described here and enterprise does like it.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Hmm, I went to go find the 'why not GPL' section but they just say, 'because' and then link to their mailing lists.. but not (as far as I can see) to the relevant thread. Do you happen to know where it's located? Is there not an html version somewhere?
  - temp667 6y ago
    I think they got tired of having folks argue with them about the license. In short though - was developed at berkeley so released under a BSD license. The license has served them well (there are a lot of commercial entities supporting postgresql development, and lots of others with various forks). And finally, it would be hard to change at this point and they don't see a gain. A note - in contrast to Elastic, there is no one copyright holder with postgresql. So this makes it much hard to get a relicense to for example a situation where one commercial entity has a special right to the terms / relicensing power.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      That doesn't sound quite right: MIT/BSD licenses are GPL compatible; you could trivially release MIT code under the GPL. I believe that's what https://www.hyperbola.info/ https://www.hyperbola.info/ is doing, for example.
      - temp667 6y ago
        It's compatible, but if Postgresql wanted to go harder copyleft and switch the license for future releases, they'd need to get pretty broad agreement, and that would be difficult, there are a lot of corps / enterprise players in the ecosystem, and things like (a)GPLv3 are often totally banned. Is GPLv3 software even allowed in the Apple iphone App Store? The Windows Phone app store?
  - munk-a 6y ago
    GPL is a big hammer you can use to force back contribution into the project and ensure that folks that use the software actually contribution to it continuing to be available and relevant - if Postgres has been able to sustain themselves for all these years with a more permissive license then why would they risk going GPL and scaring off a lot of their customers just to ensure that each customer that remains can be forced to back-contribute any innovations they make. (please note that GPL doesn't in actuality force anyone to back-contribute but in effect it tends to work that way - it actually puts a lot of responsibility on the original authors to re-acquire improved versions of the library but it does ensure that those improved versions are accessible in some manner)
    - pabs3 6y ago
      GPL does not necessarily ensure that those improved versions are accessible to the original project, people receiving the source code to improved versions could simply keep those versions secret. See the controversy around grsecurity for an example of this, although one old version of their code did get leaked.
ArchOversight 6y ago
> It sounds like they are making up excuses for not wanting to fully Open Source their code; which is fine. But don't blame upstream for your reluctance or inability to adhere to this. They are changing the license on ALL of their source code. How is this making up excuses? Second, I know plenty of companies where MySQL or Wordpress are not allowed to be used because they are GPL. PostgreSQL is NOT GPL and thus is allowed.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  > Second, I know plenty of companies where MySQL or Wordpress are not allowed to be used because they are GPL. The fact that some companies have incompetent legal teams isn't a good argument against the GPL. There's no reason you can't use Wordpress to back a commercial website.
  - derefr 6y ago
    It's not about "backing a commercial website"; it's about selling a solution for your own customers to use, where WordPress might be a component of that offered solution, customized into being something else (e.g. a control panel.) There are concerns that doing so, in the context of a monorepo, might infect your entire codebase — including the components that have nothing to do with the control-panel, and so never touch the Wordpress stuff — with GPL. Of course, you can architect code to get around that, e.g. building your shared architecture that the control-panel uses as a library, and then pulling that lib in from your isolated Wordpress control-panel codebase. But enterprises don't want to be forced into (possibly sub-optimal) architectures just because one component legally requires it. They'd rather just not use that component, so that their architecture can be totally determined by what's best for their development.
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      Sure, okay, fine. I realize this is an ideological position (and not necessarily a popular one on this board) but that's the point of the GPL. If certain companies lose out because they're afraid to share, then they have no one to blame but themselves. The pitch is that the world of free software can, collectively, build better software for everyone sharing, than the proprietary islands who selfishly cut themselves off from that ocean.
proddata 6y ago
> If your business model cannot survive when a critical upstream piece of your infrastructure moves to GPL, you probably have a bad business model to begin with. To be clear CrateDB started out as OSS and we decide to stay OSS. Elasticsearch used the Apache License and so did CrateDB. All in the spirit of OSS. Elastic are however now the ones how decided, that their business model isn't viable anymore. > It sounds like they are making up excuses for not wanting to fully Open Source their code We do want to make it fully open source! Everything that was under a more restrictive License is going to be offered under Apache License.
- berkes 6y ago
  Thanks for correcting me! > We do want to make it fully open source! This begs the question: isn't "a restrictive OSS licence" not less "fully open source" than a more permissive licence like GPL, MIT or BSD? If you are fully committed to OSS, why not go full-oss, instead of retaining control through a restrictive OSS licence? Is that really only because of some enterprises not liking GPL?
  - proddata 6y ago
    > This begs the question: isn't "a restrictive OSS licence" not less "fully open source" than a more permissive licence like GPL, MIT or BSD? We gonna change CrateDB fully to Apache License v2 ;) I would say that counts as a "more permissive" license. > Is that really only because of some enterprises not liking GPL? There are various reasons for the change. A big part is definitely also the spirit of many our contributors. We built CrateDB on open source software and also want to make the software available as open source. It also was planned for quite some time to be more open.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > why not go full-oss, instead of retaining control through a restrictive OSS licence? The main point of copyleft is to pass down freedoms to use/modify/distribute all the way to the end user. Instead we got locked-down privacy-breaching smartphones, IoT devices, SaaS, where only the manufacturer benefits from OSS.
e12e 6y ago
> We would never have chosen Elasticsearch in the first place, had it been licensed under the GPL as some of our customers (and many large enterprises do by default) banned GPL licensed software from their application stacks for legal risks. So, they don't run Linux, don't use glibc? That can't be all that common? (I mean sure, there's the bsds.. But still..).
- proddata 6y ago
  > So, they don't run Linux, don't use glibc? That can't be all that common? (I mean sure, there's the bsds.. But still..). We do run Linux :) But there is a difference between building on and building with.
- dd_roger 6y ago
  The problem is not using a GPL software internally, but using it in a product that you'd want to sell and at this point be forced to opensource your entire product. Despite what some people like to pretend there's basically no scalable business model outside of SaaS that will make you any money selling GPL-licensed software so this situation is extremely undesireable.
tracker1 6y ago
MySQL is a poor example... for a while, their client library license was GPL and insisted that anything not using a commercial license needed to be GPL, which is one of the reasons I pushed against MySQL for a long time, one of a long list of reasons over the years.
munk-a 6y ago
> If your business model cannot survive when a critical upstream piece of your infrastructure moves to GPL, you probably have a bad business model to begin with. I think they appear to be surviving just fine - they are switching forks not shuttering their doors or even withdrawing ES compatibility. Suddenly changing licenses to increase how restrictive it is absolutely is a nightmare scenario to a lot of businesses and it quite rationally is so. We share software and build on each other's shoulders, to reject that and build everything from scratch is silly and fiscally irresponsible. I'm very confused why this is so strongly stated when it's likely that most of us have, at one point, sat down with two pieces of libraries and gone with the less useful one due to licensing issues.
mikl 6y ago
GPL has the well-known web services loophole, that effectively makes copy-left protections moot. Without that, Wordpress and other GPL-licensed web CMS/frameworks would never have taken off like they have. As for MySQL, notice how no one builds anything on top of it (like TimescaleDB and others did with PostgreSQL), but just uses MySQL as-is without modifying it, also rendering copy-left moot.
GordonS 6y ago
>> some of our customers (and many large enterprises do by default) banned GPL licensed software from their application stacks for legal risks. > Which is completely new to me I work in a consultancy for enterprise-scale customers - every.single.one prohibits the use of GPL libraries and frameworks.

by berkes 6y ago

temp667 6y ago

PostgreSQL is explicitly NOT GPL (it's basically a very permissive BSD / MIT style license). More here: https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/ See section and links for "Why not the GNU General Public License?" It's not GPL for some of the same reasons described here and enterprise does like it.

fartcannon 6y ago
Hmm, I went to go find the 'why not GPL' section but they just say, 'because' and then link to their mailing lists.. but not (as far as I can see) to the relevant thread. Do you happen to know where it's located? Is there not an html version somewhere?
- temp667 6y ago
  I think they got tired of having folks argue with them about the license. In short though - was developed at berkeley so released under a BSD license. The license has served them well (there are a lot of commercial entities supporting postgresql development, and lots of others with various forks). And finally, it would be hard to change at this point and they don't see a gain. A note - in contrast to Elastic, there is no one copyright holder with postgresql. So this makes it much hard to get a relicense to for example a situation where one commercial entity has a special right to the terms / relicensing power.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    That doesn't sound quite right: MIT/BSD licenses are GPL compatible; you could trivially release MIT code under the GPL. I believe that's what https://www.hyperbola.info/ https://www.hyperbola.info/ is doing, for example.
    - temp667 6y ago
      It's compatible, but if Postgresql wanted to go harder copyleft and switch the license for future releases, they'd need to get pretty broad agreement, and that would be difficult, there are a lot of corps / enterprise players in the ecosystem, and things like (a)GPLv3 are often totally banned. Is GPLv3 software even allowed in the Apple iphone App Store? The Windows Phone app store?
- munk-a 6y ago
  GPL is a big hammer you can use to force back contribution into the project and ensure that folks that use the software actually contribution to it continuing to be available and relevant - if Postgres has been able to sustain themselves for all these years with a more permissive license then why would they risk going GPL and scaring off a lot of their customers just to ensure that each customer that remains can be forced to back-contribute any innovations they make. (please note that GPL doesn't in actuality force anyone to back-contribute but in effect it tends to work that way - it actually puts a lot of responsibility on the original authors to re-acquire improved versions of the library but it does ensure that those improved versions are accessible in some manner)
  - pabs3 6y ago
    GPL does not necessarily ensure that those improved versions are accessible to the original project, people receiving the source code to improved versions could simply keep those versions secret. See the controversy around grsecurity for an example of this, although one old version of their code did get leaked.

ArchOversight 6y ago

> It sounds like they are making up excuses for not wanting to fully Open Source their code; which is fine. But don't blame upstream for your reluctance or inability to adhere to this. They are changing the license on ALL of their source code. How is this making up excuses? Second, I know plenty of companies where MySQL or Wordpress are not allowed to be used because they are GPL. PostgreSQL is NOT GPL and thus is allowed.

ForHackernews 6y ago
> Second, I know plenty of companies where MySQL or Wordpress are not allowed to be used because they are GPL. The fact that some companies have incompetent legal teams isn't a good argument against the GPL. There's no reason you can't use Wordpress to back a commercial website.
- derefr 6y ago
  It's not about "backing a commercial website"; it's about selling a solution for your own customers to use, where WordPress might be a component of that offered solution, customized into being something else (e.g. a control panel.) There are concerns that doing so, in the context of a monorepo, might infect your entire codebase — including the components that have nothing to do with the control-panel, and so never touch the Wordpress stuff — with GPL. Of course, you can architect code to get around that, e.g. building your shared architecture that the control-panel uses as a library, and then pulling that lib in from your isolated Wordpress control-panel codebase. But enterprises don't want to be forced into (possibly sub-optimal) architectures just because one component legally requires it. They'd rather just not use that component, so that their architecture can be totally determined by what's best for their development.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    Sure, okay, fine. I realize this is an ideological position (and not necessarily a popular one on this board) but that's the point of the GPL. If certain companies lose out because they're afraid to share, then they have no one to blame but themselves. The pitch is that the world of free software can, collectively, build better software for everyone sharing, than the proprietary islands who selfishly cut themselves off from that ocean.

proddata 6y ago

> If your business model cannot survive when a critical upstream piece of your infrastructure moves to GPL, you probably have a bad business model to begin with. To be clear CrateDB started out as OSS and we decide to stay OSS. Elasticsearch used the Apache License and so did CrateDB. All in the spirit of OSS. Elastic are however now the ones how decided, that their business model isn't viable anymore. > It sounds like they are making up excuses for not wanting to fully Open Source their code We do want to make it fully open source! Everything that was under a more restrictive License is going to be offered under Apache License.

berkes 6y ago
Thanks for correcting me! > We do want to make it fully open source! This begs the question: isn't "a restrictive OSS licence" not less "fully open source" than a more permissive licence like GPL, MIT or BSD? If you are fully committed to OSS, why not go full-oss, instead of retaining control through a restrictive OSS licence? Is that really only because of some enterprises not liking GPL?
- proddata 6y ago
  > This begs the question: isn't "a restrictive OSS licence" not less "fully open source" than a more permissive licence like GPL, MIT or BSD? We gonna change CrateDB fully to Apache License v2 ;) I would say that counts as a "more permissive" license. > Is that really only because of some enterprises not liking GPL? There are various reasons for the change. A big part is definitely also the spirit of many our contributors. We built CrateDB on open source software and also want to make the software available as open source. It also was planned for quite some time to be more open.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > why not go full-oss, instead of retaining control through a restrictive OSS licence? The main point of copyleft is to pass down freedoms to use/modify/distribute all the way to the end user. Instead we got locked-down privacy-breaching smartphones, IoT devices, SaaS, where only the manufacturer benefits from OSS.

e12e 6y ago

> We would never have chosen Elasticsearch in the first place, had it been licensed under the GPL as some of our customers (and many large enterprises do by default) banned GPL licensed software from their application stacks for legal risks. So, they don't run Linux, don't use glibc? That can't be all that common? (I mean sure, there's the bsds.. But still..).

proddata 6y ago
> So, they don't run Linux, don't use glibc? That can't be all that common? (I mean sure, there's the bsds.. But still..). We do run Linux :) But there is a difference between building on and building with.
dd_roger 6y ago
The problem is not using a GPL software internally, but using it in a product that you'd want to sell and at this point be forced to opensource your entire product. Despite what some people like to pretend there's basically no scalable business model outside of SaaS that will make you any money selling GPL-licensed software so this situation is extremely undesireable.

tracker1 6y ago

MySQL is a poor example... for a while, their client library license was GPL and insisted that anything not using a commercial license needed to be GPL, which is one of the reasons I pushed against MySQL for a long time, one of a long list of reasons over the years.

munk-a 6y ago

> If your business model cannot survive when a critical upstream piece of your infrastructure moves to GPL, you probably have a bad business model to begin with. I think they appear to be surviving just fine - they are switching forks not shuttering their doors or even withdrawing ES compatibility. Suddenly changing licenses to increase how restrictive it is absolutely is a nightmare scenario to a lot of businesses and it quite rationally is so. We share software and build on each other's shoulders, to reject that and build everything from scratch is silly and fiscally irresponsible. I'm very confused why this is so strongly stated when it's likely that most of us have, at one point, sat down with two pieces of libraries and gone with the less useful one due to licensing issues.

mikl 6y ago

GPL has the well-known web services loophole, that effectively makes copy-left protections moot. Without that, Wordpress and other GPL-licensed web CMS/frameworks would never have taken off like they have. As for MySQL, notice how no one builds anything on top of it (like TimescaleDB and others did with PostgreSQL), but just uses MySQL as-is without modifying it, also rendering copy-left moot.

GordonS 6y ago

>> some of our customers (and many large enterprises do by default) banned GPL licensed software from their application stacks for legal risks. > Which is completely new to me I work in a consultancy for enterprise-scale customers - every.single.one prohibits the use of GPL libraries and frameworks.