14 ms·

So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? As a user, I can use Elasticsearch just fine with the new license.

So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? As a user, I can use Elasticsearch just fine with the new license. I can read the code, modify it and use in my own projects. So it is more difficult for Amazon to use their monopolistic power to build a competing service to the one that is financing Elasticsearch development? Yeah, good stuff. If the big tech monopolists need something under a permissive license they should pay for its development.

retrac 6y ago
The GPL family is not permissive (as the term is usually meant) and is certainly FLOSS.
vorpalhex 6y ago
No, open source means they aren't user hostile. Contractual landmines and restrictions on running the software are user hostile.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Amazon isn't an user. They are an exploiter. Users aren't affected by any of the relicenses.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    How do you draw the line between "user" and "exploiter"? Was there any point in the past Amazon wasn't an "exploiter"? What if a user becomes an exploiter? Can an exploiter become a user through repentance? Where's the legal boundary?
    - drdeca 6y ago
      legal boundary or moral boundary? (Not that I have an answer in either case, but my impression was that "exploiter" was an expression of moral judgement, not a legal judgement)
    - luckylion 6y ago
      Not OP and not really invested. You can probably replace "exploiter" with provider. A user uses the software directly, a provider provides it to users. Amazon can be both simultaneously, they can run ES to analyze sales and find out what products of third party sellers are worth copying, and they can also offer ES as a service to other users. That kind of difference is pretty common in non-source-related things, e.g. you can use the API for your business, but you can't resell access to the API.
    - aaomidi 6y ago
      Are you able to, in your head, draw a difference between Amazon and Amin running some application in their home-built system? That's how you draw the line.
- samat 6y ago
  1) who is the user? 2) let’s give some love to BSD, since GPL is hostile to my intention of selling modified software
  - ahachete 6y ago
    What part of the GPL is forbidding selling modified software? There are tons of GPL software that is sold.
    - noncoml 6y ago
      I assume GP implies without open sourcing his changes.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  This is plain false: tivoization is the best example.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? AGPLv3 is open source and isn't exactly favorable to tech monopolists, either.
- pydry 6y ago
  That's another license that gets a disproportionate level of flak.
  - mfer 6y ago
    Big companies or those with lawyers notice that the AGPLv3 says the software used to make something a service must be licensed under the same license. Much of that software isn't something a company controls. For example, you put the AGPLv3 software behind a load balancer. Does that software need to be AGPLv3? Some would say so and how often can a company control that license. Companies with more are conservative on their risk. Not a lawyer and this is not legal advice
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Yeah. The boundaries of the GPL are mostly clear because they're essentially tied to Unix linking behavior. There are some edge case--I know people who don't think you shouldn't be able to load binary blobs for example--but mostly. There doesn't seem to be the same sort of clear consensus over how broadly the AGPL interacts with other code on the network.
    - pydry 6y ago
      >Does that software need to be AGPLv3? No. It doesn't "infect" the load balancer. There's zero ambiguity about this. A lot of companies have bad lawyers who try to eliminate rather than mitigate risk and who try to grab every scrap of IP for the company. This is the kind of company you're talking about. This is also why many try to get you to sign away every profitable idea you've ever dreamed up in the shower: a combination of extreme risk aversion and flagrant greed. I'd even venture as far as to say it's a feature not a bug if this type of company were forced to use expensive proprietary software or older, shittier versions.
pydry 6y ago
I genuinely wonder what all the people defending infringements on Bezos's "right" to profit from elastic (for instance) are thinking. If it's open for you but not for him what's your problem?
- scj 6y ago
  Rational self-interest of wanting commodity software for infrastructure / tooling. A clear winner means more companies use it, increasing demand for it. Which makes it more valuable to master. If the commodity software is open source, I can learn it at home for a low cost. Then use it at work, again for a low cost. Employers have an interest in using it, as do I. So I want to encourage Amazon, and other tech companies, to use as much open source as possible! Please increase demand for my skillset! Of course, the eternal problem is how the software gets developed in the first place. But I really don't want software that bifurcates organizations vs. individuals to become a cultural norm. Even if the impact of any single case is minimal.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "If it's open for you but not for him what's your problem?" Now we have to deal with examining and getting approval for umpteen oddball custom software licenses instead of just the standard FOSS ones and, yeah, that is a problem. The pain of dealing with licenses was part of what drove adoption of FOSS in the first place. The original spirit of open source was scratching an itch and sharing your code in hopes others found it useful. The current squabbles are about large for-profit corporations trying to extract money from other large for-profit corporations, so let's call these new licenses what they are: proprietary licenses with source availability.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Teaser license?
  - pydry 6y ago
    >Now we have to deal with examining and getting approval Your legal department's inability to keep up to date is not the fault of the open source community. Corporate legal departments were exactly as useless, intransigent and belligerent when open source was first introduced. Their tendency towards evil or laziness is not an excuse for anything. >yeah, that is a problem With your legal department. THEY need to change. JUST as they were dragged kicking and screaming into the age of open source. >The original spirit of open source was scratching an itch and sharing your code No it wasn't. It was about freedom of speech and freedom to do with as you will with what you have on your computer. It's amazing the number of people I've come across today that misunderstood both the legality and the spirit of open source in a way that Google or Amazon would strongly approve of.
mfer 6y ago
> As a user, I can use Elasticsearch just fine with the new license. I can read the code, modify it and use in my own projects. This illustrates just one kind of user. And only in some situations. For example, lets say Elastic.co goes under. Under the license another company couldn't setup a replacement. So, the end user is screwed just as if a proprietary vendor had gone under. What the companies behind the new licenses are attempting to do is have their cake and eat it, too. They want open source for all the cred and for one type of user. The want proprietary for the complete control of the stack right through some types of hosting situations. It's hard to produce something completely open and yet monetize it in way that meets VC grown desires. That's why so many companies open source the common stuff but keep the special sauce proprietary.
- bramblerose 6y ago
  > Under the license another company couldn't setup a replacement. I'm confused here -- the new 'open core' is available under the SSPL, which clearly allows this, as long as you provide the source code of any management layers as well. The non-open parts already weren't available under the Apache license, so nothing has really changed there. And, yes, this does mean Elastic is the only company able to build proprietary components on top of the code base, which means there isn't an even playing field with competitors. But once Elastic goes bankrupt this is no longer an issue.
  - growse 6y ago
    > > Under the license another company couldn't setup a replacement. > I'm confused here -- the new 'open core' is available under the SSPL, which clearly allows this, as long as you provide the source code of any management layers as well. The non-open parts already weren't available under the Apache license, so nothing has really changed there. This is essentially a legal "gotcha", given that "management layers" is not defined anywhere. The purpose of the clause is not to encourage companies to "open source everything" (what does that even mean? Do they need to open source their IPMI firmware?), it's to prevent anyone from going anywhere near it. Do elastic.co open source all the management layers in their stack?
autarch 6y ago
> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? No, open source means the same thing it's always meant since the term was first coined. See the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd. Now someone will respond "why does OSI get to decide the meaning of the term?" Well, they don't have any _legal_ right to do so, but if you don't accept their definition, does that mean every person gets to come up with their own definition? And if they do, what's the point of using the term? So it makes sense to take OSI's definition as canonical, the same way the Free Software Foundation's definition of Free Software is generally considered canonical (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). Also, to forestall another common reply, I'm not defending Amazon or attacking Elastic. I'm simply trying to define a term that's at the center of this discussion. If we can't agree on the definition, then any discussion of whether a license is open source is moot. The same goes for discussing the impact and value of open source vs non-open licenses.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kube-system 6y ago
  Are you sure the FSF's definition of Free Software is a good example of your point here? That definition is almost entirely only respected by western software developers who support the FSF's cause. Just type "free software" into your favorite search engine and see how commonly that definition is followed in practice. Honestly, I think we should just say OSI-licensed if we mean OSI-licensed. Words are only as good as they can be used to communicate with others. If people misunderstand me, it's my fault.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Many other languages have an unambiguous word for "libre", and can translate "libre software" directly.
    - kube-system 6y ago
armandososa 6y ago
In spanish* we have a word: "emparejado" which means a door is not open but not quite closed. It appears closed, but it's not. Maybe we should use "emparejado-source" :) * Maybe it's just a mexicanism, IDK.
- vincent-manis 6y ago
  So in English, we can call these faux-open-source licences “ajar-source”?
jrochkind1 6y ago
As a developer acting on behalf of an organization using open source, I benefit from being able to pay the vendor of my choice to host a given piece of software. If only the single-source author can host it as a service, or you need the permission of the single source author to host it as a service, then my choices are either self-hosting, or paying whatever price the single legal-as-a-service-host wants to charge, at whatever service quality they provide. (The fact they can choose to allow other licensed hosts, perhaps for a free if they want, does not change their monopoly control). It is a form of vendor lock-in, and avoiding vendor lock-in is one popular motivation for using open source. So yes, this restriction makes something not open source. This restriction also is not favourable to me as a user of the open source software. Open source was always about avoiding monopoly control of who is allowed to do what with the software. Monopoly control of who is allowed to host it as a service is such, and it is more favourable to me as a consumer when there is not that monopoly control. Now, meanwhile, there are various market battles going on between various big tech cloud providers and other companies providing (previously) open source software. This is also true. Both things can be true. For the consumer, as the OP suggests, your best bet is when there is software that can be produced sustainably by multiple entities collaborating, instead of a single company. Now, if that's not sustainable, that's a problem. It's possible that open source is facing sustainability problems due to current conditions. But that doesn't change the fact that monopolizing legal right to host software as a service is not open source, is rightly not approved by OSI, and is making consumers locked in to that single vendor (or their licencees), which is indeed contrary to intention of open source.
- kodah 6y ago
  > It is a form of vendor lock-in, and avoiding vendor lock-in is one popular motivation for using open source. Likely also a false one. For example, if you use WordPress guess who your vendor is? WordPress. More vexing, if you use Kubernetes provided by a cloud provider guess who your vendor is? The cloud provider, because of all those non-free doodads they put into their managed service. It is possible for a company like AWS to continue to offer a managed service for things like elastic, but I suspect elastic wants the nature of the agreement to change; which as far as I can tell we're not privy to.
tsimionescu 6y ago
> I can read the code, modify it and use in my own projects. That isn't clear. The license language can be read as requiring you to provide the source code for any software that interacts with ES (e.g., the Linux kernel that you are using to deploy ES over) under the terms of the SSPL to your own users, which you literally can't do. Elastic claims in their FAQ that this is not the intention, and that may be enough, but it is debatable. Regardless, the SSPL is a bad license for having this ambiguity in the first place.
- dfox 6y ago
  Similar kind of ambiguity is even in GPLv2. ie. what does "anything that is normally distributed with..." in section 3 mean and how all that interacts with notionally GPL licensed software which depends on 3rd party components with GPL-incompatible licenses (on Unix-like systems the issue is typically only with OpenSSL but for GPL licensed Windows-only software this is giant can of worms). What makes SSPL and similar freedom-0 ignoring licenses problematic is that you have to care about these kinds of license ambiguities even if you are just using the software.
api 6y ago
> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? Open source originated in the 1980s and 1990s in largely academic circles. It gained mainstream popularity as an alternative to closed source "shrink wrap" software and closed shareware. Back then the legitimate fear was that closed-source vendors would lock everyone in and end up effectively owning the entire computing ecosystem and the Internet. By the mid-late 1990s Microsoft was well on its way to having a total OS monopoly on PCs and increasingly servers, and were it not for Linux and many other projects this likely would have come to pass. Good news: open source mostly won! We now have a fairly open compute ecosystem. Even Windows was dragged into adopting more Posix-like standards, and the Mac is just a proprietary GUI and set of system services running on top of a mostly open BSD kernel. It's borderline trivial to port most software between Windows, Mac, BSD, and Linux, so we avoided OS lock-in! Then along came the SaaS business model and closed Internet silos. Cloud-hosted SaaS just totally upends everything. Now open source doesn't really matter from a freedom perspective. The cloud has all your data, and by keeping select bits of code (or even just the system configuration) secret and locked inside cloud servers vendors can achieve DRM that is effectively impossible to circumvent. You can't even run the software yourself, and even if you could your data isn't yours. Having the source is meaningless. It's a model that's more closed than closed, and not only is it compatible with classical open source but is actually fed and sustained by it. Open source is free labor for closed cloud SaaS. The OSI is fully industry captured and isn't interested in challenging this, which is why large projects are adopting non-OSI-compliant licenses.
- chc 6y ago
  I don't think your conclusion follows. Elastic effectively saying "Nobody can provide our software as a service" doesn't increase the openness of the overall system — it reduces the openness of the system in order to benefit Elastic, which would like a monopoly on providing Elasticsearch as a service.
  - api 6y ago
    From the user's perspective there is little difference. SaaS means you don't control the data or runtime. If others want to host Elastic as SaaS they just have to negotiate a license. At least the authors of the software are supported. In this case the authors being supported by their ownership of SaaS rights are releasing the source to their product under terms that allow you to run it yourself for reasons other than providing it as SaaS. That means you can in fact control the runtime and the data if you want to do that. The alternative is to have someone else sell it as SaaS and not compensate the authors, running the risk that the open source will be abandoned. This is the SaaS equivalent of embrace-extend-extinguish.
musicale 6y ago
> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? The article explains its point of view in the first paragraph: "I’ve been asked repeatedly about a two-year trend in the open source ecosystem: ‘single source’ open source companies scrapping their Open Source Initiative-approved open source license for a ‘source available’ license."
pullmn 6y ago
First of all the 'spirit' of the new license is "you can do anything you like with the code, except if we don't want you to". Nobody knows when or whether one of these companies will turn around and say "that's now part of our business model, you can no longer do it". Perhaps they will decide that not only can Amazon not 'resell' their product, neither can anyone host it themselves, but everyone has to subscribe to their cloud service. Secondly, although I love the Redis product for example, the company that sells it is no longer getting rewarded for their added value, as when they sold support or consultation, or as when AWS sells the fact of putting Redis on a machine and maintaining it. Instead they get paid for supplying something that no one else has, something which they have made artificially scarce. Next, Amazon et al have resources and market power enough to push their own versions of these. Who will it serve when there's Amazon Redis, RedisLabs Redis, Community Redis, Azure Redis, all with slightly different interfaces? Who do you think will win? Amazon and Microsoft have the resources to destroy small competitors in these type of battles, and the user will be even more screwed. Just because Oracle failed with Jenkins, don't assume that no big tech is savvy enough to succeed at this game. Lastly, free software wouldn't exist if everyone took your attitude. If Linus had told people that they could install his kernel for free, but that distros had to pay $2, Linux would never have been a thing. If you can't deal with sharing when someone else might end up putting in less and taking out more, you're not ready to share.
- _msw_ 6y ago
  Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I am not speaking for the company. The Redis case study is a nuanced one. The core Redis code is BSD-3 licensed, and adopted a lightweight community governance model in June of 2020 [1]. This model includes a core team of individuals, and seeks to empower individuals who demonstrate a long-term commitment to Redis as a community-driven project. The core team is now made up of people who currently work for Redis Labs, AWS, and Alibaba [2]. From my perspective, on the core BSD-3 licensed Redis code, it is in all stakeholders interest to collaborate on the "upstream." There's one Redis, and it is the version that is produced by the Redis development community, and Redis Labs acts as the primary sponsor and steward of the project. [1] https://redis.io/topics/governance https://redis.io/topics/governance [2] https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/ https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/
ff317 6y ago
A viewpoint that often gets left out of these discussions is the intersection of true open source and doing big things. So many orgs and people in these debates fall into the easy trap of assuming the world of potential open source users (and contributors) can be split into two camps: there are small-scale/small-business/hobby/startup projects running on true open source, and then there are Big Internet Things run by Big Money Machines that can afford to pay any price and should, and probably don't care about open principles in the first place and therefore don't mind running a closed-source version of some project. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) doesn't fit these molds: Wikipedia is kind of a Big Thing on the Internet, and yet the WMF is committed to openness and transparency, and part of that commitment is that we only use real open source software. This is increasingly a challenging proposition with the shift towards "Open Core" concepts and specialty not-so-open licensing. The "Open Core" model is especially challenging for the WMF, as it's usually structured along the lines of "The hobbyist version of this product is open source, but if you want the features that are necessary to operate at big global scale, you need to buy licenses and run proprietary extensions or versions." The WMF's principled way of operating relies on there being real open source projects that actually work for doing big things. I think the Internet (and the world) would be a better place if there were more principled organizations like the WMF which operate with a high degree of technical transparency and openness. If open source licensing models keep going down these darker paths, it's hard to imagine such organizations being very successful. It should not be a given that doing big things in the world implies going proprietary and commercial and running hidden code nobody else can see (or use to replicate your success at other open orgs!).
Yeroc 6y ago
Honestly, I wonder whether GPL and AGPL world be considered open source licensing if they were released today. Ironically, it's commercial interests that have made the Apache-like licenses popular in the first place.
tolmasky 6y ago
Careful when you read and modify it, since it’s not actually an open source license, you can poison yourself if later in your career you decide to write a new thing in the same space. Someone could come and argue that you are writing a derivative work, similar to if you spent years seeing closed source software inside a company and then went and made a similar product. That’s the actual safety from using something like MIT, BSD, or Apache: who cares whether or not the projects you read and maybe even contributed to inspired you, or if code you later write coincidentally looks similar to code from these projects, it’s no strings attached! These licenses however have many of the same legal subtleties as the GPL, except with a more explicit commercial intent, and owned by parties who have already demonstrated that they become unhappy when competitors make more money than them (as opposed to the “spirit” of the GPL which ultimately just wanted everyone to be able to see the code).
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > That’s the actual safety from using something like MIT, BSD, or Apache ... it’s no strings attached This is very misleading. For example, [L]GPLv3 explicitly introduced clauses to protect developers from patent trolling and to grant trademark usage. When releasing code you can be sued over patent issues or trademark infringement and MIT/BSD provides no protection.
zvrba 6y ago
> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? Fully agree with your opinion here. In fact, I posted a lengthy comment on reddit about this, here it is copy/pasted. NB: "You" below refers to the OP on reddit I was replying to. --- Yes, and that's why the phrase "open source" would be perfectly appropriate: open for inspection, review and modifications, but with possible restrictions on use and redistribution. Now from your description and quick glance at approved OSI licenses, the problem is that OSI seems to like and approve "free source" licenses, "free" basically being the freedom to do what the heck you want with it. (Except for GPL and its variants as /u/nemec noted. Not to mention that Affero GPL is OSI-approved and comes with restrictions/obligations not unlike the new Elastic license.). [EDIT: this paragraph was meant to illustrate the ambiguity of "open" in the OSI's license collection.] If somebody is the "enemy" of developers here (in terms of they getting fairly compensated), it's OSI: they've made a marketing stunt (which you seem to have bought -- and I don't mean anything bad by this -- you're not alone) by adopting the phrase "open source" instead of "free source", or even more explicit phrase "free-rider source". So now you have a bunch of developers striving for the OSI "seal of approval" and donating their work for free to huge companies. It almost seems like a plan devised by those big companies. Oh wait, look at the sponsors: https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors No, I do not believe that OSI is the result of a conspiracy of big companies. But those big companies have been smart and coopted OSI for their benefit and now contribute to OSI to keep the marketing stunt rolling on.

retrac 6y ago

The GPL family is not permissive (as the term is usually meant) and is certainly FLOSS.

vorpalhex 6y ago

No, open source means they aren't user hostile. Contractual landmines and restrictions on running the software are user hostile.

dannyw 6y ago
Amazon isn't an user. They are an exploiter. Users aren't affected by any of the relicenses.
- spijdar 6y ago
  How do you draw the line between "user" and "exploiter"? Was there any point in the past Amazon wasn't an "exploiter"? What if a user becomes an exploiter? Can an exploiter become a user through repentance? Where's the legal boundary?
  - drdeca 6y ago
    legal boundary or moral boundary? (Not that I have an answer in either case, but my impression was that "exploiter" was an expression of moral judgement, not a legal judgement)
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Not OP and not really invested. You can probably replace "exploiter" with provider. A user uses the software directly, a provider provides it to users. Amazon can be both simultaneously, they can run ES to analyze sales and find out what products of third party sellers are worth copying, and they can also offer ES as a service to other users. That kind of difference is pretty common in non-source-related things, e.g. you can use the API for your business, but you can't resell access to the API.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    Are you able to, in your head, draw a difference between Amazon and Amin running some application in their home-built system? That's how you draw the line.
samat 6y ago
1) who is the user? 2) let’s give some love to BSD, since GPL is hostile to my intention of selling modified software
- ahachete 6y ago
  What part of the GPL is forbidding selling modified software? There are tons of GPL software that is sold.
  - noncoml 6y ago
    I assume GP implies without open sourcing his changes.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
This is plain false: tivoization is the best example.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? AGPLv3 is open source and isn't exactly favorable to tech monopolists, either.

pydry 6y ago
That's another license that gets a disproportionate level of flak.
- mfer 6y ago
  Big companies or those with lawyers notice that the AGPLv3 says the software used to make something a service must be licensed under the same license. Much of that software isn't something a company controls. For example, you put the AGPLv3 software behind a load balancer. Does that software need to be AGPLv3? Some would say so and how often can a company control that license. Companies with more are conservative on their risk. Not a lawyer and this is not legal advice
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Yeah. The boundaries of the GPL are mostly clear because they're essentially tied to Unix linking behavior. There are some edge case--I know people who don't think you shouldn't be able to load binary blobs for example--but mostly. There doesn't seem to be the same sort of clear consensus over how broadly the AGPL interacts with other code on the network.
  - pydry 6y ago
    >Does that software need to be AGPLv3? No. It doesn't "infect" the load balancer. There's zero ambiguity about this. A lot of companies have bad lawyers who try to eliminate rather than mitigate risk and who try to grab every scrap of IP for the company. This is the kind of company you're talking about. This is also why many try to get you to sign away every profitable idea you've ever dreamed up in the shower: a combination of extreme risk aversion and flagrant greed. I'd even venture as far as to say it's a feature not a bug if this type of company were forced to use expensive proprietary software or older, shittier versions.

pydry 6y ago

I genuinely wonder what all the people defending infringements on Bezos's "right" to profit from elastic (for instance) are thinking. If it's open for you but not for him what's your problem?

scj 6y ago
Rational self-interest of wanting commodity software for infrastructure / tooling. A clear winner means more companies use it, increasing demand for it. Which makes it more valuable to master. If the commodity software is open source, I can learn it at home for a low cost. Then use it at work, again for a low cost. Employers have an interest in using it, as do I. So I want to encourage Amazon, and other tech companies, to use as much open source as possible! Please increase demand for my skillset! Of course, the eternal problem is how the software gets developed in the first place. But I really don't want software that bifurcates organizations vs. individuals to become a cultural norm. Even if the impact of any single case is minimal.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "If it's open for you but not for him what's your problem?" Now we have to deal with examining and getting approval for umpteen oddball custom software licenses instead of just the standard FOSS ones and, yeah, that is a problem. The pain of dealing with licenses was part of what drove adoption of FOSS in the first place. The original spirit of open source was scratching an itch and sharing your code in hopes others found it useful. The current squabbles are about large for-profit corporations trying to extract money from other large for-profit corporations, so let's call these new licenses what they are: proprietary licenses with source availability.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Teaser license?
- pydry 6y ago
  >Now we have to deal with examining and getting approval Your legal department's inability to keep up to date is not the fault of the open source community. Corporate legal departments were exactly as useless, intransigent and belligerent when open source was first introduced. Their tendency towards evil or laziness is not an excuse for anything. >yeah, that is a problem With your legal department. THEY need to change. JUST as they were dragged kicking and screaming into the age of open source. >The original spirit of open source was scratching an itch and sharing your code No it wasn't. It was about freedom of speech and freedom to do with as you will with what you have on your computer. It's amazing the number of people I've come across today that misunderstood both the legality and the spirit of open source in a way that Google or Amazon would strongly approve of.

mfer 6y ago

> As a user, I can use Elasticsearch just fine with the new license. I can read the code, modify it and use in my own projects. This illustrates just one kind of user. And only in some situations. For example, lets say Elastic.co goes under. Under the license another company couldn't setup a replacement. So, the end user is screwed just as if a proprietary vendor had gone under. What the companies behind the new licenses are attempting to do is have their cake and eat it, too. They want open source for all the cred and for one type of user. The want proprietary for the complete control of the stack right through some types of hosting situations. It's hard to produce something completely open and yet monetize it in way that meets VC grown desires. That's why so many companies open source the common stuff but keep the special sauce proprietary.

bramblerose 6y ago
> Under the license another company couldn't setup a replacement. I'm confused here -- the new 'open core' is available under the SSPL, which clearly allows this, as long as you provide the source code of any management layers as well. The non-open parts already weren't available under the Apache license, so nothing has really changed there. And, yes, this does mean Elastic is the only company able to build proprietary components on top of the code base, which means there isn't an even playing field with competitors. But once Elastic goes bankrupt this is no longer an issue.
- growse 6y ago
  > > Under the license another company couldn't setup a replacement. > I'm confused here -- the new 'open core' is available under the SSPL, which clearly allows this, as long as you provide the source code of any management layers as well. The non-open parts already weren't available under the Apache license, so nothing has really changed there. This is essentially a legal "gotcha", given that "management layers" is not defined anywhere. The purpose of the clause is not to encourage companies to "open source everything" (what does that even mean? Do they need to open source their IPMI firmware?), it's to prevent anyone from going anywhere near it. Do elastic.co open source all the management layers in their stack?

autarch 6y ago

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? No, open source means the same thing it's always meant since the term was first coined. See the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd. Now someone will respond "why does OSI get to decide the meaning of the term?" Well, they don't have any _legal_ right to do so, but if you don't accept their definition, does that mean every person gets to come up with their own definition? And if they do, what's the point of using the term? So it makes sense to take OSI's definition as canonical, the same way the Free Software Foundation's definition of Free Software is generally considered canonical (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). Also, to forestall another common reply, I'm not defending Amazon or attacking Elastic. I'm simply trying to define a term that's at the center of this discussion. If we can't agree on the definition, then any discussion of whether a license is open source is moot. The same goes for discussing the impact and value of open source vs non-open licenses.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kube-system 6y ago
Are you sure the FSF's definition of Free Software is a good example of your point here? That definition is almost entirely only respected by western software developers who support the FSF's cause. Just type "free software" into your favorite search engine and see how commonly that definition is followed in practice. Honestly, I think we should just say OSI-licensed if we mean OSI-licensed. Words are only as good as they can be used to communicate with others. If people misunderstand me, it's my fault.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Many other languages have an unambiguous word for "libre", and can translate "libre software" directly.
  - kube-system 6y ago

armandososa 6y ago

In spanish* we have a word: "emparejado" which means a door is not open but not quite closed. It appears closed, but it's not. Maybe we should use "emparejado-source" :) * Maybe it's just a mexicanism, IDK.

vincent-manis 6y ago
So in English, we can call these faux-open-source licences “ajar-source”?

jrochkind1 6y ago

As a developer acting on behalf of an organization using open source, I benefit from being able to pay the vendor of my choice to host a given piece of software. If only the single-source author can host it as a service, or you need the permission of the single source author to host it as a service, then my choices are either self-hosting, or paying whatever price the single legal-as-a-service-host wants to charge, at whatever service quality they provide. (The fact they can choose to allow other licensed hosts, perhaps for a free if they want, does not change their monopoly control). It is a form of vendor lock-in, and avoiding vendor lock-in is one popular motivation for using open source. So yes, this restriction makes something not open source. This restriction also is not favourable to me as a user of the open source software. Open source was always about avoiding monopoly control of who is allowed to do what with the software. Monopoly control of who is allowed to host it as a service is such, and it is more favourable to me as a consumer when there is not that monopoly control. Now, meanwhile, there are various market battles going on between various big tech cloud providers and other companies providing (previously) open source software. This is also true. Both things can be true. For the consumer, as the OP suggests, your best bet is when there is software that can be produced sustainably by multiple entities collaborating, instead of a single company. Now, if that's not sustainable, that's a problem. It's possible that open source is facing sustainability problems due to current conditions. But that doesn't change the fact that monopolizing legal right to host software as a service is not open source, is rightly not approved by OSI, and is making consumers locked in to that single vendor (or their licencees), which is indeed contrary to intention of open source.

kodah 6y ago
> It is a form of vendor lock-in, and avoiding vendor lock-in is one popular motivation for using open source. Likely also a false one. For example, if you use WordPress guess who your vendor is? WordPress. More vexing, if you use Kubernetes provided by a cloud provider guess who your vendor is? The cloud provider, because of all those non-free doodads they put into their managed service. It is possible for a company like AWS to continue to offer a managed service for things like elastic, but I suspect elastic wants the nature of the agreement to change; which as far as I can tell we're not privy to.

tsimionescu 6y ago

> I can read the code, modify it and use in my own projects. That isn't clear. The license language can be read as requiring you to provide the source code for any software that interacts with ES (e.g., the Linux kernel that you are using to deploy ES over) under the terms of the SSPL to your own users, which you literally can't do. Elastic claims in their FAQ that this is not the intention, and that may be enough, but it is debatable. Regardless, the SSPL is a bad license for having this ambiguity in the first place.

dfox 6y ago
Similar kind of ambiguity is even in GPLv2. ie. what does "anything that is normally distributed with..." in section 3 mean and how all that interacts with notionally GPL licensed software which depends on 3rd party components with GPL-incompatible licenses (on Unix-like systems the issue is typically only with OpenSSL but for GPL licensed Windows-only software this is giant can of worms). What makes SSPL and similar freedom-0 ignoring licenses problematic is that you have to care about these kinds of license ambiguities even if you are just using the software.

api 6y ago

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? Open source originated in the 1980s and 1990s in largely academic circles. It gained mainstream popularity as an alternative to closed source "shrink wrap" software and closed shareware. Back then the legitimate fear was that closed-source vendors would lock everyone in and end up effectively owning the entire computing ecosystem and the Internet. By the mid-late 1990s Microsoft was well on its way to having a total OS monopoly on PCs and increasingly servers, and were it not for Linux and many other projects this likely would have come to pass. Good news: open source mostly won! We now have a fairly open compute ecosystem. Even Windows was dragged into adopting more Posix-like standards, and the Mac is just a proprietary GUI and set of system services running on top of a mostly open BSD kernel. It's borderline trivial to port most software between Windows, Mac, BSD, and Linux, so we avoided OS lock-in! Then along came the SaaS business model and closed Internet silos. Cloud-hosted SaaS just totally upends everything. Now open source doesn't really matter from a freedom perspective. The cloud has all your data, and by keeping select bits of code (or even just the system configuration) secret and locked inside cloud servers vendors can achieve DRM that is effectively impossible to circumvent. You can't even run the software yourself, and even if you could your data isn't yours. Having the source is meaningless. It's a model that's more closed than closed, and not only is it compatible with classical open source but is actually fed and sustained by it. Open source is free labor for closed cloud SaaS. The OSI is fully industry captured and isn't interested in challenging this, which is why large projects are adopting non-OSI-compliant licenses.

chc 6y ago
I don't think your conclusion follows. Elastic effectively saying "Nobody can provide our software as a service" doesn't increase the openness of the overall system — it reduces the openness of the system in order to benefit Elastic, which would like a monopoly on providing Elasticsearch as a service.
- api 6y ago
  From the user's perspective there is little difference. SaaS means you don't control the data or runtime. If others want to host Elastic as SaaS they just have to negotiate a license. At least the authors of the software are supported. In this case the authors being supported by their ownership of SaaS rights are releasing the source to their product under terms that allow you to run it yourself for reasons other than providing it as SaaS. That means you can in fact control the runtime and the data if you want to do that. The alternative is to have someone else sell it as SaaS and not compensate the authors, running the risk that the open source will be abandoned. This is the SaaS equivalent of embrace-extend-extinguish.

musicale 6y ago

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? The article explains its point of view in the first paragraph: "I’ve been asked repeatedly about a two-year trend in the open source ecosystem: ‘single source’ open source companies scrapping their Open Source Initiative-approved open source license for a ‘source available’ license."

pullmn 6y ago

First of all the 'spirit' of the new license is "you can do anything you like with the code, except if we don't want you to". Nobody knows when or whether one of these companies will turn around and say "that's now part of our business model, you can no longer do it". Perhaps they will decide that not only can Amazon not 'resell' their product, neither can anyone host it themselves, but everyone has to subscribe to their cloud service. Secondly, although I love the Redis product for example, the company that sells it is no longer getting rewarded for their added value, as when they sold support or consultation, or as when AWS sells the fact of putting Redis on a machine and maintaining it. Instead they get paid for supplying something that no one else has, something which they have made artificially scarce. Next, Amazon et al have resources and market power enough to push their own versions of these. Who will it serve when there's Amazon Redis, RedisLabs Redis, Community Redis, Azure Redis, all with slightly different interfaces? Who do you think will win? Amazon and Microsoft have the resources to destroy small competitors in these type of battles, and the user will be even more screwed. Just because Oracle failed with Jenkins, don't assume that no big tech is savvy enough to succeed at this game. Lastly, free software wouldn't exist if everyone took your attitude. If Linus had told people that they could install his kernel for free, but that distros had to pay $2, Linux would never have been a thing. If you can't deal with sharing when someone else might end up putting in less and taking out more, you're not ready to share.

_msw_ 6y ago
Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I am not speaking for the company. The Redis case study is a nuanced one. The core Redis code is BSD-3 licensed, and adopted a lightweight community governance model in June of 2020 [1]. This model includes a core team of individuals, and seeks to empower individuals who demonstrate a long-term commitment to Redis as a community-driven project. The core team is now made up of people who currently work for Redis Labs, AWS, and Alibaba [2]. From my perspective, on the core BSD-3 licensed Redis code, it is in all stakeholders interest to collaborate on the "upstream." There's one Redis, and it is the version that is produced by the Redis development community, and Redis Labs acts as the primary sponsor and steward of the project. [1] https://redis.io/topics/governance https://redis.io/topics/governance [2] https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/ https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/

ff317 6y ago

A viewpoint that often gets left out of these discussions is the intersection of true open source and doing big things. So many orgs and people in these debates fall into the easy trap of assuming the world of potential open source users (and contributors) can be split into two camps: there are small-scale/small-business/hobby/startup projects running on true open source, and then there are Big Internet Things run by Big Money Machines that can afford to pay any price and should, and probably don't care about open principles in the first place and therefore don't mind running a closed-source version of some project. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) doesn't fit these molds: Wikipedia is kind of a Big Thing on the Internet, and yet the WMF is committed to openness and transparency, and part of that commitment is that we only use real open source software. This is increasingly a challenging proposition with the shift towards "Open Core" concepts and specialty not-so-open licensing. The "Open Core" model is especially challenging for the WMF, as it's usually structured along the lines of "The hobbyist version of this product is open source, but if you want the features that are necessary to operate at big global scale, you need to buy licenses and run proprietary extensions or versions." The WMF's principled way of operating relies on there being real open source projects that actually work for doing big things. I think the Internet (and the world) would be a better place if there were more principled organizations like the WMF which operate with a high degree of technical transparency and openness. If open source licensing models keep going down these darker paths, it's hard to imagine such organizations being very successful. It should not be a given that doing big things in the world implies going proprietary and commercial and running hidden code nobody else can see (or use to replicate your success at other open orgs!).

Yeroc 6y ago

Honestly, I wonder whether GPL and AGPL world be considered open source licensing if they were released today. Ironically, it's commercial interests that have made the Apache-like licenses popular in the first place.

tolmasky 6y ago

Careful when you read and modify it, since it’s not actually an open source license, you can poison yourself if later in your career you decide to write a new thing in the same space. Someone could come and argue that you are writing a derivative work, similar to if you spent years seeing closed source software inside a company and then went and made a similar product. That’s the actual safety from using something like MIT, BSD, or Apache: who cares whether or not the projects you read and maybe even contributed to inspired you, or if code you later write coincidentally looks similar to code from these projects, it’s no strings attached! These licenses however have many of the same legal subtleties as the GPL, except with a more explicit commercial intent, and owned by parties who have already demonstrated that they become unhappy when competitors make more money than them (as opposed to the “spirit” of the GPL which ultimately just wanted everyone to be able to see the code).

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> That’s the actual safety from using something like MIT, BSD, or Apache ... it’s no strings attached This is very misleading. For example, [L]GPLv3 explicitly introduced clauses to protect developers from patent trolling and to grant trademark usage. When releasing code you can be sued over patent issues or trademark infringement and MIT/BSD provides no protection.

zvrba 6y ago

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? Fully agree with your opinion here. In fact, I posted a lengthy comment on reddit about this, here it is copy/pasted. NB: "You" below refers to the OP on reddit I was replying to. --- Yes, and that's why the phrase "open source" would be perfectly appropriate: open for inspection, review and modifications, but with possible restrictions on use and redistribution. Now from your description and quick glance at approved OSI licenses, the problem is that OSI seems to like and approve "free source" licenses, "free" basically being the freedom to do what the heck you want with it. (Except for GPL and its variants as /u/nemec noted. Not to mention that Affero GPL is OSI-approved and comes with restrictions/obligations not unlike the new Elastic license.). [EDIT: this paragraph was meant to illustrate the ambiguity of "open" in the OSI's license collection.] If somebody is the "enemy" of developers here (in terms of they getting fairly compensated), it's OSI: they've made a marketing stunt (which you seem to have bought -- and I don't mean anything bad by this -- you're not alone) by adopting the phrase "open source" instead of "free source", or even more explicit phrase "free-rider source". So now you have a bunch of developers striving for the OSI "seal of approval" and donating their work for free to huge companies. It almost seems like a plan devised by those big companies. Oh wait, look at the sponsors: https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors No, I do not believe that OSI is the result of a conspiracy of big companies. But those big companies have been smart and coopted OSI for their benefit and now contribute to OSI to keep the marketing stunt rolling on.