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> Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? The answer is simple - no. Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can

> Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? The answer is simple - no. Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but". I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good with the bad.

skrtskrt 5y ago
If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Well, it's just the free speech issue all over. Either you censor speech or you risk people saying things that you really don't like. This is exactly the same situation: Either you go FOSS, with all the benefits it entails, and risk getting forked by a major player or you go proprietary and risk not getting adopted at all by major players and open source enthusiasts. Don't get me wrong, I feel with the Elastic team and I can understand why they're unhappy (even if I don't agree with their pettiness). I also don't particularly like the move Amazon did here. But that's why we want free software: If the current owner of the software does something you don't like, you can still use the software. That's the whole point. And you're still free to pay Elastic to manage a cluster on AWS for you; Amazon might have forked the project, but it's still the customer that needs to switch to OpenSearch.
  - skrtskrt 5y ago
    Okay, but what about something like BSL, with the older versions automatically getting fully open-sourced? Not technically open-source, but much closer to open-source than what we would generally think of as "proprietary" software
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  The end result may be that there's a little bit more proprietary software; so be it, people could already make proprietary software. We'll still have plenty of Open Source software that's actually Open Source. That's better than losing Open Source altogether.
Dylan16807 5y ago
The question was not "would it be FOSS". The question is whether you can have the benefits of FOSS, or as much of them as possible. Imagine just as an example, a license for personal software that is exactly the same as GPLv2 except billionaires can't use it. Functionally that has the same benefits as FOSS, even though it's not.
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  This is exactly the framing/idea I am going for. Honestly it seems like the only downside there would be all the OSS purist/billionaire-defender HN commenters would have a field day, then you could move on.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    One of the key benefits of FOSS is that if I don’t want to (or am not capable to) do something with the software, I can pay someone to do that part for me. Maybe that’s fix a bug, extend/modify the software, or maybe it’s operate and host it for me. I’d like to choose AWS to do this hosting in a lot of cases, assuming they’re willing. Barring them from hosting it is impinging on my freedom as a user and therefore with respect to whether I think that software is Free and Open. That’s the exact freedom that Elastic is trying to remove here, for their own (totally valid) business reasons (they don’t want to compete head-to-head with AWS hosting), but in so doing, they’re removing an essential freedom from users. This is not about defending billionaires; it’s about having choice in the use of the software purporting to be free and open.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      I don't think they want to stop you from doing those things, and hiring out to do that, I think they want it to not be offered as a prepackaged product. So it's a reduction in freedom, but it's not a reduction in user freedom.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Those are just differences in timing and system efficiency. In one view, RHEL is a pre-packaged product. In another view, it’s a bunch of users outsourcing a portion of FOSS management to an expert company because they don’t want to do it.

skrtskrt 5y ago

If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software.

Sebb767 5y ago
Well, it's just the free speech issue all over. Either you censor speech or you risk people saying things that you really don't like. This is exactly the same situation: Either you go FOSS, with all the benefits it entails, and risk getting forked by a major player or you go proprietary and risk not getting adopted at all by major players and open source enthusiasts. Don't get me wrong, I feel with the Elastic team and I can understand why they're unhappy (even if I don't agree with their pettiness). I also don't particularly like the move Amazon did here. But that's why we want free software: If the current owner of the software does something you don't like, you can still use the software. That's the whole point. And you're still free to pay Elastic to manage a cluster on AWS for you; Amazon might have forked the project, but it's still the customer that needs to switch to OpenSearch.
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  Okay, but what about something like BSL, with the older versions automatically getting fully open-sourced? Not technically open-source, but much closer to open-source than what we would generally think of as "proprietary" software
JoshTriplett 5y ago
The end result may be that there's a little bit more proprietary software; so be it, people could already make proprietary software. We'll still have plenty of Open Source software that's actually Open Source. That's better than losing Open Source altogether.

Dylan16807 5y ago

The question was not "would it be FOSS". The question is whether you can have the benefits of FOSS, or as much of them as possible. Imagine just as an example, a license for personal software that is exactly the same as GPLv2 except billionaires can't use it. Functionally that has the same benefits as FOSS, even though it's not.

skrtskrt 5y ago
This is exactly the framing/idea I am going for. Honestly it seems like the only downside there would be all the OSS purist/billionaire-defender HN commenters would have a field day, then you could move on.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  One of the key benefits of FOSS is that if I don’t want to (or am not capable to) do something with the software, I can pay someone to do that part for me. Maybe that’s fix a bug, extend/modify the software, or maybe it’s operate and host it for me. I’d like to choose AWS to do this hosting in a lot of cases, assuming they’re willing. Barring them from hosting it is impinging on my freedom as a user and therefore with respect to whether I think that software is Free and Open. That’s the exact freedom that Elastic is trying to remove here, for their own (totally valid) business reasons (they don’t want to compete head-to-head with AWS hosting), but in so doing, they’re removing an essential freedom from users. This is not about defending billionaires; it’s about having choice in the use of the software purporting to be free and open.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    I don't think they want to stop you from doing those things, and hiring out to do that, I think they want it to not be offered as a prepackaged product. So it's a reduction in freedom, but it's not a reduction in user freedom.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Those are just differences in timing and system efficiency. In one view, RHEL is a pre-packaged product. In another view, it’s a bunch of users outsourcing a portion of FOSS management to an expert company because they don’t want to do it.