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> That's pretty disappointing. From the article: “End users can continue to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial and commercial use,

> That's pretty disappointing. From the article: “End users can continue to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial and commercial use, except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp.” Literally nothing has changed, this isn’t disappointing, it’s smart, they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community.

ugh123 3y ago
> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community. e.g. AWS -> Elasticsearch.
- nostrebored 3y ago
  Absurd. Providing a managed instance of open source software that’s complicated to manage is fine. It’s not AWS’s fault that Elastic did a bad job of selling into AWS accounts. They should have worked on their value prop.
  - ericb 3y ago
    > They should have worked on their value prop. AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service. Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon chose to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs, now they have to figure it out themselves, and whole ecosystems of services they could have hosted are running away from them.
    - jen20 3y ago
      The reason historically it hasn’t been a level playing field is because Amazon have: - The ability to invent new infrastructure to suit a need. For example, multi legged ENIs that provide the EKS control plane are simply not available to others, - The ability to integrate with IAM natively, - The ability to build common network architectures without outrageous costs (traffic over peering links being a good example since that is what basically all vendors have to do).
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        This is overthinking it. For nearly every given service, Amazon can just slap together a managed version and it will be the easiest one for people to discover and use if they are already using AWS. It doesn't require any of that special sauce fanciness. Most of their managed offerings are mediocre also-ran versions of things, but they are just easier to use within the existing ecosystem, so they win.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    What I find absurd is the perspective that it is 1. a giant no no breach of the spirit of open source software to provide software with open source code but a license that restricts commercial resale, and 2. it's totally great for megacorporations to reap the vast majority of the rewards that accrue to popular mature open source software services. I honestly can't fathom this worldview or how so many people here seem to be so sure it is the one that makes sense. If you win this battle for mindshare, people will just stop making open source services like these. Every service will just be fully closed source SaaS. Amazon can't just re-sell that no matter what, and people just crap on you if you make it open source (edit: re-reading this, should have said "source available" here), so why would anyone bother? Increasingly people who make open source software services are damned if they do and damned if they don't, and if that is how it's gonna be, people are going to just stop bothering with it.
- adrr 3y ago
  Elasticsearch is based off lucene so they are making money off another open source project.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Technically true, but practically different. Lucene is the core piece but %-wise the minority of the ES product. There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch.
    - Xylakant 3y ago
      > There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch. Apache Solr, which existed long before Elasticsearch was conceived.
      - paulddraper 3y ago
        Solr is a separate product. It is also an Apache project, though so are a million other projects. It also doesn't even have a commercial offering; Elasticsearch in no way affects any financial ambitions.
andrewstuart2 3y ago
Maybe you missed my last sentence. I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize, to capture some of my value add, while also giving back. (It's sorta "if you build it they will come" at this point tbh so I don't necessarily expect it to work). My project is sort of "OSS platform as a service" only I just deploy it for you and teach you to run it yourself, while jumping on a call occasionally if you need SRE for it, and continuing to iterate on tooling as well as make PRs to the tools as it makes sense. Vault and consul (as a vault backend only) are components I've used for that (via cert-manager so they're replaceable tbh) and I'm no longer sure if that's viable. And generally as a contributor to the vault codebase, however small, I'm not thrilled they want to capture more value from it themselves while not offering me a miniscule chunk of that. The whole cloud provider argument really feels a lot like Displaced Aggression. You're probably punishing the people smaller than you a lot more than you are the billion dollar cloud providers who can afford both expensive lawyers and can very easily afford to fork your codebases as we see with OpenSearch vs ElasticSearch.
- vmatsiiako 3y ago
  If so, you can check out Infisical (https://github.com/Infisical/infisical https://github.com/Infisical/infisical) as an open source alternative to Vault. The absolute majority of our codebase is licensed under MIT and we have no intentions to change that. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.
  - andrewstuart2 3y ago
    I'll definitely check it out. That said, I'm starting to feel a lot more skeptical of the ability for even founders to manage stuff like this. I would say the same of my own OSS as a "founder," but if my company controls it in some way then I'm not sure there's a reasonable way for me to ensure that continues in perpetuity. At least not via a split model like a lot of these recent news stories have revolved around. From what I've seen of Mitchell as well, at least in the past, I kind of doubt this is something he would have gone through with on his own.
    - deleted 3y ago
mindB 3y ago
>Literally nothing has changed This is super disingenuous in a world where things like the GPL exist and any other license that prevents you from putting further restrictions on the combined product.
jchw 3y ago
>Literally nothing has changed. Uhm, yeah, something DID change: the license and terms. I don't understand what kind of argument this is.
thayne 3y ago
> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community This seems a lot more likely to be targeting other startups that build on terraform like spacelift, env0, maybe pulumi (although I think they interface with providers directly, so this might not affect them as much), etc. And maybe there are similar companies for their other offerings, although I'm less familiar with those.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Adding a non-compete clause to your license is not "literally nothing" - in fact, it might be extremely problematic for a large number of downstream users. As for "abusing the goodwill of the open source community", that's kind of the point of FOSS. Free riding is not stealing. That's proprietary world logic, and everyone saying we need to stop people from free riding FOSS is calling for the enclosure of the commons. Let me be perfectly clear: there is no license condition you can put on software that will let everyone use it as if it were in the commons but prevent Amazon Web Services from hosting it.
- piaste 3y ago
  > Let me be perfectly clear: there is no license condition you can put on software that will let everyone use it as if it were in the commons but prevent Amazon Web Services from hosting it. "The following licence is granted to everyone except the following entities: Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle"
  - arlcode 3y ago
    "Today Amazon introduces the AWS Partnered Software Supplier Programm. Selected companies are invited to offer their products as deeply integrated AWS services. The first announced Parter are: Not-at-all-amazon-for-hashicorp inc, Not-at-all-amazon-for-mariadb inc."
growse 3y ago
For me, bait-and-switching their code contributors is almost the textbook definition of "abusing the goodwill of the open source community".

ugh123 3y ago

> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community. e.g. AWS -> Elasticsearch.

nostrebored 3y ago
Absurd. Providing a managed instance of open source software that’s complicated to manage is fine. It’s not AWS’s fault that Elastic did a bad job of selling into AWS accounts. They should have worked on their value prop.
- ericb 3y ago
  > They should have worked on their value prop. AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service. Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon chose to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs, now they have to figure it out themselves, and whole ecosystems of services they could have hosted are running away from them.
  - jen20 3y ago
    The reason historically it hasn’t been a level playing field is because Amazon have: - The ability to invent new infrastructure to suit a need. For example, multi legged ENIs that provide the EKS control plane are simply not available to others, - The ability to integrate with IAM natively, - The ability to build common network architectures without outrageous costs (traffic over peering links being a good example since that is what basically all vendors have to do).
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      This is overthinking it. For nearly every given service, Amazon can just slap together a managed version and it will be the easiest one for people to discover and use if they are already using AWS. It doesn't require any of that special sauce fanciness. Most of their managed offerings are mediocre also-ran versions of things, but they are just easier to use within the existing ecosystem, so they win.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  What I find absurd is the perspective that it is 1. a giant no no breach of the spirit of open source software to provide software with open source code but a license that restricts commercial resale, and 2. it's totally great for megacorporations to reap the vast majority of the rewards that accrue to popular mature open source software services. I honestly can't fathom this worldview or how so many people here seem to be so sure it is the one that makes sense. If you win this battle for mindshare, people will just stop making open source services like these. Every service will just be fully closed source SaaS. Amazon can't just re-sell that no matter what, and people just crap on you if you make it open source (edit: re-reading this, should have said "source available" here), so why would anyone bother? Increasingly people who make open source software services are damned if they do and damned if they don't, and if that is how it's gonna be, people are going to just stop bothering with it.
adrr 3y ago
Elasticsearch is based off lucene so they are making money off another open source project.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Technically true, but practically different. Lucene is the core piece but %-wise the minority of the ES product. There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch.
  - Xylakant 3y ago
    > There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch. Apache Solr, which existed long before Elasticsearch was conceived.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Solr is a separate product. It is also an Apache project, though so are a million other projects. It also doesn't even have a commercial offering; Elasticsearch in no way affects any financial ambitions.

andrewstuart2 3y ago

Maybe you missed my last sentence. I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize, to capture some of my value add, while also giving back. (It's sorta "if you build it they will come" at this point tbh so I don't necessarily expect it to work). My project is sort of "OSS platform as a service" only I just deploy it for you and teach you to run it yourself, while jumping on a call occasionally if you need SRE for it, and continuing to iterate on tooling as well as make PRs to the tools as it makes sense. Vault and consul (as a vault backend only) are components I've used for that (via cert-manager so they're replaceable tbh) and I'm no longer sure if that's viable. And generally as a contributor to the vault codebase, however small, I'm not thrilled they want to capture more value from it themselves while not offering me a miniscule chunk of that. The whole cloud provider argument really feels a lot like Displaced Aggression. You're probably punishing the people smaller than you a lot more than you are the billion dollar cloud providers who can afford both expensive lawyers and can very easily afford to fork your codebases as we see with OpenSearch vs ElasticSearch.

vmatsiiako 3y ago
If so, you can check out Infisical (https://github.com/Infisical/infisical https://github.com/Infisical/infisical) as an open source alternative to Vault. The absolute majority of our codebase is licensed under MIT and we have no intentions to change that. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.
- andrewstuart2 3y ago
  I'll definitely check it out. That said, I'm starting to feel a lot more skeptical of the ability for even founders to manage stuff like this. I would say the same of my own OSS as a "founder," but if my company controls it in some way then I'm not sure there's a reasonable way for me to ensure that continues in perpetuity. At least not via a split model like a lot of these recent news stories have revolved around. From what I've seen of Mitchell as well, at least in the past, I kind of doubt this is something he would have gone through with on his own.
  - deleted 3y ago

mindB 3y ago

>Literally nothing has changed This is super disingenuous in a world where things like the GPL exist and any other license that prevents you from putting further restrictions on the combined product.

jchw 3y ago

>Literally nothing has changed. Uhm, yeah, something DID change: the license and terms. I don't understand what kind of argument this is.

thayne 3y ago

> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community This seems a lot more likely to be targeting other startups that build on terraform like spacelift, env0, maybe pulumi (although I think they interface with providers directly, so this might not affect them as much), etc. And maybe there are similar companies for their other offerings, although I'm less familiar with those.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Adding a non-compete clause to your license is not "literally nothing" - in fact, it might be extremely problematic for a large number of downstream users. As for "abusing the goodwill of the open source community", that's kind of the point of FOSS. Free riding is not stealing. That's proprietary world logic, and everyone saying we need to stop people from free riding FOSS is calling for the enclosure of the commons. Let me be perfectly clear: there is no license condition you can put on software that will let everyone use it as if it were in the commons but prevent Amazon Web Services from hosting it.

piaste 3y ago
> Let me be perfectly clear: there is no license condition you can put on software that will let everyone use it as if it were in the commons but prevent Amazon Web Services from hosting it. "The following licence is granted to everyone except the following entities: Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle"
- arlcode 3y ago
  "Today Amazon introduces the AWS Partnered Software Supplier Programm. Selected companies are invited to offer their products as deeply integrated AWS services. The first announced Parter are: Not-at-all-amazon-for-hashicorp inc, Not-at-all-amazon-for-mariadb inc."

growse 3y ago

For me, bait-and-switching their code contributors is almost the textbook definition of "abusing the goodwill of the open source community".