3 ms·
SSPL is mainly bad for the companies that use the license. They cut themselves off from their own open source communities. Those typically reorganize around a f
by jillesvangurp 3y ago
SSPL is mainly bad for the companies that use the license. They cut themselves off from their own open source communities. Those typically reorganize around a fork, which then starts competing with the SSPL version for new users. Most of those users end up paying somebody else for hosting, support, etc. As a long term business strategy that seems misguided.
I think in a few years we'll look back and we'll see a bunch of mostly failing former OSS companies being milked by hedge funds or companies like Oracle, Salesforce, etc. for profit and a lot of thriving open source communities around the only thing that made those companies successful: forks of their software; pre-license change.
I'm well familiar with Opensearch now being the preferred choice over Elasticsearch as I am active doing consulting around both and the overwhelming majority of my clients defaults to Opensearch at this point. I'm neutral about this and still use Elasticsearch myself. But I can see the logic of my clients.
Morals and ethics don't really factor into this. All you need to do is follow the money, users, and developers. It's very predictable what happens: no company has a perpetual license on their loyalty or attention and that's exactly what you throw out of the window with SSPL.
- giamma 3y ago> I'm well familiar with Opensearch now being the preferred choice over Elasticsearch That's interesting feedback, I am using Elasticsearch and was looking into Opensearch as an alternative. What I see from their respective repositories is that Elasticsearch is more actively developed, it receives almot 3x commits in the same amount of time. Plus, as some of my clients want to install on-prem, it's not clear to me if you can get commercial support for on-prem installations.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoAmazon won't have much interest in supporting on-prem. But I'm sure you can find independent companies that would be willing to help with this. I wouldn't know any one of them well enough to vouch for any at this point. But with a quick Google search I was able to pull out some company names. There are enough companies going down this path that you should be able to get support.