If Lucene followed the same logic being espoused here, then ElasticSearch as we know it wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be able to use Lucene, which is an incredibly core component to ES. Elastic employs several people to work on Lucene full time at this point, so they're "giving back" in that regard, but they're still making money off of pre-existing open source.
What is the litmus test for this being okay? No one seems to be upset at Elastic for making money off Lucene, but the idea of the big cloud vendors making money off of ES is upsetting to a lot of people. If Amazon or Microsoft employed a handful of people to work on ElasticSearch full time does it become okay then?
Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, just that previous link in the chain should be financially rewarded for it.
This sounds exactly like a lot of proprietary software licensing agreements :)
>Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, just that previous link in the chain should be financially rewarded for it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with building and selling proprietary software, but that's really what's being described here.
If financial reward is what you most care about, write proprietary software. If FOSS is what you care most about, then the AGPL is probably a good fit for you. It won't force anyone to pay you for using your work, but it would force them to give back to the community.
This is a false dichotomy. You don't need to "care most about financial reward" to recognize that FOSS is simply not sustainable.
There is a whole level of freedoms one can grant (or not) to users of their software. FOSS is one extreme. Proprietary software is another. I don't think we need to tolerate black boxes, just because we want functioning software.
What about Open Source makes you believe this is the bad outcome?
The cloud companies make their money providing the physical infrastructure, their expertise in working with the product, support, etc. when hosting it for you. You're not paying them to have access to ElasticSearch - you've already got ElasticSearch.
Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Why shouldn't they have the option of getting their hosting from someone that they already get other hosted services from?
If there had been a similar attitude behind the development of open source webservers, the web as we know it would almost certainly not exist today. If httpd had been licensed in such a way that you couldn't make money off of providing it as a hosted service, and no open source alternative had come into existence, I doubt we'd all be sitting on HN right now. It never got concentrated like it has today with the big three, but nothing in the license prevented it from occurring.
Hosting OSS isn't the only thing that creates value, but it's where most of the revenue is now being derived since no-one pays for OSS, only to host it. The generated wealth is then be used to finance other proprietary and OSS efforts that can outspend and out resource anyone else they choose to compete with, who need to rely on a different source and business model for their sustainable income.
Cloud hosting is the primary business model that allows investing in developing OSS as they'll still get paid in the end, in this way OSS bringing the cost of software down to zero becomes a loss-leading marketing expense (and competitive advantage) that allows mass free bait distribution of their software which everyone else is at a disadvantage to compete against.
Essentially OSS is strengthening cloud monopolies by bringing the cost of software development to zero with the majority of wealth created going to making major tech cloud providers more wealthy and powerful each passing year.
> Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic?
Because AWS didn't put any of the investment in creating it, they're reaping the benefits from Elastic's investments and can undercut them since they don't have to fund any of the development and have access to an bigger economy of scale no-one else has access to.
In the end, working for such corporations is the only way to actually be paid when one wants to have a daily job in software tooling.
I don't think they do, actually? MongoDB felt a need to change their license from AGPL to SSPL. That said, I'm on "not going far enough" side of the argument. I don't care if they distribute their code, I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Alternatively, they are free to develop their own product. Note that that doesn't go for users - users are free to install and use the software as they see fit. But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me.
Which is basically rent seeking which is what this whole thread is complaining about.
And, incidentally, the whole problem copywrite was invented to solve -- you get a "time limited" monopoly on the distribution of your work.
> But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me.
<bad car analogy warning>
This is like car companies saying you are free to race their cars as long as you never outcompete them on the track...
Ayende from RavenDB (which is a great no-nonsense document DB) has written an interesting blog series [0] on how they approach OSS while still making money from it and keeping their interests aligned with users and customers. TL;DR they license the full server and all modules as AGPL, offer free community (commercial) license that don't skimp on core features (clustering, authn/z), treat support as a cost-center.
Appears to work well for them and I personally find their mode of operation sympathetic.
[0] https://ayende.com/blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-f...
People are free to use them for their projects. More power to them.
Assuming that all OSS projects are exploited or missing out is wrong.
The reason apl/mit are so popular is because they encourage use. I suspect that projects that try to use common core or whatnot will not meet with success because of the limitations of those licenses. Although I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community).
The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash from OSS community [0][1]. Ironic, given that the same authors openly post the donations received that amount to... well not peanuts exactly, but not something comparable to an average programmer's pay either. Not all feedback is like this, of course - some recognize the unfairness in the system and support the search for change.
What I currently miss most is some viable 3rd option - not open source, not closed source, but something in between. Apart from GPL & co., and MIT / BSD / Apache, we need a sort of license that would allow creators to extract some part of money from their work. Or at least allow them to sell services, based on their product, without fear of being undercut by competitors who don't bother developing. Why develop when you can take the best OSS product, integrate it to your infrastructure and sell the service?
Current situation with "middle-ground" licenses is:
- Fair Source license is very well written, but is unfortunately only applicable to a very narrow use-case (user-facing apps), and bigtech can still undercut you at hosting (though you do get some royalties... probably)
- Commons Clause seems a bit vague about the term "Sell", has a very unfortunate name, and their main proponent already chose another license... too bad, because the idea is great.
- Zero License is too complex (for me at least)
- Business Source License looks promising, though I am not thrilled about the prospect of turning my software to GPL after 3 years (AGPL with closed loopholes would be a better choice).
If someone knows of a better license in the spirit of Commons Clause, I'm all ears.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-i...
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destr...