Re:Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
by treis on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @02:05PM
(#25837315)
It's somewhere between bait and switch & dumping. It's very hard to compete against free. And it's very hard to make money when you give away your product for free. Cloud hosting was a way out of that conundrum. But that window is now closing as the big cloud operators move in + the rise of Docker making hosting much easier.
Re:Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
by tshaddox on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @02:50PM
(#25837952)
> And it's very hard to make money when you give away your product for free. Cloud hosting was a way out of that conundrum.
But surely it's only a conundrum if the primary goal of a software project is for a single company that has the same name as the software project to exclusively make money by selling hosting and/or support for that software while still using an open source license to attract a community of developers to work for you for free. I'd argue that this conundrum is easily resolvable: either have an open source software project for which anyone can sell support and hosting, or have a software company that develops proprietary software and sells it and related services.
Re:Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
by rossjudson on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @12:15AM
(#25842815)
The only mistake Elastic seems to have made here is not releasing ElasticSearch under something like the SSPL in the first place. Of course, it didn't exist then.
Almost every user would have been free to use it exactly as they do today.
That’s my attitude towards most of these license changes or “open core” pivots. These companies want all the good will and community contributions of “open source” while still being able to wield intellectual property protection laws against other companies who dare compete against them on unrelated, commoditized services like hosting.