With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source users to pay you is “doing it wrong”.

Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

Exactly this.

Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model.

The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. Nope, it's all gaslighting. They don't need to make this license change, without it they'll still be a $50B business in a decade or less.

They're just having an immature childish response because, while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is also making boatloads of money, and that's not fair in their eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a whole is, but that's another rant)

ES had a business model. It was open-core, but with critical features like Security and Access-Control hidden behind their paid support.

The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working.

Enough blame for the current situation on all sides.

Yeah, I simplified things for the sake of argument, but just to be clear, the whole open core business model was a huge conflict of interest and has convinced me that open core is a way worse conflict of interest than other ways to monetize (enterprise support, operating cloud service etc).

So, to call Elastic a successful open-source business model isn't quite accurate, and you're correct to point that out.

please add disclaimers if you work at amz

I don’t, I work for a non-profit that refuses to run proprietary software such as Elasticsearch 7.1.1 in prod. Not sure why you made that blind assumption. Very bizarre.

Thank you for pointing this out. I used to run elasticsearch on a project and these pay walled features were a large source of frustration to the point that eventually I recommended moving it to the AWS service because we were already paying amazon anyway and in a large organization it is a huge pain to contract another vendor.

> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

I think this is precisely correct, and it's really strange to me that a company developing innovative software would decide to apache license all of their work but I still feel for them. I'm guessing that they wanted to build a thing and make some money off of it while mostly just contributing to moving tech forward and that's a super noble goal... but that noble goal would have been much better served by using a license better tailored to OSS free use for non-commercial purposes and pursuing individual agreements for commercial use.

Then again, if it was launched with such stringent requirements would so many contributors have helped them develop into such a usable product?

> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

Elastic has indeed found a profitable business model: they have their own cloud (cloud.elastic.co). But for it to be profitable they need to cover the costs of both developing the Elastic stack, and running a SaaS. AWS only has to cover the cost of running a SaaS (since they are getting the stack for free) which gives them a HUGE cost-wise advantage.

To counter this advantage Elastic is asking them to partner with them like other cloud providers do (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba etc) but AWS has refused to do that.

Isn't it then fair for Elastic to restrict AWS from using their software?

This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.

My two cents:

Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous.

However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again.

So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.

> Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.

If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead.

The AGPL would ensure users of elasticsearch, whether hosted by elastic or AWS, have access to the source code of the software they're using.

> If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead.

But Amazon is releasing their source code. Even more of it than Elastic.

A restrictive licence limits the potential value that the code can bring to the world. To maximize the value you bring as an open source developer you can't expect returns (to the community), only hope for it.

> To maximize the value you ...

... have to let Bezos et al. exploit it?

(And that's maybe not as bad a thing as it sounds on the surface. Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, HAProxy, Nginx, and probably hundreds of open source projects I can't even start to list don't seem to feel the need to come out swinging like Elastic/Mongo/Redis have. )

Amazon's forks will still be Apache-licensed, so if there's a tit-for-tat element here, it appears to be Amazon responding to Elastic's abandonment of open-source.

Yeah, and here I feel that there's something missing in my description. While I think Elastics move is bad I definitely don't feel like Amazon is the good guy here either. I feel that there's a good chance that Amazon steam rolls Elastic and then five ten years away the community is worse off.

Open Source makes the most sense when your position is “I made this because it solved a problem I had and am giving it away so that it might solve problems for you.”

We might actually be better off with Amazon as the steward because they don’t need to make money on the software itself.

> need to make money on the software itself.

It would make a lot of sense for them to slowly close it down or modify it so that it eventually only makes sense to use it on their platform. Or something similar. And given what I've seen from their behaviour I would expect them to exploit whatever market leverage they can.

What you described is exactly what Elastic doing now, and it triggers a fork. We will be fine if it happens again.

Depends if they actually develop it. For other open source software, they usually keep improvements (say, improvements to Spark working with S3 from EMR, to give example from my area) to themselves in proprietary modules.

Maybe?

Brian Behlendorf didn't write Apache (or more accurately, patch NCSA httpd) out of "generosity", he was doing what was known back then as "scratching his own itch". Sure, he generously gave it away as well, but that was after he'd done the work to benefit _himself_.

Same with Larry Wall and Perl. He wrote the language he wanted, and shared it afterwards. He didn't write it out of generosity (and to be fair, he is 100% the sort of person who might have).

I think the dual license strategy Larry chose for Perl really shines light on his motivations, "use GPL if you want to, use the enormously more permissive Artistic License if you want to". He just wanted anybody who might find his software useful for any reason at all (including becoming insanely rich, if they could work out how to do so) to be able to use Perl.

> Open source is a type of generosity.

Open source should be about optimisation. For example you have some infrastructure code (like LLVM, Linux kernel, etc.) that brings you little competitive advantage but you benefit from distributed maintenance - OSS is a perfect fit. And people using it but not contributing back is not really that big of a deal.

The incentives to upstream exist without licensing requirement - maintaining a fork which when the upstream knows nothing about what you're doing and could break you with every commit is not fun. You also lose on distributed review/support aspect. At the end of the day if someone finds a way to profit and not contribute back - how does that impact you ? Unless they are a direct competitor and you OSS something critical - in which case like people above said - you should rethink your business model.

Also OSS has a bunch of secondary benefits - recruiting, developer mindshare, etc.

I think viewing OSS as a generosity is not sustainable, and the incentives exist even without restrictive licensing.

> Open source should be about optimisation.

Sure it's nice when you can motivate it like that but I feel that the long tail of open source projects doesn't fit your description but are projects driven by a few enthusiasts.

I don't get it. I can understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about payback and with no expectation of reciprocity. I can also understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about reciprocity while having some expectation of reciprocity (like, "I'll do someone a favor, and it sure would be nice if they return a favor one day").

But why would you very deliberately choose a software license which very explicitly distinguishes itself from normal proprietary software licenses by spelling out how it requires no payment and will always require no payment (and in some cases, explicitly prohibits anyone else from requiring payment!), and still maintain an expectation of payment?

Yeah let's talk about greed for a second.

Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.

So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.

Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.

And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.

Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>?

So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.

They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.

They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:

> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming

Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.

Except What Elastic is doing is fundamentally opposed to open source, and what Amazon is doing is fundamentally aligned.

At least according to the OSI, who last I checked, really care about open source ideals.

https://opensource.org/node/1099

It's not like the OSI and the FSF haven't got at least a few major differences about "ideals" though.

Pretty sure rms is 100% convinced _both_ sides of this disagreement are morally wrong.

> people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society)

Do you really think that liking open source is in any way correlated with politics?[1] I'd like to read a source on that one, because it's certainly not been my experience. Maybe we've contributed to different projects and/or read different people.

But even that aside, you think that everyone who likes open source is condemning amazon and on elastic's side? That is even more suspect. Just as an example, the creator of sourcehut has been criticizing elastic all week, and all of his posts—at least one of them explicitly saying that Amazon is definitely allowed to do what it's doing—have reached the front page here. And he's someone whose "liking open source" credentials are good enough, I think.

[1]: I'm not even going to get into other implication, that wanting to improve society is also in any way related to any given political leaning.

That's a very good description. Thank you.

(sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough)

Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic.

https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/

> Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.

Kafka is an ASF project, and not controlled by Confluent. There is nothing stopping anyone from offering a hosted Kafka. You seem to be conflating Kafka with Confluent's own products.

>No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors.

I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.

> This is the whole point of open source.

What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.

I think GP meant that allowing for forks is the point of Open Source. Which I would argue is kind of a big point of Open Source -- the point isn't who's doing the forking or who's profiting -- but the point is that forks like this are intentionally allowed.

Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point, either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.

Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I should rephrase to say it's a point. I could see someone arguing that forking is just a component of the deeper philosophical attitude about how people can use and distribute and modify code in general.

Forking is the/a point in the sense that I can't think of a version of Open Source that is still Open Source but that doesn't allow forking -- that allowing for forking is a deliberate choice, not an accidental one.

The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"?

Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...

I was thinking more the former. I understand the latter as more of an ethical position, and it's one I'm not really familiar enough with to talk intelligently about...

Conversations like this are just sort of pointless, where one side says it's supposed to be this and the other replies no, it should be that, when really open source software is just a thing that happened. It's up to us to define an ethics around it and to decide how we interact with other actors in the ecosystem who might not have the same principles and goals.

To have a discussion about how it should work, to make subjective value judgments like the ones these comments are full of, we need better arguments than 'the license says it's fine, so on what basis can you criticize Amazon's and/or Elastic's conduct here?' or 'but that's not nice!' or 'Amazon/Elastic has $XXXM revenue so they are bad'.

I don't know what distinction other people make, but when I capitalize Open Source, I'm referring to Libre software, specifically of the kind that Stalman or the OSI would talk about.

Lower case open source is a term that I personally try not to use, specifically because of that confusion. I personally try to refer to that as source available or shared source when possible.

This is exactly the confusion I'm talking about.

Stallman and the OSI do _not_ agree on "Libre software" and "Open Source" - in a quite fundamental way.

"The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term."

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

I know this isn't going to help, but:

When I use Open Source (capitalized) I am arguing for Libre software with the values Stallman is talking about. The point of disagreement I have with Stallman is this -- Stallman argues that using the 'wrong' word to describe Libre software risks corrupting the movement. I argue that using a generally accepted word to describe the movement, and culturally reinforcing the common understanding of that word as a subset of Libre (ie, not just giving up saying "Open Source can mean whatever the Mongo devs want it to") is valuable enough to override those concerns.

Stallman goes on to argue that the Open Source movement doesn't care about Libre software, and we should not align with that movement. I argue that a very large contingent of the Open Source community does care about Libre software, and it is worth advocating to the remainder of the community that Open Source software is Libre software and that the real ideals of Open Source beyond just source availability can not exist without the ideals of Libre software.

Stallman and I disagree about whether or not we should use the term Open Source to describe Libre software, but we don't disagree about what Libre software is. Even Stallman admits that aside from some minor differences, the official OSI definition is mostly in alignment with Libre software. What Stallman is really disagreeing with is with the PR strategy. And the reason I'm not going to try and separate those terms is because I explicitly disagree with him that his strategy in this specific case is helpful, and because I and many other people in the community want to continue to fight for the idea that Open Source needs to be Libre.

Part of the reason we use Open Source to describe Libre software is because we don't believe that Mongo or Elasticsearch have the right to decide for us what Open Source means, and we're not willing to drop the issue, give up all of the good will and public recognition we've built around the term, and just go use something else that the public doesn't recognize. Because if we do, and we have any success at all, then pretty soon proprietary companies will start to co-opt that term too.

I don't see any indication that confusion over what the OSI meant by the term 'Open Source' is the reason why Mongo felt emboldened to write a new license that took away user freedoms. Mongo didn't argue that Open Source was different from Libre, they attacked the very spirit of both movements by implying that their focus on 'sustainability' and 'fairness' was somehow fixing flaws in the OSI/GNU definitions and making their software even more free. If we were all using the term Libre instead, nothing about Mongo's PR strategy with the SSPL would have changed, they would have still claimed that their license was reinforcing the 'spirit' of Libre software.

Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to contribute to free software. But when others can live in mansions because of it, maybe not so much :)

Elastic forced the fork. AWS was contributing and complying with the license. Why should AWS not be allowed to make insane profits off open source?

AWS was entirely within their rights to do what they did. If Elastic wanted AWS to stop, they just had to re-license their software. Which they have now done. If AWS wants to continue to offer the latest version of ES then they simply have to comply with the new licensing terms. Nobody has done anything wrong or unreasonable, or “forced” anyone to do anything, though it was perhaps not in Elastic’s best interest to have offered ES under the original license.

The problem is that "their cut" of the profits was defined as precisely 0%, as per their original license terms.

> insane profits AWS is making

Do you have numbers on how much AWS profits from Amazon Elastic Search service?

Have you checked the profits from Elastic for their offerings?

Have you compared them?

How do you quantify "insane"?

Honest questions. Just a data person.

> that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.

So legally open source but socially closed source/non-commercial use?

I'd phrase it backwards: these people think it should have the appearance of open source and get all the benefits (contributions from community, widespread adoption), but legally and ethically speaking it's closed source and they get to make all the money.

They seriously have this entitled attitude that because you used the free software project that they started, that now they're entitled to that money. It's patently absurd. Imagine if Linus Torvalds went around with that attitude, claiming he deserves to be a trillionaire because of the absurd amount of value Linux has produced. (And ironically Linux is a more restrictive license than Elasticsearch)

> contributions from community

Good point. When I willingly contribute to open source with no compensation, it's with the understanding that it's because my contribution is available to anyone under the same terms, I'm contributing to a "commons" open to all, willingly for the public good.

If anyone wants to use it for profit-making purposes, that's generally fine with me, because everyone can on an equal basis.

If instead the software is licensed such that one company has special rights to profit off of it that others don't... why would I donate my contributions for free to that company? Shouldn't I get a cut?

Your comment and the one you're replying to actually just changed my mind on this topic.

Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wanting to have the cake and eat it too.

I love having my opinion changed. Thanks for that.

I agree, but I think there's many many shades of grey here.

Elastic (and Mongo and RadisLabs) are trying to do something new.

Linux, without doubt, "reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community," to the point where although the original release was 100% Linus's own code and arguably "Linus's software", these days to a first approximation _none_ of the code is "his". The percentage of the ~27million LOC that is "linux" these days that were personally written by Linus is effectively zero.

Elastic is a company paying 500-1000 employees who I suspect (but haven't checked) contributed the majority of the code rather than it being "free work from the community". (And their ability to relicense the code suggests that any community contributed code was contributed under their CLA which meant the contributors explicitly granted Elastic future rights to relicense those contributions, so it's not like the "community" can pretend they didn't know this was possible.)

I don't know that Elastic's business model will work. I don't think there's any guarantee that it will. Part of me kinda hopes it does, because I suspect that the business success of "company backed venture capital funded free-as-in-beer software" might result in more and better software being available to use - perhaps software on such a large scale that "scratch your own itch" motivations have insurmountable ramp up difficulties. I personally think the jump[ from AntiRez's "scratch your own itch" redis, to RedisLab's "Widely Fortune500 adopted and enterprise ready Redis" is not a thing AntiRez wanted to stick around and do. And the world _might_ be a better place for the existence of the non-OSI approved software under license like RedisLabs "source available" one.

It'll be interesting t watch this play out over the next decade or so...

Great comment.

Just to add a bit more nuance, I think we tend to focus a lot on community contributions, but IMO the biggest benefit of FOSS is not that; it's adoption.

Even if Elastic writes 100% of the code, by making it open source, they are promoting the widespread adoption of their software. A project with a non-free license or a custom license is a non-starter at many (most?) companies, or at a minimum requires talking to legal which is a PITA.

So, even with no community contributions, Elastic would never have been able to get to where they're at now - making $500MM in revenue a year and at a $15B evaluation - if it weren't open source.

Now just to be clear, Elastic is totally allowed to close things up now that they've reaped the benefits. The beautiful irony is that, when you close source after you've reaped the benefits, by definition you've also hit the point where it's now obviously beneficial for a company like Amazon to make their own fork and keep their AWS Elasticsearch cash cow going.

So, ultimately the community is totally fine. Indeed Elastic has been going down this road for a few years now, so it's actually a good thing for us that this happened. Better to have an amicable divorce early rather than a messy one later. But I can't help but point out that Elastic has broken its promises and misled the community - to their detriment more than to ours.

That is in fact exactly the trap door of open source -- you are QUITE WELCOME to switch to a non-opensource model once you've reaped the benefits, but guess what, anyone else is also QUITE WELCOME to make a still-open-source fork at the point you do that.

This isn't an accident, it's in fact the whole point of open source that people can make open source forks when the original authors decide to no longer do open source.

I don't think there's much 'amicable' about it though in this case at the moment.

> perhaps software on such a large scale that "scratch your own itch" motivations have insurmountable ramp up difficulties

I don't think that's true, at least for software such as Elastic, Mongo and RedisLabs.

There are a lot of big companies that benefit from those, and might want to invest it, despite not being their direct revenue driver.

See for example the Cassandra database released by Facebook. Or how Amazon is going to invest in their Elastic fork now. Or how Linux is funded by dozens of companies (IBM, RedHat, Oracle...)

Or pretty much any programming language: I haven't seen a programming language that's not truly Open Source (as in the compiler/interpreter + API) for decades.

The kind of software where it's not going to work is where it's solving a business need for companies that are not software companies: but Open Source isn't common in those fields anyway.

> Elastic is a company paying 500-1000 employees who I suspect (but haven't checked) contributed the majority of the code rather than it being "free work from the community".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867682

Do they want to have their cake and eat it too?

If a company or a person wants to relicense their open source project, either they need to get permission from all its contributors to relicense their contributions, or the contributors already signed a CLA that allows for relicensing, or the contributors' code is removed entirely.

The "free work from the community" either was contributed under the terms of a CLA that allows for relicensing, or members of the community all agreed to relicense their contributions, or that free work was removed entirely.

There’s a bit more community contribution that just “code”. I have never contributed code to elasticsearch, but I have co-founded the Berlin ES meetup, before elastic, the company, even was a thing. The group was for some time one of the largest around. For a while, I was one of the most active posters in their IRC channel, helping other users with whatever issues they’d have using ES. I signed no CLA, I received no money nor do I want any. But I contributed my time in the understanding that we’re all working on something that benefits both ourselves and the wider community. That implicit understanding is now gone.

Why are you contributing to projects with CLAs if you disagree with their terms?

My interpretation of his point is that he doesn't and that many other contributors to Elastic might have made the same decision.

Indeed. I would have a hard time using something with a custom licence in my company, so there are definite advantages to Apache licencing.

I don't quite understand your logic here. Does he deserve to be a trillionaire? Maybe? Does Jeff Bezos deserve his whole net worth just because he acquired it legally?

It's like leaving your car in the middle of the road, keys in the ignition, and a deed transferring ownership to whoever holds it under the window wiper, then getting annoyed at someone driving off with it.

Sort of.

You’d have to add a replicator button to the car so you make a copy and don’t actually take the original.

Forgive me for expressing my frustrating for a moment here:

What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give it away freely, sell it.

Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with Elastic submitted patches to their codebase.

Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary.

Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them more money, it will just hurt their brand image and incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an open source vendor gives away their software for free, intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. It's completely backwards logic.

To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you yell at someone using your free software for commercial purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't owe you any money.

You people seem to think open source just means "source available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that.

[/unhinged rant]

Were you an ES contributor who feels betrayed, or are you speaking more hypothetically?

I was just a free ES user, and feel fine with all of this. I don't see a bait and switch, I see a fundamentally changed market compared to 10 years ago where a business model that was perfectly reasonable is now very precarious in the face of the major cloud vendors, and a desperation move to protect their business, not some grand cynical plan.

If I needed to submit a patch I'm not gonna care about the project being "truly" open source vs just source-available.

But the more these "allowed" but kinda-dirty-feeling things happen, the less likely I am to choose a "true" open source license for any projects I may start...

> If I needed to submit a patch I'm not gonna care about the project being "truly" open source vs just source-available.

Really? Everyone's cares are different, but I don't like contributing my time and programming output for free to proprietary software, for it's owner to make money off my work.

I don't mind contributing to open source, where anyone can make money off of it with no special privileges to some. It feels like contributing to a commons.

But contributing to proprietary software without getting compensated feels like getting taken advantage of to me.

I've made very small contributions, irrelevant in the scheme of things. I've also run decent-sized Elasticsearch clusters (~10-20TB total store).

When I speak of betrayal I'm more speaking in the general sense that under my value structure, it is immoral to lie to someone or to break promises, which is what Elastic did. They told people they would never make the Apache 2.0 code proprietary, and then they did it anyway. For a shitty reason at that.

A lot of engineers I’ve observed are increasingly far removed from sales, marketing, and ultimately, their customers.

I also think the world (particularly technology and laws) is a complicated place with a lot of history. The old timers tend to appreciate this a bit more. There’s a book out there about the “Death of Expertise”. People think they can learn a complex domain from some questionable YouTube videos and maybe blog posts or a book. They decry the experts. In fairness there are also a lot of charlatan experts out there.

Combine the two problems, and it is an opening for “outrage bandwagons” to form that claim to simplify the matter without actually understanding it. And companies try to exploit this comprehension gap to fulfill their agenda.

> "Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary."

Hmmm.... is that what happened or did AWS usurp Elastic's main stream of revenue providing an enterprise cloud platform, and in response they changed their licensing in an attempt to protect the viability of their company while minimizing the impact on contributors to the framework.. As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself.

You may disagree with this strategy, but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Because I think there is an issue of how people can sustain a business centered around open source.

So one reason I choose open source is precisely because of the legal guarantee that there will be comptetition in providing services based on it.

If I become dependent on it, one company can't control the pricing of people offering hosted services, because it's open source, nobody needs their permission to host it. "vendor lock-in" does not exist with open source.

If that was incompatible with ES's business model for a main stream of revenue, as the project IP holder they are welcome to change their license terms.

But what they're saying is that open source was incompatible with their business model.

It is what it is, but users clamoring for the ethical superiority of vendor lock-in and thinking that's somehow open source values is... weird to me.

It is a fair point

Last I checked, sustaining a for profit business wasn’t a guaranteed right. It’s called competition, and plenty of companies fail.

If you can’t sustain a business around open sources, then don’t be open source.

Elastic chose to close their source but are now lying about it to make it look better than it is. AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.

> AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.

Yup. This mentality drives me absolutely insane. People seem to regurgitate whatever propaganda fake-open-source-company-X tells them.

Sorry, I'm not going to feel bad that the $15B company that built their business off the backs of open source - which is totally fine - is upset that another company is competing with them. And the biggest irony is, Amazon's not eating Elastic's lunch, they're both eating respectable lunches. Elastic's built a great business, which they are now doing their best to ruin as quickly as possible.

Having "open source" vs "source available" or whatever you want to call the new license isn't a guaranteed right either, so if there's no problem with the one then what's the problem with the other?

Would you prefer more software to be released openly or less? Cause if you're making moves like Amazon did with their ES service, you're pushing the world towards "less."

I'm not too concerned with this, but it's strange to me that people are both trying to keep OSS licenses "pure" and advocating that companies release less of their code in the first place...

I would prefer that companies stop abusing their communities by leveraging them and then discarding them when they have enough power to do so.

OSS was never about source availability - that’s just a form of cheap escrow and has fairly limited value. Open source is about user freedom to do whatever they want with the software - guaranteed freedoms.

This isn’t about “purity”, it’s about using a label on the tin that says “FREEDOM INSIDE” and then peeling the label off and telling a subset of users to pay up or give away any software code you’ve ever used to touch my software. We used to call that a “bait and switch” to be polite , though really it’s more like a shakedown.

Next time, go commercial from get go.

do you think that would have hurt adoption from the get-go? How about ability to get unpaid community code contribution?

Sure it would be harder, but that is life, hard and made of options.

I have been there during the first .com wave, so I know how hard it was, including what happens when the money stops flooding in.

> As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself.

You very profoundly and deeply misunderstand what the SSPL actually says, which is understandable because Elastic have helped promulgate this misinformation. Please go read the license. It is not straightforward, it's very vague and exposes an organization to enormous uncertainty. If you don't want to read the license itself, then start with https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearc...

Additionally, organizations that commit to running free software, are forced to drop Elasticsearch now (or more accurately, they're all going to just run the best fork of 7.1.0 and call it a day). So Elastic's statement that it doesn't impact users is just a complete lie.

Finally, this whole discussion is irrelevant because the license change won't actually protect Elastic's business. Amazon is going to behave no differently, except that now they have a better codebase to work with because they don't need to worry about Elastic rejecting pull requests that cannibalize their proprietary features.

> You may disagree with this strategy, but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Because I think there is an issue of how people can sustain a business centered around open source.

Absolutely not, I refuse to explain that for you, because you're reversing the responsibility here. If you want to build a company around giving away software for free, you better have a way to monetize the giving away of the software for free. There's plenty of strategies to do this, such as the famous "Commoditize your complement", OR you can be a redhat and sell enterprise support, OR you can be elastic and sell cloud services.

And guess what? Elastic HAS built a more than financially viable business with Apache 2.0 licenses. They pull in $500M revenue per year, with 40%+ y/y growth. They're valued at $15B right this moment. And you seriously believe that this organization is on the verge of bankruptcy?

Do the math, you're being tricked by a dishonest company. A company that so many of us had respect for until they started down this path a couple years ago.

And for the love of god, I implore everyone in this thread, please give up the whole "won't somebody think of the poor company?" argument. Open source is not a business model in and of itself. It never has been. If anything, the rise of these companies that build their brand image around being open source and then re-license to proprietary as soon as it's convenient is the literal problem. They're polluting the whole spirit of open source, which was always "I'm giving this away freely, and I don't ask for anything in return except you can't infringe my trademark" (for apache 2.0). You guys have the open source mentality totally backwards.

And don't get me wrong, I'm an AnCap. I'm as capitalist as it gets. So I'm not criticizing the mentality out of some misguided hatred of private ownership; rather, all I'm saying is if you talk the talk you better be prepared to walk the walk. All these entitled companies that make their software successful BECAUSE it's open source and the community feels safe building stacks upon it, and then clutch their pearls when someone else makes money from that software, are totally absurd and should be laughed at.

Sorry for the rant, I drank too much coffee today. But for the love of god, can't you see how, ethics of lying to the community aside, this licensing change doesn't even help protect Elastic's business interests, but rather just strengthens their competitors?

> but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable.

Ironically, it is exactly Amazon that seems to be demonstrating a way to develop an open source ElasticSearch fork and be financially viable, right?

If becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world in an adjacent field and using that to fund an open source SaaS is a demonstration of a financially viable open source business; we're in trouble.

Going from the frankly insane pricing for managed ES on AWS (we tried it, were happy with the service and massively disappointed in the pprice, now manage our own on AWS), Amazon makes enough money from the SaaS to fund it.

How does the price compare to other managed ES including from the ES founders?

If it's super non-competitive high, it is even more curious they seem to see it as such a threat. I'm becoming increasingly unsure if they actually see it as a threat, or if it's just like "nobody should be able to make money from our open source without giving us a cut".

Or is it just that all managed ES seems too expensive to you?

> Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:

Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).

It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, and it's not really clear to me who would (for business reasons, not philosophy) switch to solr/other just because of the license switch.

It also makes perfect sense that AWS would release an apache-licensed fork - they have serious monopoly power - they con offer this service cheaper inside AWS, and the integrations can be smoother/better.

So really why be mad at either party? They both made good business choices it seems to me, maybe elastic will end up loosing out, but if that happens, I can't imagine that staying on the apache license would have saved their bacon.

> It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses

It actually makes incredibly bad business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, because they won't get any more revenue as a result and have now forced a high-quality Apache 2.0 fork.

> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:

Well, they explicitly promised that they would stay Apache 2.0 licensed, which was a lie. And they're no longer open source software. So yeah that's a big deal in my book.

> Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).

I wasn't referring to Amazon, I was referring to the community overall. And don't get me wrong, the community will be fine because we'll have high-quality forks. I'm just pointing out the scumminess of what Elastic did for the company that claims to be the little guy getting exploited.

But they absolutely did pull the rug. Or as a better analogy, they shut the door behind themselves.

I think the fact that you've been downvoted only validates your point. I agree that I think the idea of "open source" has veered so far away now from Free Software ideals that this is the only reasonable outcome, even if it was not desired. The Open Source vs. Free Software people kept saying they were fundamentally the same but one was more palatable to commercial entities, but the (granted, not the most pleasant) "free software fundamentalists" called this outcome a mile away.

Are Google and OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks? Google, Apple, and Microsoft paying for WebKit?

>OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks

Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL?

But also

LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL)

OpenBGPD

OpenOSPFD

OpenNTPD

OpenSMTPD

OpenSSH

OpenBSD did not initially make OpenSSL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL, https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html)

And Google did not initially made Blink.

But OpenBSD was never involved with OpenSSL (until they forked it).

How so? If the licence permits free copy/fork/whatever it's all great to expect some return but surely it's not guaranteed?

Why Elastic and not Lucene or OpenJDK ?

They already have fork of OpenJDK (Amazon Corretto)

Corretto is not a fork, but a distribution.

Which is perfectly alright, there are plenty of Java implementations, including full commercial ones, just like with ISO languages.

Money

Amazon is doing all of the work of buying servers and hiring skilled professionals and setting up instances of Elastic and automating it so that you can easily rent a server to run it.

I agree. What Amazon is doing is clearly legal , but it also clearly violates cultural norms about fairness. I don't know much about the Elasticsearch team or company, but from a 50k ft view it seems like Amazon could and should throw them a couple mil, at least out of pity.

They probably offered to throw them a couple of million dollars to avoid the hassle and the bad PR, but ElasticSearch is worth a lot more than that.