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.