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A comment on AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Parent comment

Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by reissbaker on Thursday January 21, 2021 @08:47PM (#25867210)
SSPL is marketed as copyleft, but it really isn't. AGPL is. SSPL requires not only that you open source modifications to the software, but also that you open source "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software" that you use to operate the licensed software.

If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a service, you have to open-source your entire hosting stack including UI. God help you if you pay for any proprietary software — you literally can't satisfy these terms. Notably, Elastic itself doesn't have to do this for its own hosting service, because of course it can't satisfy the terms: no hosting company I know of can.

The point of the license isn't to get contributions back. The point is to prevent competition to Elastic's hosting business. Elastic's new version of ElasticSearch is source-available software, not open-source, by pretty much any reasonable definition.

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Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by ryukafalz on Thursday January 21, 2021 @11:02PM (#25868179)
>If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a service, you have to open-source your entire hosting stack including UI.

It's worse than that: you need to release your entire hosting stack under the SSPL. It's extremely unlikely that you're able to do this. Hope your servers aren't running Linux! (Or bash or the GNU coreutils or...)

If it were acceptable for the rest of the stack to be under another free software license, I'm not actually sure I'd be opposed to it. But yeah, as-is it sure looks like they've just written the license such that it's impossible for a hosting provider to comply.

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