News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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

Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by freeqaz on Friday January 22, 2021 @04:24AM (#25869950)
This comment is really insightful. Thank you for the perspective!

It's an interesting idea to think that "Free Software" creates a sort of "distributed code base". In the sense that "code will be eventually pushed to the main repo when the patch is created". That's an interesting perspective.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by unilynx on Friday January 22, 2021 @06:22AM (#25870674)
Not necessarily. "Just" making it free software (eg slapping a GPL v2 on Elasticsearch) doesn't require AWS to share any changes to the codebase, and wouldn't have prevented the current AWS/Elastic drama as it wouldn't have prevented AWS from monetizing Elasticsearch.

Now AGPL might have, if it was used from the start... not because it would prevent any monitization, but because it might bring enough legal uncertainty for AWS to even consider using it

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by freeqaz on Friday January 22, 2021 @01:59PM (#25874845)
Agreed! No silver bullet. AWS is able to extract value regardless of the license being used.
[ Parent | on HN ]