Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations
by SXX on Thursday January 28, 2021 @05:09PM
(#25950113)
Where Elasticsearch would be without Apache Lucene? Too bad Lucene doesn't use SSPL because it's would be so nice to not let company like Elastic to make billions of dollars on it. /s
Don't want someone to profit from your code? Just use EULA and call it a day.
My takeaway from all this isn't that "enterprise open source" is no longer a viable business model. It's that if you want to start an enterprise open source company, start with SSPL.
It works great as an open source license. People and businesses can use, modify, and redistribute the product for free. The only thing they can't do is package the product and sell/host it as a service.
This is extremely reasonable. AWS shouldn't be able to take the technology that your team built, without asking/paying/contributing, and quickly turn it into a $100m+ business.
Sure "true" open source champions will balk at the license. But at the end of the day, the technology only flourishes because of the business built around it (eg. Elastic around Elasticsearch). SSPL goes a long way to protect your business, and therefore the underlying technology, from big tech.
What would Elasticsearch be without Elastic? What would MongoDB be without MongoDB Inc?