Don't believe me, just go ahead say something negative and see it get removed within 30 minutes.

I think that would be valuable and the right choice for many projects.

I'd image now AWS will have to put significant resources to maintaining their fork and keeping it current. Couldn't that money have been applied to a licensing deal with Elastic instead?

The SSPL is an open source license. It's just not the license that can help Amazon make money.

Elastic seems to have shaken the AWS beast and they forked (which is legal).

I wonder what will eventually win with the community.

meanwhile AWS is fighting for what?

Reminds me of the cisco router firmware fiasco.

Looks like a few elastic lawyers are about to get sacked.

I'm not sure if OSS vendors like Elastic need to modify their business models, Apache needs to address the suboptimal situation, or if the Cloud gorillas need to change their business tactics but something has to give.

It only makes me sad that AWS makes a lot of $$$ with their elastic SaaS because of their size and for that reason can monetize it better than the original authors. Feels very Amazon like for me.

At end I have the feeling it could be all avoided if Amazon paid a little bit royalty to Elastic and both sides would have talked more and better together.

I know — they did it to me.

AWS would be a multi-trillion company by then, will buy these companies and make that code proprietary. they have no incentive to let their competitors win.

It is surely a significant investment on AWS part and they're even maintaining the Av2 license.

At the end of the day, we have a huge, highly profitable company backing and a better license

Something like: okay yes, this is OSS, except if you want to offer it as a managed service, in which case you need to purchase a licence.

That said, being able to make a fork if you disagree with the direction of an open source project is one of the great things about open source. AWS clearly has the resources, and the motivation to maintain a fork of Elasticsearch, at least they are making their fork open source instead of keeping it proprietary. It probably would have been a better situation if AWS had created some kind of reciprocal partnership with Elastic and Elastic hadn't felt the need to change the license, but it is likely too late for that now.

Elastic is a 15 billion dollar MONSTER of a publicly traded company doing hundred+ million revenue per quarter. By market cap they'd be a ~top-20 biggest company overall and contender if not title-holder for the biggest tech company in the UK, Australia, and most other non-US countries. They are not some plucky feel-good startup fighting the good fight against nasty/unfair big-corps that are drinking their milkshake.

That multi-billion dollar corporation does not own ElasticSearch 7.10 any more than Amazon does. Elastic have taken 7.10 and released it under a new license that prevents others from doing stuff with it. That's allowed. You could do that too. It's allowed. And some plucky startup in a garage (or say, Google, or MS, or Amazon) could decide they'll make changes to 7.10 and release it open source. All fine. All allowed.

If your argument is that AWS is a form of mono/duo/oligo-poly and there are antitrust matters at play due to distorted market power being used illegally to crush a competitor... great make that argument.

Most of the other arguments boil down to variations on an anti-capitalist theme.

Amazon say: "Thanks original developers, farewell! We will take over from here."

I think this can act as an important reminder to license your (group) project as GPLv3 or AGLPv3, it's a trojan horse and helps the open source/free software revolution.

It feels predatory and although Elastic is a huge company by the numbers that keep getting touted here, they're a rounding error on Amazons scale.

Amazons practice in sections of their online market place has been clone / re-brand what's selling well in the market, slap an amazon basics logo on it. Then harass, ban or in the best case put the margins so low (or in the negative until the competition bleeds out) that the original seller can no longer compete. To me, this feels like the OSS equivalent.

I'm anti-Amazon though and not sure if I'm just jaded at this point.

If I were working at ElasticSearch/Kibana, I would be filling a DMCA takedown on GitHub against all the offending repos.

This is how to defend your copyright and trademark.

And yes, it's getting into aggressive territory and not everybody might agree with that strategy, but that's how the game is played. It's a full on conflict and the result might very well kill elastic in the long term if no action is taken now.

It's kind of like an Uber model - offer taxi services while bleeding cash to wipe out the entire Taxi industry (Short term success) to get fame and popularity, get AOUs and ARPUs going; and then have a difficult time monetizing their mistakes.

So Elastic felt loosing due to AWS using is assets, so changed the licence to compensate.

Now AWS announces it cuts ties with Elastic by forking Elastic. So what AWS seems to announce is that it will continue to earn from Elastic , still will be using the name and further more it will openly compete with Elastic?

It is an extremely aggressive move, take all and destroy, or am I missing on something?

[1] https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/why-license-change-AWS

What if someone searches for Elasticsearch and finds Elastic's docs and there's confusion as to why something is different from AWS's Opendistro for Elasticsearch? How would that relate to trademark dilution?

Lies lies and lies. Wake up. They could have done things by the book by collaborating with the ES team. They didn't. Don't ever let them feed on lack of true knowledge. Build infrastructures that can be deployed anywhere. Support the OSS products you buy if you can. Reevaluate.

(1) Ethical and (2) Tort.

Ethical is the question of good corporate practice to do what's right to your partner. As a key executive of a company, I am expected to call any CEO and say - you know what CEO Joe, that contract we signed 2 weeks ago, we goofed. Can we please re-cut ? And because Joe is interested in a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts a long time, that's what usually happens.

Enter the FAANGS.

Clearly, it was Elastic's mistake to operate on a open license that lends to FAANGS literally imploding Elastic market share. Elastic mistake, OK . However, it is not ethical for a FAANG to profit off errors, just as it is not ethical for a Bank to charge overdraft fees over overdraft fees from a grandma. They can, but they really shouldn't. What is legal is not ethical.

In the middle east it is legal to stone a female adulterer to death. That's not OK.

2) Tort. It will be argued in court that AWS misappropriated the Elastic TM. That's where AWS is going to pay. AWS clearly stepped over the line.

It is just a question of how costly that mistake was.

From AWS' perspective, taking an OSS Project and offering it as a hosted solution is legally fine.

Elastic isn't happy about the fact that AWS make more profit from their OSS product than themselves, so they recognize that OSS isn't their best approach anymore, and do it differently.

AWS decides that forking and maintaining the their own OSS version is more profitable in the long run than paying license fees.

What changed since Elastic's original license choice? Hosting an SaaS version was possible back then, but it didn't happen at the scale that it is, so it was more of a theoretical problem. Now it's a very practical problem.

This is a bit of a simplistic take, and there seem to be a lot of side shows (like trademarks), so more details lurk in the shadows.

If I were to try to make a value judgement, my premise would be the flourishing OSS is a good thing. AWS's actions have have driven Elastic to make their product no longer OSS, which is not good. OTOH they maintain an OSS fork, which is good.

But the interesting broader question is: would it have been beneficial for OSS if Amazon were paying some license fees to Elastic, for an OSS product? I think we need to find some model whereby OSS shops are not forced to rely on the whim of a giant to make their money. Whether this can be done sustainably without restricting usage rights remains to be seen, IMHO.

AWS chose not to, and that's OK too. Elastic still pulled in $500M in revenue last year, so clearly you can compete with AWS in the market.

MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing nothing to the project. They even linked entirely to MongoDB’s comprehensive documentation. “Anticompetitive” is the kindest description I can offer of Amazon’s behavior.

Just remember —- the SSPL and similar licenses are still completely open source. Amazon knows they’re forcing companies to change licenses, but shaming them as being “unacceptable to many in the open source community”.

This is political rhetoric, and I’m shocked anybody outside of Amazon would support this. The people who started these projects and surrounding businesses are generally very good people — I’ve been disabled with a neurological condition for 6 years now, but live can afford to live relatively comfortably thanks to the people at MongoDB. And I contributed code to the project before I started working for them (10gen at the time). So I’m admittedly biased, but it really seems like Amazon has become the Trump of Silicon Valley. I’m done with political rhetoric like this.

All opinions are my own.

Death of an Open Source Business Model [1]

[1] https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-busin...

So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid OSS license? What a pirate logic here.

EDIT: I think I made a mistake here. SSPL is really a weird license here, not really friendly.

However how AWS is doing this is ugly and my hope is it will make people stop using AWS managed services.

Elasticsearch is open source. the SSPL is open source. It just can't help Amazon make money.

The Apache, MIT, BSD licenses are not what you think they are.

But I am not Amazon's side here. This is my very subjective take on the matter and by no means am I claiming to be correct.

Amazon represents and existential threat to the open source business model. To those who say otherwise: How do you compete with a company with the incredible amount of resources available to Amazon? They could outprice you (running at a loss) and use that as leverage to bring your customers into their ecosystem.

I'm not saying Amazon is actively hostile towards opensource. I recognise that they even submit contributions to the stacks they use (at least the ones I've seen). But there's no argument that I could host a better instance than Amazon. That would be one hell of a grandiose delusion.

I don't know what the answer is here for open source. Maybe a license that allows free use, but prohibits you directly competing (offering a paid solution for support of the product) without a license.

I don't think that's unfair stance to take, it doesn't punish Amazon for being such an incredibly successful and powerful hosting provider (I like AWS, I really hope I'm not sounding hostile towards them) but it creates a symbiotic relationship instead of a directly competitive one.

Maybe I'm being naive and overlooking something, but I don't see what choices Elastic had here.

I don't agree with the arguments that Elastic made a killing last year and therefore they should shut up and be grateful. Be grateful for what, exactly? That a behemoth of a platform is taking business share from them? You can't expect them to be OK with that, surely. I don't agree with their response either, but I think it's time the open source community acknowledges that we're in a different era now and we need a license to reflect that.

1. Don't punish Amazon, they haven't done anything wrong (and you can very easily nuke small businesses that offered support too, nobody is whining about them). Open source should belong to all of us. Making money off of that should really belong the original authors. I don't think that's a wildly ridiculous opinion.

2. Protect your business model, or maybe even come up with a new one that works hand-in-hand with a hosting provider like Amazon, rather than waiting for them to drain your market (which is not their intention but you can't ignore that it's happening).

An example I can think of for 2) is building a version of the product that's more suitable for Amazon, which might help relieve overhead for them setting that product up. Then charge them for supporting that codebase. I'm imagining a twist of the "enterprise-grade" tier with extra features for enterprise-grade users. Have a "cloud-provider" tier on top of that (that supports replication, multi-instance, easy-up-down state or whatever you can think of).

Again: I'm just a dude who thinks there's a growing elephant in the room that can be addressed in a manner that's beneficial to all parties. I don't mean to attack Amazon or Elastic, but I think this incident is a harbinger for what's to come

-----

EDIT: Maybe the right move is to approach the cloud providers as an OSS provider and ask them to work with you on your business model. Don't wait for Amazon to build your product into an offering, build it with them. Take a cut of the revenue. Maybe?

AGPL your software, kiddos!

I _do_ think it was very shifty of Elastic to say that switching to the SSPL was "doubling down on open".

We can agree to disagree about the details; no use arguing on the internet, and I respect your view. But please keep in mind the OSI's mission is fitting open source into a legal framework. It's not the ASF, FSF, Mozilla Foundation or other organizations who actually support and organize open source projects. Full disclosure; I also worked on Apache Drill, thanks to the ASF.

My primary point is that Amazon is not part of the open source community (AFAIK, they've never claimed to be). So it's hard for me to trust a company overtly focused on monetizing OSS without contributing. IMHO, all of the engineers at Elastic who gave so much time and effort for this project are still part of the open source community. I hate to see Amazon effectively judging which projects/people are "truly" part of the community when their motivation is so clearly corrupt.

I hope this comes across with respect, and please know that I'd much rather not see licenses like the SSPL. But after seeing Amazon's monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior play out repeatedly with various companies, I can't just watch them do this without saying something. Even on a stale HN thread. :)

One last thing to note -- Bruce Perens left the OSI in January of 2020 (shortly after the SSPL stuff went down), and said: "We created a tower of babel of licenses. We did not design-in license compliance and we have a tremendous noncompliance problem that isn't getting better. We did not design a good framework for where proprietary software can go, and where it never should. Our license loopholes are exploited." ESR (who I detest as a human being), was banned from the OSI two months later. I don't mean to suggest this was a direct reaction the SSPL though -- please see the OSI's wikipedia page and cited sources.

Now that elastic.co is going sideways, sphinxsearch (best search server experience I've had) non-foss since circa 2017, what are the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo search?

Edit/disclaimer: former aws employee

Elastic has the right to take the code private. Basically they are making a fork.

AWS also has the right to create their fork and contribute to it.

If we're playing the game of "who's the bigger dickhead" I would say it's Elastic. Before these 2 forks, many companies benefitted from hosting Elasticsearch for their customers. From their reasoning, it seems that only they should benefit from the code. Which is not Elastic's by the way. It belongs to the world.

If you strip everything down to first principles, you get paid because you have a valuable asset. That asset may be your skill, your time, a piece of land, a patent, etc. With open source, you give away your key asset and then you have nothing except the wish and hope that nobody takes it and eats your lunch with your own fork. Which is clearly what is happening in this case.

I am all for things being done as open source because you believe in the freedom of it, or it's fun for you, but it seems like a really bad way of getting programmers and businesses paid, if you're into that sort of thing.

Very unfortunate. Probably a lesson about naming your company after a common English word.

The blog post also signals an intention to make sure there's parity in terms of API surface with mainline Elasticsearch.

Also, AWS' decision to create a committee is something Elastic.co could have done... Alas, this is where we are. Would be interesting to see which of these forks take off. The developer community is likely to rally behind F/OSS. I can also see a lot of IaaS/PaaS upstarts like RailwayApp [0] prefer OpenDistro.

I'm half-expecting AWS to announce a managed Solr service and prompt an exodus to it with lower pricing and free data migration.

[0] https://railway.app/changelog/2021-01-15

Seems like a rather disingenuous way of announcing it given the reason for the license change is (allegedly) a direct response to Amazon.

Not that I'm a fan of Elastic's stance either...

This is also why, if you have a customer or competitor who makes changes to the software and does not release those changes if they convey the software to others, you are not protected by using a permissive open source license. If AWS was allegedly not committing back to Elasticsearch/Kibana, they are within their rights to do so, whether Elastic like it or not. Elastic should not have used a permissive open source license like APL. The only thing that protects users here is strong copyleft, in this case a license like AGPL.

At the end of the day, these licenses protect users. Maybe something else is needed to protect the interests of businesses which also respecting users - whatever that is, it is not necessarily one of the stated goals of free or open source software, so assigning an open source license and expecting support to cover the costs is not going to end well for you if you get big enough to matter.

I'm a bit out of the loop here, can someone please tell me why Elastic decided to enact this seemingly Anti-OSS license?

> When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion.

> Recently, we found more examples of what we consider to be ethically challenged behavior. We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon, telling us their behavior continues and is more brazen. NOT OK.

0: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

1: https://archive.is/9TIu6

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25794987

This means Elastic can continue to differentiate from Amazon without worry. Amazon however can keep the code they've not contributed back internally, but they could always do that.

Perhaps this is simply an image move they don't plan to actually enhance or maintain the fork?

Also Elastic moving from Apache to (essentially) GPL is not making it closed source. Just as Amazon was within their rights to maintain an internal fork, so is Elastic to move to a GPL model. Demonizing either over business decisions is dumb.

AWS is calling them out as they deserve too and now AWS is going to run with a true open source codebase moving forward. Ironic considering the, generally baseless, accusations that AWS just takes open source stuff but doesn’t contribute back to the community.

This all just comes across as Elastic having sour grapes for being out competed on managed service offerings and trying to save that with shady license moves. With a separate fork, now they’re going to have to compete on the codebase too as, ironically, the proprietary model against the open source community the claim is being hurt here.

now this is just the beginning; for they will need to throw money at their fork to make sure it's successful. And isn't that ultimately what this was about, money? Now Amazon has the opportunity to hire the core engineers to contribute to the TRUE open source project.

Everything by design as intended. Go Amazon.

Don't start an open source projects if that's not what you want to be. Or did you forget what made you successful to begin with?

ElasticSearch move was very easy to conter-attack.

Amazon does not lack smart guy to its side. Anyway the way cloud providers are using open source project can become a issue and "drain" day by day the open source community, especially smart startup creating a value in the day by day.

I think there is some space for new ideas and new startup to find out a way to balance these forces and find out a deal in a win-win scenario....what do you think?

Sure, but that allegation has absolutely nothing to do with Elastic breaking its earlier promise to the community and making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source. Indeed, the license change will have no effect on Amazon except to make Amazon's fork more successful because it's now been made necessary.

If they have actual evidence of those things, they probably need to allege them in court.

The license change does nothing to address either issue, so citing them to support the license change makes no sense at all.

Your margin is my opportunity. (c)

Though AWS still growing too fast atm so they value quantity of services over quality. But once they have capacity they can squeeze out of business almost anyone.

Now, I do think we are missing a standard license in this space - everyone seems to be writing their own, which limits those that can use them to larger projects.

>AWS contributes improvements to the project.

Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't verified). For a company the size of Amazon, unless it was one heck of a PR that's basically nothing.

*Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream.

Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance.

AWS taking advantage of this — yeah sure it may be legal, like how business lobbying senators for obvious policy hacks is legal — but doesn't mean it's fair or acceptable. It's totally OK to call them out here and not reward them for it.

They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.

While what AWS is doing is (probably, IANAL) within their legal rights, it's arguably immoral because it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." Which, given AWS's widespread adoption, puts the OS version in peril.

Edit: Thanks for pointing out that AWS will be releasing the code under an Apache 2 license. That does change my opinion somewhat, though I'll leave my original comment for posterity.

So is ES to blame for having a permissive license? Or is it AWS for making it trivial to use? Or are we to blame for dismissing any license that isn't OSI approved (and even then, we still snort at things like Affero GPL!)

IMHO, if there IS a "bad guy" in this situation, its us...

And which part of the same article ever said Elastic are not OK with Amazon providing a Services using their Open Source Software? Which they are legally allowed to do so with Apache 2.0? They even mentioned and I quote:

"We collaborate with cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud, and others. We have shown we can find a way to do it."

What they are not happy with was the TradeMark. Amazon usage of that Trademark to mislead customers and this isn't some recent things either. It has been going on for 5 years. ( And yes the court should be used to settle that. )

So majority of HN; including its previous threads with 1000+ comments, is basically making allegation that Elastic is making the changes because of their Business Model. Until that can be proved, allegations remain merely assertions.

But right now it is being stated as Facts. And it is now being spin into ethical debate.

And I was under the impression, should Amazon be forced to fork it, which they did as announced, would have to use a different name. Instead they choose to use ElasticSearch again.

[1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

I say "Rich people get huge tax breaks, why??" you say "well that's how tax law works, why get angry?"

I say "I'm a small business getting exploited by a goliath!" you say "well everyone is playing by the rules so it's their fault"

Systems are so biased by large actors and for some reason everyday people jump in and defend them? We should totally take everything in critically but this defense doesn't seem reasonable at all.

The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist.

How many other new interesting products will no longer be built as open source, because they know that AWS can just co-opt them and then their business will be effectively over.

The laws and licences cannot possibly cover all the details of the real world, there needs to be some humanity involved, some "let's try to not be assholes" attitude.

I prefer to live in a world where I'm not required to be a robot. Following all the clauses and laws to all the details will end up with that. It's not a great path.

We all need more empathy.

You both articulate the problem and dismiss it in the same sentence. AWS have a right to offer the service - they do not have a right to tell people that they built ES, or to say that they work hand-in-hand with ES, etc. But there is nothing that a small open source group can do without tackling the shit-ton of lawyers that Jeff Bezos can bring to bear on the problem. No matter the points of law, he can just outspend them in every capacity to get the outcome he wants.

ES was never going to make a penny from us anyways and AWS is not making any money from the ES software itself. What they are making money is from our usage of their core services. Same goes for all the other open softwares, Kafka, Airflow, EMR to name some. Plus it would be dumb to have your infrastructure on AWS and buying ES cloud service where you'd require to send your data out of AWS as you'd have to pay for the data out.

  - AWS
  - Azure
  - GCP

The fantasy that OSS allows equal competition is no longer a reality, ISV's cannot compete with a cloud vendor who uses their own investments against them in addition to their anti-competitive monopoly lock-in of already having Customers running on their cloud platform.

Elastic's move to SSPL is effectively "OSS + free for everyone with the exception of exploitation by a major cloud vendor", since without it we're heading towards a mono culture future where all hosted OSS software is going to be funded and resourced by the billions major cloud vendors have reaped in collecting all the rent for hosting others OSS investments, that AWS gives nothing back in exchange for.

SSPL is effectively being used a tool to force AWS to do the ethical thing and reach an agreement with Elastic to distribute a portion of their profits from using their trademarks and hosting their Software they've invested a decade in building. AWS has instead chosen the path to maintain their own fork to avoid sharing any profits with Elastic as they're obviously currently making so much from hosting Elastic's products that it's in their financial best interest to start hiring dev resources to maintain their own fork then sharing profits with Elastic to fund its continued development.

Will be interesting to see how this strategy turns out, AWS may have already become to big to compete against who will be able to out resource, out fund & take over any ISV's OSS product, but it's clear the longer Elastic waits, the harder it would be to protect their own investments being used against them.

This comment kind of implies there is this 'free and fair market' that just magically rewards better products etc..

Mostly, it's a game of power.

Large companies use power to wipe out smaller one's and consolidate, sometimes to the near term benefit of consumers, sometimes not.

Also - just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's fair, we really shouldn't have to state that. This doesn't mean that Amazon is 'bad' because they are big, or Elastic is 'good' because they are small or any of that, but the issue is worth consideration.

...well, there is no but. The price I pay to live in a free world is that I can’t do anything about anyone else’s bad behaviour. I just have to put up with it because the alternatives are worse. At least I get a free world out of it.

I hope Elastic get something out of the free world in which they exist. Patches from early contributors, I’m guessing. Certainly a brand and adoption they wouldn’t have enjoyed had they remained closed source.

It’s a better world than one where we lack high quality open and free software, even if we have to live alongside the Amazons.

They made multiple accusations. One of them is AWS announced Elastic search in partnership with Elastic when there was no partnership at all.

also tested and fixed for free by community contributors.

Open source software was about empowering people in particular, not corporations. It has however made it very, very difficult for individuals to make money from their software whilst the corporations reap the rewards from countless man hours of this free work across the a myriad of domains.

I still think it's something we can get better at as an industry. Just choosing different licenses doesn't really solve the problem, people regularly shun paid software licenses, feeling entitled to all software for free, and I think that's an issue for the ecosystem as a whole.

Also good to see Amazon sponsoring lots of OSS development. Wish they could have done it in collab with ElasticCo, but I think that’s on them as there’s no way they can allow peers to contribute and stay in business.

Something being legal does not make it ethical, many people see what AWS did, including profiting off the TradeMark of Elastic Search with zero compensation to the project is unethical

AWS is clearly in the wrong here, I am surpised by the number of people that defend AWS, this is why FOSS continues to struggle

AWS is a leech on Open Source, like many other large companies. I will be SHOCKED if AWS fork has any actual feature improvements, my guess is it will be a pure maintenance fork with security updates (maybe)

AWS has changed the "new low" what an open-source project can expect if a cloud company earning billions on top of open-source can just change their project and fork it.

Cloud companies taking your source are a "new thing" to consider in the world of open-source.

Whatever happened to that pure-AGPL fork of MongoDB?

Not taking sides, but for comparison, Amazon makes that much revenue every 12 hours.

The license communicates to others how you approve the usage of your copyright work. If you aren't communicating "do whatever you want" don't pick a license that literally says "do whatever you want".

Although it’s great for new entrants to the market who’re looking to build mindshare and marketshare. Because it’s hard for incumbents to compete with Free.

“Open Source bait and switch” has been a thing for a while now. Elastic is just the most recent/high profile example.

Apache license is a longer and more complicated version that is the same in spirit but also includes the agreement that the licensor does not sue the licensee over patent infringement for use of their contributions to the software or the cumalative software, unless the licensee makes a patent claim against the licensor in which case the license terminates

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

The big sell was easy deployment and cost management but the negatives outweighed that.

We tried Elastic themselves but the sales and technical process was a nightmare. It was virtually impossible to work out what we were going to have to spend. We needed X-Pack (RBAC and SSO) but the enterprise licensing is all over the place for it.

Ergo we didn’t bother and stuck with our DBMS FTE stuff. It’s crap but the ROI is better.

Company I was at switched from AWS's ElasticSearch to hosting it ourselves on top of EC2 instances so that we could control the memory/CPU/disks and see logging/understand more about the internals to help understand why it was slow for our use case.

Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.

Take an example what Amazon did with Mongo - First they launch a closed-source competitor (totally fine) but then they also take Mongo's source and rebadge it as their own fully-managed DocumentDB (Mongo 1.6 but with closed source additions). It's having your cake and eating it too. There's nothing legally wrong with this, but I do think this is market abuse (because they can only do this because of AWS market penetration) just to make the worlds richest man richer.

Everybody should be allowed to change its mind when presented with new data or circumstances.

https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

It appears that they are concerned that it may be argued that if for example YouTube uses an AGPL DB that they would be required to release YouTube under AGPL.

I'm not saying that the interpretation is correct, but if companies can't be sure they won't use your software.

And to be honest IANAL but their interpretation seems reasonable to me. If you put Mastodon behind NGINX I think it is fairly easy to argue that the user is "interacting with it remotely through a computer network". So now if you have a theoretical AGPL Elasticsearch and your site sends the user search query to it and returns the user the results it doesn't seem clear that this is a legally meaningful difference. I certainly wouldn't want to argue that in court. I'd just use different software.

When it comes to licenses that were written “with a plan”, there is a charitable reading and an uncharitable one.

The charitable reading is that, back then, it was assumed that every computer user, local or remote, would have access to a compiler; and that any user would eventually learn how to operate a compiler, hence making it obvious that they would want to mod and compile the software they ran. And then they saw the licenses worked well enough to develop an ecosystem, and more or less left it at that (unless explicitly threatened, as they did when reacting to freeloading trends in embedding with the GPL 3).

The less charitable reading is that they left the door open precisely because they knew it ensured demand for service providers and system administrators (which many of the original “foss hackers” were, in their day job).

In any case, I don’t think anyone would have predicted they would become so dominant; everyone just assumed the big commercial vendors would be around forever, and FOSS would always be the underdog ecosystem; hence, leaving certain activities commercially unburdened would have always been somewhat necessary.

If you think about it the usage is best described tied to a an era of pay as you go services launched in the first decade of the 2000's.

There's otherwise not that much in common between Google Docs, pay-as-you go VPS/VM, Kubernetes, platforms like GCP/AWS, and Dropbox.

It's hilarious that you picked K8. K8 destroyed dockers ability to make money. They were planning on rolling out their own system, but didn't get it out fast enough and got eaten.

Was k8 nonsense? no, they made a product from the ground up.

Edit: I am much more talking about projects like Postgres than companies like Elastic.

Controversy is that he accepted patches from OSS contributors, but assumed his own copyright on them, then sold his rights to big corp (Sun), which (Oracle) closed some sources, it is probably not very clean behavior.

I disagree because if they had had it closed or non-free open source from the start, they would not have a $15 billion business. Partly because people wouldn't have adopted it, and partly because it is build on other open source projects (Lucene).

I don't think there is a scenario where they get their cake (an open source project and a vastly successful business) and get to eat it too (they have no competition).

Is it though? Every single one of their blog posts have been focused on spinning their decision as being great for the open source community. What they should have said was - we are a business, have VCs/shareholders and need to make money now, so sorry but the free ride is over.

This of course does not have the limiting effect on SaaS.

That cost acts as a barrier if AWS launches its own Snowflake competitor. Basically AWS taxes you for not using other AWS services, once you are inside AWS.

You basically have to hookup Cloud Provider A through a middle layer to Cloud Provider B (e.g., connect via Equinix or Megaport). It’s not drastically different than a hybrid setup, except you don’t control the premises on either side.

While getting you the right link to our Partner Interconnect docs, it turns out we have a nice solution guide writing up the various options [1].

The costs boil down to some non-trivial fixed price each month to cover the 1/10/100+ Gbps connection on each side, plus whatever transfer fees each provider charges for egress over that method. At large enough volumes, providers of all sorts usually have equivalent fixed prices. Getting multiple redundant lines, or doing VPN encryption, obviously costs more and is more work than “just a pipe”.

Even at list prices though, this gets you closer to $.02/GB each way in Europe or North America. At high volume in the same metro area (like Northern Virginia), you can easily agree to much lower rates on either side.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/patterns-for-connecting-o...

Elastic isn't the saint here, they aren't doing this to "Double Down On Open Source" as they claim. They're simply doing it so they can squeeze the hell out of the SAAS market by betraying their promises to the community and contributors.

I didn't say that wasn't the case.

I specifically made this claim:

It is not just legal for Amazon to do this, but it is also ethical. They are contributing value, not just to their paying customers but to the whole FOSS community. That's a moral good under my framework. You may have a different ethical framework; that's fine.

If there’s been any breach of ethics, it’s Elastic’s license change in the first place which was completely contrary to the spirit and intent of open source.

Perhaps you don’t agree. That’s fine, but let’s not assume this is consensus and that Elasic, Inc. is all about having the highest of ideals. From my POV, They’re panicked about a business model.

You're not required to contribute with your amazon e-mail address, and I see a lot of people who don't due to inertia or because they want to avoid tying their identity their employer.

When you run AWS Elasticsearch, you have no access to ES instance. You can't configure it, you can't add your own plugins. You are no longer a user, you are just a consumer of the UI/API, even when the primary product is still called Elasticsearch.

Big difference.

Elastic: Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying us Community: Awesome!

... years go by and the community is loving it, Elastic is loving it everything is great

AWS: Wow! Free, popular software. Millions of dollars already invested in it so we don't have to. We'll take it for free and sell it.

... years go by

Elastic: Hey AWS! So glad you like our software but we can see that your actions are hurting our business which will hurt the software and the community in the future if we don't do anything. What do you think about making a deal?

AWS: Lol, suck it.

... years go by where other cloud providers make deals with Elastic

Elastic: Okay AWS, from now on we are changing our license so you and other companies similar to yours cannot re-sell it

AWS (and their fans): What, how dare you?! We've made millions by reselling it as our own, and not you are going to restrict us doing exactly that. You dick!

A hole which didn't exist in this way 10 years ago. But well you could have seen it coming tbh.

> all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition

So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited?

If so then why do GPL and similar exist, which are normally considered as Open Source?

It's just that the landscape changed and with this the problems around it changed.

While in the past bundling it into non free programs (+some committed aspects) was seen as a problem and as such GPL was created today the problem are similar but instead of distributing that bundles they are provided as managed services.

In this context the Server Side Public License is as much in line with the core values of Open Source as GPL is.

It's just that Amazon cares to some degree more about free software being free as in not costing them then they care about it being freely inspectable and modifiable. But cost free-ness was never a core value of Open Source, just a side effect.

I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying on AWS" they have to be able to translate that into profit. This seems like a lose-lose for Elastic as they have effectively ceded all that away to this fork. The use of SSPL also seems like nonsense here that won't result in them seeing a dime from Amazon.

In the most recent example, we were occasionally hitting Java heap OutOfMemory under our workloads and wanted tuning or even architectural advice. It turns out that ElasticSearch didn't limit ingestion rate to control memory pressure and was happy to accept writes under load until it exploded. Heavy users of ElasticSearch commonly have to watch ES memory pressure and throttle their own writes client-side.

I would've loved to hear these limitations from elastic.co, be offered some tips on appropriate techniques for throttling, or have them accept a feature request to better handle this server side. We never got anywhere near that level of depth of understanding our problem, after months of trying. It felt like we were talking to first-level support who didn't understand the product much better than we did.

What I'm actually saying is that when people think that outcome is a bad thing, their beef is with our particular breed of capitalism. When they say "This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones," then what they're saying is that they're objecting to the free market as it exists in our particular breed of capitalism. And when they say, as others say, "This good outcome could have been so much better if it weren't for the dictators at the OSI micromanaging the term 'open source'," then what they're actually saying is they're objecting to companies freely choosing to believe what the OSI says, because the OSI has no power. If you think that something was short of the mark here, that something was our breed of capitalism.

I'm agreeing with you. Capitalism did not fail. It did what everyone expected it to do. If you're happy with the outcome, great! I'm not telling anyone they ought to be unhappy with the outcome. But if you are unhappy with the outcome, I'm telling you why.

How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?

Meanwhile, if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud

I wouldn't necessarily say AWS' ability to use ES as a loss-leader for their Data Transfer charges is better for AWS's clients in the long-run. I can certainly see the argument for calling it exploitation.

Which OT1H is a valid reason not to go all "spirit" and "ideology" in business; OTOH, if what you're all about is spirit and ideology, it's a valid reason to stop thinking what you're doing is "Open Source" and go back to the original "Free Software" terminology.

As I think someone else mentioned already in this discussion, the term "FOSS" does more harm than good by conflating these different things, and should be avoided.

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)

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?

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?

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)

Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad thing, and that the only true way to be a developer is to give your work away for free as Open Source. Even silly things like negotiating for a market rate salary from your employer are frowned upon as caring only for money.

But that's all backwards. There are good reasons to release your work product as Open Source, and those all share the quality that they give you or your business some tangible benefit. So it's simple: do the benefits of open sourcing your thing outweigh the downside? If yes, go for it. If no, don't. But don't spend even a second worrying about whether it's the "right" thing to do for silly moral reasons.

If there was one thing I could change about our industry, it would be to remove the 5 year Open Source Indoctrination brainwashing session you need to go through at University before entering it. Because we'd spend a lot less time being taken advantage of later in life.

You can still build a business on your software -- as long as you keep developing, no competitor will be able to use up to date version. And people who want to rely on open source can do so, knowing that the software will get open-sourced eventually, no matter what the company decides.

[0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/

Open source makes sense when many companies benefit economically from sharing resources to develop common software/tooling.

Open sourcing code from inception can lead to adoption and create profits.

At some point that code may be more valuable to another company in some way and they profit from it.

I don’t see Linus Torvalds complaining about companies that profit from Linux but then again Elastic Search has shareholders to answer to and their trademark has been violated.

I think a possible solution to that problem could be a universal basic income, itself funded on the likes of Amazon.

If you had the assurance that you'd always have something to live with, wouldn't you be more open to take the risk of going open-source and see if you can run a business of that ?

> First Quarter Fiscal 2020 Financial Highlights

> Total revenue was $89.7 million, an increase of 58% year-over-year, or 62% on a constant currency basis.

As long as open-source is a near requirement for getting traction, I don't think there is much to worry about.

If the code is your original, differentiating product, go ahead and make it proprietary if it helps you. If there's some code that supports your product, that helps make your product possible, or that complements your product but doesn't really differentiate your work or create a bespoke advantage for your users, then seriously consider making that Open Source or Free Software.

For example, let's say you have a new, great music recommendation technique and that's why people would choose your music player or music web site or whatever. You could build that with an OS DB on the backend, on an OS operating system, using an Open Source language and Open Source libraries and still close the source for your recommendation engine. However, you could still offer a F/OSS client to an API for that for various languages. You could contribute to the projects underlying yours. You might write a whole new configurable data wrangling system that's not specific to your recommendation code but is really useful to populating your database, and you could release that as F/OSS for the community to use. You might make your own front-end toolkit for the browser, or your own websockets code on the backend, that can be used by any application. You'd be able to contribute that to the community as F/OSS without undercutting your main differentiator, too. I kind of think of this model akin to open core, but in this case it's a "Closed Core" with open everything else. Improve everything that's in common with others in a common space, and differentiate your offering in your own different, compartmentalized space. Just make sure the bindings between the parts are at the appropriate level so the licenses don't clash.

Does this mean some competitor could come along, tie all of your F/OSS together, and plug in a different core? Absolutely. If that core's not your true differentiator, though, your plans have probably already gone awry. Making it easy to plug other code in the place of your proprietary code surrounded by an open platform is almost as good for the community as making the whole thing open source, and lets you compete on what you've decided is going to be your competitive advantage.

Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL?

But also

LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL)

OpenBGPD

OpenOSPFD

OpenNTPD

OpenSMTPD

OpenSSH

Even if it is though, I'm just not sure I find the idea of free software being a loss-leader a bad thing. Having a loss-leader implies that AWS is providing + capturing value elsewhere. In this case, you assert this is from Data Transfer. But regardless of where the cost-centers are, AWS is delivering value to their customers and charging for it. There is competition in the cloud space, and in all honesty moving clouds generally isn't a huge deal, at least if you've architected your systems with that in mind (which any SysAdmin worth their salt should be doing in 2021).

The fact is, customers like having all their cloud managed under one roof. Customers like the exceedingly strong uptime guarantees provided by AWS. If customers have choice (which they do), and they're choosing AWS, why is it a bad thing if Elastic can't compete? If AWS is winning, it's because they have a holistic offering that customers like better.

For someone who claims to want a conversation, you're doing a good job of insulting me repeatedly without actually discussing anything relevant to this post.

These people have this bizarre fusion of capitalist and communist reasoning, I really can't reconcile it. On the one hand they seem to think profit is fundamentally evil, but on the other hand they seem to think the problem is that Elastic isn't being allowed to monopolize all the profit.

Well, which is it? Did Elastic release non-restrictively-licensed free software out of the goodness of their hearts, giving it away with no expectation of a return? Or did they create this codebase purely for profit, and thus have no claim to moral highground? It's all so silly and childish.

And the biggest irony is, Elastic is already a successful business. They're trying to pretend their business model is not viable as long as Amazon keeps operating, which is just gaslighting.

Which is ironic because, they also at the same time believe that Elastic is entitled to all the profits, and wax philosophical about "but how will any company be built around open source if we don't carry Elastic's water for them?"

It's just all so farcical.

It seems like a lot of us perhaps rushed to discussion before reading this article, which is about Amazon forking ElasticSearch so that an OSS version would remain available.

Honestly, this is a shitty move by Elastic and I’ll be advocating against new uses of it, though /because reasons/, I doubt this will come up for me in the near future. ;)

"this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."

> An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation.

Isn't that exactly the point of capitalism and the reason why proprietorship is possible?

RMS doesn't, but others also in the copyleft camp certainly have. E.g. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

It's not like a widget, that there's a value intrinsic to each widget - the value is all in the creating the initial copy of the software and in any ongoing changes people want.

And while for a singular person, perhaps writing FLOSS is charity, but for companies it might well be more payment in kind - i.e. cooperation on making it do things each company wants makes it more valuable for everyone.

The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos.

Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea.

The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.

...it would deter them, which is what your original question was asking. Preventing and deterring are two completely different things.

While true in a simplistic sense, this is generally not true when you have a society / economy as complex as ours.

Partly this is due to perceived value vs "actual value", and to me a business is only moral (obviously businesses can't really be moral, so what I'm really saying is "the only businesses that should exist") if you actually believe that what you are delivering to the other party is more valuable than what you are costing them, so that it is actually a win-win. Generally this is hard to measure, but I can provide some examples of when this is pretty clearly not the case.

1. Get rich quick schemes. Things like online courses that tell you how to make boatloads of cash by doing X. Except they don't actually work, so the value to the purchaser is effectively $0, while what they paid for it is certainly not.

2. A larger scale example: the collapse of the housing market in 2008. This is a better example of effects from the complexity I mentioned earlier. A significant part of the crash can be attributed to CDOs/MBSes. Long story short, banks were doing some repackaging shenanigans to make something that was shit look less shit. Any honest accounting will realize that this provided zero real value. Yet the bank's were getting rich off it. That certainly sounds like capturing (>0) more value than you are delivering (0) to me.

That is the kind of behavior I'm talking about.

> AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.

> With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.

> That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.

There's a lot of businesses with a lot of budget who want to use ES and don't want to go near AWS. Let's not pretend there's not an enormous opportunity out there for a good hosted ES platform not on AWS.

Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month

AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month

Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)

Amazon built the product with the hope that it would continue to be developed with that license. What are they supposed to do with the license change? Just accept whatever Elastic said? I don't think you can blame them for taking the last version where they agreed with the license and continue to use and develop it. Sure, maybe making it open is a bit of a jab back, but even in isolation it makes sense for them.

They're a hosting company, they're hosting open source software and they're doing it well.

Also, do you think they make a profit on the bare EC2 instance? If so, why do you think that running a few management scripts that manage ES running on it would add up to more than $0.094/hour?

Elastic loses nothing by pissing off AWS, this was clearly the right move. AWS has contributed very little to the project so far, so if they took their toys home in a huff it makes no difference to Elastic. And if AWS does contribute significant development to their new fork, Elastic is free to copy any worthwhile commits into the official repo under the terms of the license Amazon has released their fork under. The only thing Elastic is going to suffer for this is some people whinging on HN about whether or not it’s “really open source” anymore.

Disclaimer: worked at AWS.

Yes, Amazon has a vast number of engineers. They also have a vast need for engineers.

So they have to make a business case to continue to fund engineers, and I don't think one exists for the type of development we're wanting.

To be clear, there is some development they could justify.

If they are replicating new features that Elastic releases, so they're not falling behind the market, the business case is retaining customers. But that's playing catch up.

If new features optimize the service, the business case is being able to advertise lower TCO, which attracts customers. That could be quite beneficial, but there's usually not a ton of optimization you can do.

There is a business case for new features that increase integration with other AWS services. That increases customer usage of AWS. But AWS is so proprietary this would likely be useless outside AWS.

So none of that, I think, is the development people are looking for.

What we'd want are features a software business develops to differentiate their product in the market. If the features go into the open source version, however, then by definition they aren't differentiating.

This is the key business contradiction in AWS trying to fund open source development.

Maybe I'm missing something and they can make the business case for continued differentiating feature development. So, I'd say I'm wrong if after two years we're seeing such features being released to the commnuity.

Looking at the various projects at https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/, the most prominent ones seem to only have a handful of somewhat active developers, almost two years after launch.

If AWS hires a lot of people to work full time on their ASL2-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks, then ... that's not necessarily _just_ bad for Elastic? I doubt Elastic execs thought AWS would just fall over and discontinue something that's probably billions in revenue at this point. If AWS actually starts contributing code beyond trivial bug fixes, code Elastic can legally fold into their own Elasticsearch (via the ASL2-licensed fork) if it's good enough, then ... good for both?

That may be true for a few OSS projects, but if they were forced to do that for ALL the projects they're profiting from the math would probably not look as simple.

So what you're saying is people shouldn't work on open source projects. That's essentially what your statement boils down to.

> All changes to Elasticsearch were sent as upstream pull requests (#42066, #42658, #43284, #43839, #53643, #57271, #59563, #61400, #64513), and we then included the “oss” builds offered by Elastic in our distribution. This ensured that we were collaborating with the upstream developers and maintainers, and not creating a “fork” of the software.

With links on the issue numbers. Why should we not understand this as contributing back?

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...

So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close?

EDIT: I do think it's fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is worse than the AGPL, but I do think it's important to point out that it's possible to believe in open source licenses and to think that the way AWS uses software violates the spirit of open source. The people who work on GNU seem to think that!

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...

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.

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.

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.