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Comment by shawnz | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, if their hosted cloud services and premium features aren't viable as a business, and they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place.

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You can run the SSPL'd code, you can view the SSPL code, if you change the SSPL code then contribute back if you distribute your changes. If you run a service providing the SSPL code, contribute the management layer back as well.

It gets more code into the open, where's the disconnect?

I am not concerned with the code of other users' management layers. I am concerned with being able to use the code of this product in the way I want to use it. Copyleft is not important to me, I see permissive licensing as being a bigger priority for freedom.

> they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place.

If something satisfies the four freedoms [0], it is free software.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

How does SSPL satisfy GNU's "freedom 0", to run the program for any purpose?

In the same way the AGPL satisfies it, you can run it for any purpose if you provide the source code to users.

Well, the linked page indicated that copyleft is something that applies only to distribution and not use, but I guess the AGPL shows that that's not true.

Nonetheless I don't agree with the GNU's claim that copyleft doesn't reduce freedoms. Of course a permissive license provides more freedoms: it's right there in the name

But this issue isn't really about permissive vs copyleft licensing anyway: Had Apache used a copyleft license with Lucene, Elasticsearch would have never existed.

But Amazon is hardly offering Lucene as a SaaS offering, don't they?

If they did, should that mean Elasticsearch can't?

I don't see the point there.

Lucene is a library, you can hardly offer it as SaaS. It's gluework.

On the other hand, Elastic is much more enduser software, which is much more routinely abused for SaaS hosting by larger corporations.

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