Hacker News Reader

Were you an ES contributor who feels betrayed, or are you speaking more hypothetically?

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...

> If I needed to submit a patch I'm not gonna care about the project being "truly" open source vs just source-available.

Really? Everyone's cares are different, but I don't like contributing my time and programming output for free to proprietary software, for it's owner to make money off my work.

I don't mind contributing to open source, where anyone can make money off of it with no special privileges to some. It feels like contributing to a commons.

But contributing to proprietary software without getting compensated feels like getting taken advantage of to me.

I've made very small contributions, irrelevant in the scheme of things. I've also run decent-sized Elasticsearch clusters (~10-20TB total store).

When I speak of betrayal I'm more speaking in the general sense that under my value structure, it is immoral to lie to someone or to break promises, which is what Elastic did. They told people they would never make the Apache 2.0 code proprietary, and then they did it anyway. For a shitty reason at that.

A lot of engineers I’ve observed are increasingly far removed from sales, marketing, and ultimately, their customers.

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.

> "Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary."

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.

Next time, go commercial from get go.

do you think that would have hurt adoption from the get-go? How about ability to get unpaid community code contribution?

Sure it would be harder, but that is life, hard and made of options.

I have been there during the first .com wave, so I know how hard it was, including what happens when the money stops flooding in.

Last I checked, sustaining a for profit business wasn’t a guaranteed right. It’s called competition, and plenty of companies fail.

If you can’t sustain a business around open sources, then don’t be open source.

Elastic chose to close their source but are now lying about it to make it look better than it is. AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.

Having "open source" vs "source available" or whatever you want to call the new license isn't a guaranteed right either, so if there's no problem with the one then what's the problem with the other?

Would you prefer more software to be released openly or less? Cause if you're making moves like Amazon did with their ES service, you're pushing the world towards "less."

I'm not too concerned with this, but it's strange to me that people are both trying to keep OSS licenses "pure" and advocating that companies release less of their code in the first place...

I would prefer that companies stop abusing their communities by leveraging them and then discarding them when they have enough power to do so.

OSS was never about source availability - that’s just a form of cheap escrow and has fairly limited value. Open source is about user freedom to do whatever they want with the software - guaranteed freedoms.

This isn’t about “purity”, it’s about using a label on the tin that says “FREEDOM INSIDE” and then peeling the label off and telling a subset of users to pay up or give away any software code you’ve ever used to touch my software. We used to call that a “bait and switch” to be polite , though really it’s more like a shakedown.

> AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.

Yup. This mentality drives me absolutely insane. People seem to regurgitate whatever propaganda fake-open-source-company-X tells them.

Sorry, I'm not going to feel bad that the $15B company that built their business off the backs of open source - which is totally fine - is upset that another company is competing with them. And the biggest irony is, Amazon's not eating Elastic's lunch, they're both eating respectable lunches. Elastic's built a great business, which they are now doing their best to ruin as quickly as possible.

> As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself.

You very profoundly and deeply misunderstand what the SSPL actually says, which is understandable because Elastic have helped promulgate this misinformation. Please go read the license. It is not straightforward, it's very vague and exposes an organization to enormous uncertainty. If you don't want to read the license itself, then start with https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearc...

Additionally, organizations that commit to running free software, are forced to drop Elasticsearch now (or more accurately, they're all going to just run the best fork of 7.1.0 and call it a day). So Elastic's statement that it doesn't impact users is just a complete lie.

Finally, this whole discussion is irrelevant because the license change won't actually protect Elastic's business. Amazon is going to behave no differently, except that now they have a better codebase to work with because they don't need to worry about Elastic rejecting pull requests that cannibalize their proprietary features.

> 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.

Absolutely not, I refuse to explain that for you, because you're reversing the responsibility here. If you want to build a company around giving away software for free, you better have a way to monetize the giving away of the software for free. There's plenty of strategies to do this, such as the famous "Commoditize your complement", OR you can be a redhat and sell enterprise support, OR you can be elastic and sell cloud services.

And guess what? Elastic HAS built a more than financially viable business with Apache 2.0 licenses. They pull in $500M revenue per year, with 40%+ y/y growth. They're valued at $15B right this moment. And you seriously believe that this organization is on the verge of bankruptcy?

Do the math, you're being tricked by a dishonest company. A company that so many of us had respect for until they started down this path a couple years ago.

And for the love of god, I implore everyone in this thread, please give up the whole "won't somebody think of the poor company?" argument. Open source is not a business model in and of itself. It never has been. If anything, the rise of these companies that build their brand image around being open source and then re-license to proprietary as soon as it's convenient is the literal problem. They're polluting the whole spirit of open source, which was always "I'm giving this away freely, and I don't ask for anything in return except you can't infringe my trademark" (for apache 2.0). You guys have the open source mentality totally backwards.

And don't get me wrong, I'm an AnCap. I'm as capitalist as it gets. So I'm not criticizing the mentality out of some misguided hatred of private ownership; rather, all I'm saying is if you talk the talk you better be prepared to walk the walk. All these entitled companies that make their software successful BECAUSE it's open source and the community feels safe building stacks upon it, and then clutch their pearls when someone else makes money from that software, are totally absurd and should be laughed at.

Sorry for the rant, I drank too much coffee today. But for the love of god, can't you see how, ethics of lying to the community aside, this licensing change doesn't even help protect Elastic's business interests, but rather just strengthens their competitors?

> but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable.

Ironically, it is exactly Amazon that seems to be demonstrating a way to develop an open source ElasticSearch fork and be financially viable, right?

If becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world in an adjacent field and using that to fund an open source SaaS is a demonstration of a financially viable open source business; we're in trouble.

Going from the frankly insane pricing for managed ES on AWS (we tried it, were happy with the service and massively disappointed in the pprice, now manage our own on AWS), Amazon makes enough money from the SaaS to fund it.

How does the price compare to other managed ES including from the ES founders?

If it's super non-competitive high, it is even more curious they seem to see it as such a threat. I'm becoming increasingly unsure if they actually see it as a threat, or if it's just like "nobody should be able to make money from our open source without giving us a cut".

Or is it just that all managed ES seems too expensive to you?

So one reason I choose open source is precisely because of the legal guarantee that there will be comptetition in providing services based on it.

If I become dependent on it, one company can't control the pricing of people offering hosted services, because it's open source, nobody needs their permission to host it. "vendor lock-in" does not exist with open source.

If that was incompatible with ES's business model for a main stream of revenue, as the project IP holder they are welcome to change their license terms.

But what they're saying is that open source was incompatible with their business model.

It is what it is, but users clamoring for the ethical superiority of vendor lock-in and thinking that's somehow open source values is... weird to me.

It is a fair point

> Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:

Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).

It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, and it's not really clear to me who would (for business reasons, not philosophy) switch to solr/other just because of the license switch.

It also makes perfect sense that AWS would release an apache-licensed fork - they have serious monopoly power - they con offer this service cheaper inside AWS, and the integrations can be smoother/better.

So really why be mad at either party? They both made good business choices it seems to me, maybe elastic will end up loosing out, but if that happens, I can't imagine that staying on the apache license would have saved their bacon.

> It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses

It actually makes incredibly bad business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, because they won't get any more revenue as a result and have now forced a high-quality Apache 2.0 fork.

> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:

Well, they explicitly promised that they would stay Apache 2.0 licensed, which was a lie. And they're no longer open source software. So yeah that's a big deal in my book.

> Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).

I wasn't referring to Amazon, I was referring to the community overall. And don't get me wrong, the community will be fine because we'll have high-quality forks. I'm just pointing out the scumminess of what Elastic did for the company that claims to be the little guy getting exploited.

But they absolutely did pull the rug. Or as a better analogy, they shut the door behind themselves.

I think the fact that you've been downvoted only validates your point. I agree that I think the idea of "open source" has veered so far away now from Free Software ideals that this is the only reasonable outcome, even if it was not desired. The Open Source vs. Free Software people kept saying they were fundamentally the same but one was more palatable to commercial entities, but the (granted, not the most pleasant) "free software fundamentalists" called this outcome a mile away.