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Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

I wish that same drive would come to their devices division which do the absolutely bear minimum not to be sued for GPL Violation when they use GPL code on their Fire Devices

Edit: Also doesn't AWS have a history of Microsoft style EEE, where they embrace an open source project, make a service from it, extend that service in a non-open way and then push people to use their extended non-open service instead of improving upstream?

Hasn't this resulted in a number of projects changing their licensing to prevent it?

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I think ElasticSearch license change was biggest such change, as was discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657

Their "obsession" with contributing isnt really in evidence on their fork:

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/71f7e9147092c7d4b08df18da...

Worth bearing in mind that the only reason fork even exists was so that they didnt have to pay Elastic a cut when selling hosted ElasticSearch.

If they cared about open source they could start by not undermining the business models of companies that do more than just pretend to support it.

They forked it when the upstream project switched to using a non-open-source license. This is a reasonable thing to do if your goal is to run FOSS and if you have the resources to maintain it.

Notably, you could build GPL software on top of OpenSearch. You could not do so on top of ElasticSearch at the moment.

Wasn't that license change after AWS started playing funny buggers with Elastic?

So, Elastic then chose to change their license to try and counter it.

By "playing funny buggers" do you mean "running the code for their customers"? The code whose license said this?

> Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.

So, I take it you're familiar with the history between those two then, and you're ignoring it for some reason? ;)

switched to a non-open source licensing because AWS as leeching off the project, it was completely reasonable for ElesticSearch to change their licensing in the face of what AWS was going which while legal was IMO unethical

Amazon referring to it as "not open source" is a bit like Russia calling Crimea "Russian". This redefinition of open source is intended as a political statement - fighting against open source with restrictions.

Especially so, it seems, if those restrictions promote the growth of open source.

Elastic changed to a license that is completely open except insofar as it blocked Amazon from profiting from it.

>Notably, you could build GPL software on top of OpenSearch. You could not do so on top of ElasticSearch.

Notably you can't build MIT software based on GPL software either. This is 100% about MIT being a weak open source license with few restrictions and GPL being a strong open source license with restrictions.

Not coincidentally the very-much-also-open-source-license GPL also had a history of infuriating big tech for exactly the same reason - they hate restrictions put in place designed to help open source flourish.

E.g. Here's Google getting publicly grumpy about the AGPL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source...

It is pretty well accepted that "open source" in the context of software is referring to the OSI's Open Source Definition. Elastic themselves say they're not calling Elasticsearch open source:

> Does this mean that Elasticsearch and Kibana are no longer Open Source?

> Yes. Neither the Elastic License nor SSPL have been approved by the OSI, so to prevent confusion, we no longer refer to Elasticsearch or Kibana as open source. We updated our website and our messaging to refer to these products as “Free & Open,” and when talking about the licenses directly, we describe them as “source-available.” If you notice an area we missed, please let us know, so we can correct it.

https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing

>It is pretty well accepted that "open source" in the context of software is referring to the OSI

To the corporate funded OSI. I know.

The same corporate OSI who joined in the character assassination attacks on Richard "open source comes before profit" Stallman for very similar reasons.

If you'd prefer, here's Stallman saying the FSF hasn't gotten around to examining the SSPL but expecting it won't be considered a free software license either: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-10/msg00...

OSI has become corporatized with their "approvals"...

I am not sure anyone should care what OSI thinks about a given license

> It was changed to a license that is completely open except insofar as it blocked Amazon from profiting from it.

It didn’t just block Amazon, and even if it did, selectively blocking a single downstream commercial user would make it not open source.

The freedom of third-party competitive commercial downstream use is a guarantee against effective vendor lock in, and it is one of the important reasons to choose open source solutions.

Does that make it hard to monetize development of software by just rent-seeking in the “we don’t want to expend the effort to host our own things” SaaS market with a hosted implementation? Yes, but, too bad.

>It didn’t just block Amazon

No, I guess it also blocked google, oracle, etc. from monetizing their work without sharing the proceeds from the quite considerable profits they make (something they seem happy to do).

Didnt block anybody else though, as you well know. Any regular user of Elastic faced 0 additional restrictions.

>Does that make it hard to monetize development of software

No. As Amazon demonstrates the software can still be monetized by the most powerful rent seeking players in the market like Amazon.

Does it make it hard for the companies not running monopolistic rent machines that actually build open source? Yes. MUCH harder. It would have killed elastic.

>too bad.

Yes, too bad for open source.

You can be anti open source if you like (it has made a lot of people mad, not just MSFT and Amazon) but don't try to dress it up.

Having to pay for hosting an open source product? Isn’t Amazon doing what they should in this case where a company tries to block any competition.

No. Amazon was abusing their enormous market power to squeeze the company that made this software out of the market of hosting it.

(Not to mention lying about "partnering" with them)

If allowed to continue this would kill the project. If only Amazon can monetize it, it doesnt get developed. The open source project then dies.

Amazon is no more doing the right thing here than they were when they destroyed diapers.com with a strategy of sustained predatory pricing.

The fact that they want a pat on the back for being "pro open source" now after pulling this kind of crap is just icing on the cake.

Not sure I'd count that as "EEE"? I guess in a way you could see "We can't compete with AWS at running our own software" as AWS "extending" it, but I don't think it is quite that?

> do the absolutely bear minimum not to be sued for GPL Violation

Could you expand on what you mean? Are they violating the GPL? What does it mean to do the bare minimum but not violate the GPL?

It's unrealistic to expect corporations to go above and beyond when complying with something like a code license. If you want someone to do something, put it in the text of the license.

>It's unrealistic to expect corporations to go above and beyond when complying with something like a code license.

I agree up to the point where they start going on about how much they love and support open source. At that point going beyond legal necessity should be a given.

Why? Who decides they need to do that? How do you explain to a CEO or CFO that you want to spend more resources (money sure but time as well) than required doing things out of love? Who decides how much more?

If the legal requirement is X, and you do X+Y, there will still be people bitching about the fact that you didn't do Z, or that Y is really just self-serving, or something else. Someone someone will always complain about what you're doing because you're a profit-making enterprise.

>Who decides they need to do that?

The corporation decides to do that. They shouldn't advertise that they support charities if they don't actually support charities.

Who's talking about supporting charities?

They drop a zip file with their open source code somewhere on the website at some point, but don't try to upstream patches, work with Linux kernel people in public, or provide a public git history

To be fair, it's a tough sell to tell your management chain that you have to spend a week every month arguing and refactoring code just to make some internet people happy about it

> it's a tough sell to tell your management chain ...

Sounds like a weird management chain then.

Generally I've seen the conversation go along the lines of "we should 'contribute' these changes back, so the upstream people can check them over for bugs, and we don't have to write this stuff again for the next product".

ah, I dunno if anyone in the linux community is really going to be going out of their way to fix MediaTek's shitty code for free as a favor to Amazon

>>It's unrealistic to expect corporations to go above and beyond when complying with something like a code license.

This is completely false as they (amazon) want to market themselves has developer friendly and supportative of open source

Their actions however say something completely different.

Further Loads of companies and organizations go beyond the legally required bare minimum in all kinds of things not just open source. You have a completely warped view of human interactions if you want to boil all humanity, and all interactions to just what is "legally required of us"

If you lower expectations to literal legal text only, then they don't even have the "it would be bad for PR and developer relations not to do it" incentive.

> Also doesn't AWS have a history of Microsoft style EEE

AFAIK (but I'm far from knowing about all examples), no, they have a history of taking open-source software, forking it out of the control of the creators, and extending it there without bothering to sync the changes back.

It is hostile to people that want to gain anything from their software, but it is not against the license.

I’m pretty sure that is EEE

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