I totally agree, I think this is great for the community because the writing was on the wall ever since the initial X-pack source-available drama as well as the original OpenDistro drama.
I think this will be better for all involved.
2,266 karma · joined November 6, 2017
I think this will be better for all involved.
Frankly Elastic has been very hostile at accepting PRs if they seem like they’d compete with Elastic’s proprietary offerings. Glaring conflict of interest. So I’m glad Elastic forced a full fork.
BTW, in case you didn’t realize this license change will not prevent Amazon from running their own fork. So even from a greedy business perspective Elastic made a horrible decision, even ignoring the ethics of lying to the community as they have done repeatedly and without showing any remorse.
edit: Fixed typo where I wrote "Elastic" instead of "Amazon" when talking about Amazon being no exception to preferring to merge upstream where possible
You also haven’t resolved the logical contradiction that Elastic is equally “guilty” of profiting off of Lucene.
I honestly don’t think a nuanced understanding of these licenses and open source business models can lead to any conclusion except this one: Amazon is not in the wrong here, Elastic is being entitled, misleading and duplicitous. Elastic is free to use Lucene as its kernel and monetize it, and Amazon is free to offer a managed Elasticsearch service.
If you write Apache 2.0 software, you have no right to bitch about competition. That’s the short of it. And remember - Elastic is doing fine. They’re worth $15B. The founder has hundreds of millions of dollars now, and rightly so.
Just to add a bit more nuance, I think we tend to focus a lot on community contributions, but IMO the biggest benefit of FOSS is not that; it's adoption.
Even if Elastic writes 100% of the code, by making it open source, they are promoting the widespread adoption of their software. A project with a non-free license or a custom license is a non-starter at many (most?) companies, or at a minimum requires talking to legal which is a PITA.
So, even with no community contributions, Elastic would never have been able to get to where they're at now - making $500MM in revenue a year and at a $15B evaluation - if it weren't open source.
Now just to be clear, Elastic is totally allowed to close things up now that they've reaped the benefits. The beautiful irony is that, when you close source after you've reaped the benefits, by definition you've also hit the point where it's now obviously beneficial for a company like Amazon to make their own fork and keep their AWS Elasticsearch cash cow going.
So, ultimately the community is totally fine. Indeed Elastic has been going down this road for a few years now, so it's actually a good thing for us that this happened. Better to have an amicable divorce early rather than a messy one later. But I can't help but point out that Elastic has broken its promises and misled the community - to their detriment more than to ours.
I think we agree up until this point, at which you fall into a trap. This is the same trap I was trying to avoid by giving my SSPL scenario above.
A copyleft license like GPLv3 does not prevent a business from operating a SAAS business.
AGPL would apply, but it only triggers upon modification. So as long as Amazon doesn't modify Elasticsearch itself, they don't have to publish anything (because there's nothing to publish), and if they do modify, they have to share just those changes. Which is very fair to me from a copyleft perspective.
Now SSPL tries to go further and say for merely using the software in a certain way, you must release not just any changes to the software itself but also everything around the software. That is what makes the SSPL neither open source nor free. (I guess I don't actually know how "free" is defined, so I can only say for certain that it's not open source, but I don't think SSPL even counts as copyleft)
> 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
Well, I disagree with the (I think?) implication that Amazon is doing any bullying here, and I disagree that companies should be broken up purely for their size. But since we're getting into anti-trust authority, perhaps I can convince you to throw the ring into Mordor:
While anti-trust could theoretically fight monopolies, those laws exist within a system in which special interests will co-opt those powers to essentially defend their own monopolies. So, big company X kicks over the right amount of lobbying dollars and magically the politicians want to bring an anti-trust suit against competitor Y, etc.
Now the blue-pilled response is to say, "hey that's just another failure of capitalism, and that's why we need to get money out of politics!". In my unashamedly biased opinion, the red-pilled answer is to realize that these power structures will always be co-opted and the best solution is decentralization and therefore not having a state that can hand out bailouts, force small businesses to close up shop, discriminate against low-skilled workers with minimum wage regulations, exert arbitrary power through anti-trust legislation, etc.
Sorry, I kind of got down a philosophical rabbithole.
Now, there are absolutely cases where there is unethical profit, but (under my worldview, at least) those are all cases where the state gives a company a special advantage, or literally gives it money. So, the following is unethical:
- bailouts of corporations ("corporate welfare")
- government providing an exclusive monopoly to a given company
- government de-facto forcing someone to buy a product due to coercion
The following is not unethical:
- making a product, offering it freely for whatever price people are willing to pay
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.
What right is being violated here? You as a user can run your own Elasticsearch software; I haven't modified it and thus I don't need to publish anything specific. What the SSPL says is I must publicize my entire SAAS product - but the user isn't paying me to run their own Elasticsearch SAAS product, they're paying me to run Elasticsearch.
So to call SSPL copyleft is totally absurd.
Now, there's a broader discussion that you raised of whether the open source definitions are out-of-date or not. Personally, I don't believe so. I don't see how any of the newer developments in the space (public clouds, managed offerings, etc) materially change anything; indeed the whole point of OSS is it's based off of deep principles.
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.
So, to call Elastic a successful open-source business model isn't quite accurate, and you're correct to point that out.
Elastic is just fundamentally in the wrong here. (I'm not talking about the trademark dispute; that's irrelevant to the licensing changes, frankly)
Hey guess what. It's possible to take an Apache 2.0 codebase, let's say Lucene, and then build more Apache 2.0 code on top of it, give it away entirely for free, and still build a $15B business. And you think capitalism has failed here?
Absolute nonsense.
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.
Simply put, this is a naive and entitled attitude. And here's my proof of that: Elastic is a success story. They gave away software for free and turned it into a $15B business. And yet there's still people like you being apologists for their outright lies and intentionally misleading statements. I find it so incredibly absurd.
Elastic is tricking you into thinking that they are not an absurdly successful business. That's not true.
Oh, and one last time: This license change doesn't even protect their business, so it's totally pointless. It's just a business blunder. The SSPL will not make a difference to Amazon because they're not going to use the SSPL version of the code. It's so simple.
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.
Actually, you can totally use Apache 2.0 code as your kernel and then make the whole thing a restrictive license. In fact, that's why we're having this discussion right now. Elastic just made their Elasticsearch/Kibana codebases entirely proprietary, even though they rely on Apache 2.0 Lucene as their kernel. Which to be clear is totally fine, I'm just pointing out the obvious.
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.
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.
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?
Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.
So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.
Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.
And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.
Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>?
So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.
They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.
They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:
> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming
Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so - because they're (a) no longer an open-source company [except for beats/etc which only works in the context of the now-proprietary elasticsearch/kibana], and (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0
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)
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)
What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give it away freely, sell it.
Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with Elastic submitted patches to their codebase.
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.
Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them more money, it will just hurt their brand image and incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an open source vendor gives away their software for free, intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. It's completely backwards logic.
To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you yell at someone using your free software for commercial purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't owe you any money.
You people seem to think open source just means "source available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that.
[/unhinged rant]
You use Apache 2.0 when you explicitly don't want copyleft. But here's what's great: copyleft wouldn't even stop Amazon, so they have to use SSPL which is a proprietary license masquerading as copyleft.
Also, one way they were clearly outright reneging on their promise was that Elastic explicitly promised the community that the parts of the codebase that were Apache 2.0 licensed (the 'open core') would never be made proprietary. They broke that promise for this move.
And what's doubly hilarious is from a business perspective it's an awful move. It won't stop Amazon from making money - they'll just fork 7.1.0 and develop under Apache 2.0 like they just did, and keep operating their service just the same. And by the way, it's Amazon's right, legally AND ethically, to be able to operate AWS Elasticsearch for profit - just as Elastic is right both legally and ethically to use Lucene as a necessary part of Elasticsearch.
Well, first of all I disagree that that's reasonable, but let's be clear here:
any license with a non-commerciality provision is not open source. This is explicitly part of the open source definition:
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This is why Elasticsearch and Kibana are no longer open source; you have a choice of two proprietary licenses if you want to use their version.
The magic is in the "management layers" part. True copyleft says "you can use this software in your product but you have to open source any changes to the software". Okay, fine. This "poison pill proprietary license dressed up as copyleft" is saying "if you sell a service that uses an UNMODIFIED version of elasticsearch, you have to release every piece of software around elasticsearch, including your hypervisors, kernels, os image...the list goes on". It's very clearly an attempt to make the requirement so odious that no-one would risk triggering that clause.
Which is why functionally all they did was force Amazon (and other organizations like Wikimedia who don't sell Elasticsearch as a service but do refuse to run proprietary software) to have to fork.