__blockcipher__

No, it's not about the Russia collusion hoax (yes it was a hoax btw).

Simply put, Trump was threatened that if he pardons Assange, senate republicans (the establishment) would vote to convict.

I wish he had the courage to call their bluff, because them convicting Trump would fragment the GOP to an extent that is irreversible, IMO. Most people who aren't Trump supporters don't appreciate the extent to which Trump's base is not overlapping with the establishment GOP base.

Not quite. Trump knows they're more or less okay with him pardoning Bannon - it pisses them off, but at the end of the day it's water under the bridge. Whereas Assange getting pardoned would absolutely infuriate the "deep state" to an extent that's hard to describe.

Trump should have pardoned Assange, it's the only thing that would actually have taken a (small) chunk out of the "deep state" for real. Instead, as many of us saw coming, Trump's rhetoric about "draining the swamp" and "fighting the deep state" was always empty bluster.

Now Assange will die in prison (there's not a snowball's chance in hell that Biden pardons him, to state the obvious).

Have you never been burned by those awful blue-green deployments?

Of course, my company was willing to pay $100k/mo to log every SQL query in existence but wasn't willing to pay for AWS support (of course it would have required paying something like 1% of our TOTAL aws spend, not just aws elasticsearch, although we could have probably created a subaccount or something)...so maybe the experience is different if your tickets actually get answered.

What was bad about performance in particular? You were just seeing less throughput per dollar spent or what?

I agree but you're really splitting hairs at this point, aren't you?

I work for a very well-known non-profit. You probably visit our site multiple times a week, if not per day. We're going to have to move off of Elasticsearch powering our article search, despite us not offering Elasticsearch as a service or anything remotely comparable, because we believe in running free software in production only.

So, I hope you enjoy taking the holier-than-thou stance. It must be nice up there.

I know it’s not competing with permissive licenses. That’s my point. The people here acting like the fact that companies are profiting off of Apache 2.0 licensed code are being unreasonable was my point.

Separately, I think this move will just hurt Elastic Co in the long term. The organization I work for runs a 30 TB elastic cluster and we’re going to have to go drop Elasticsearch because of this change because we’re committed to using free and open source software. What a shame.

Well, now organizations like Wikimedia are going to have to drop Elasticsearch everywhere despite it powering wikipedia article search and more. So congrats on both missing the GP’s point and also failing to see how this license change would shrink Elastic’s usage / market anyway

Yeah at my last gig we used AWS’ offering. Blue green deployments would hit a race condition and the new cluster would never come up, requiring a ticket to be filed. Important APIs and settings were disallowed.

Horrible service. That’s why it’s ironic that Elastic just shot themselves in the foot with this licensing change. So foolish.

> Maybe not the writing, but the spirit of the permissive FOSS licenses is not to end up being swapped into a non-FOSS alternative...

Well, you can argue the spirit all day, but in practice, permissive licenses mean what they mean. Once a version is released with that license it stays that way, but subsequent versions can have a new license.

Basically, you do keep the fruits of your labor - you get Elasticsearch 7.10 and all previous versions. But you have no right to Elasticsearch 7.11.

Note: In practice I agree it's a dick move to go to a more restrictive license, and I strongly disagree with Elastic's decision to do so. It's just a greedy move that won't even make them more money in the long run because it will cripple the momentum ES has.

Exactly! I've used AWS' service, it's awful. Elastic's is better, and price is comparable or better in fact. But the point is they don't even have to compete on price if quality is superior!

If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently (which in AWS-land means multiple days of back and forth, opening tickets etc), I'd way rather pay $120k/mo for something that actually works.

Does not sound good to me, for the reasons that others have mentioned. But just to be clear: if a big cloud provider uses their software to make money, that's great. That's the point of a non-restrictive license.

Yet now Elastic isn't content with competing in the market with its own managed offering (ironic because their offering is way better than AWS' anyway). Instead, they want to call themselves open source while switching to a proprietary license. Shameful.

Let's be clear here: You build something. You release it under a license that says, "do what you want with it, profit with it, I don't care". Then someone comes and builds on top of it, and you call them a thief? For using something you told them they could use without restriction?

Related: I find it really bizarre how many in the tech community seem to outright just not believe in capitalism...

Wordpress is huge precisely because it was open. Elastic is already quite large and would keep growing massively if they stay non-restrictive. Now that they've switched licenses, this may have a significant enough effect over the long-term that they're leaving a lot of "opportunity pie" on the table.

And guess what, when a corporation uses Elasticsearch in a serious way they will inevitably end up contributing back. It's actually easier to just get a change merged upstream rather than to manage a whole fork, unless the upstream is really hard to get patches merged with.

The whole narrative of "company X is offering Elasticsearch as a service and not contributing back!" is ridiculous. First of all, the whole point of free software is that somebody somewhere is going to be making money with that software, and that's okay, regardless of contribution. Second of all, in practice companies like Elastic will always exaggerate the extent to which corporations aren't "contributing back".

What they really mean is Amazon isn't contributing financially to Elastic Co. That's what they're pissed about, and that's why they clearly wish they were actually in the business of proprietary software (which they now are)

> If we can get the same benefits while also protecting open products from megacorps like AWS, that's a better licence than a true open source licence

That's your opinion, of course. IMO, there's a type of magic that happens when software is under a truly non-restrictive license. You get a level of quality and reliability in the software that is unmatched by what you get with any proprietary equivalent.

Unfortunately, most people don't really believe in FOSS. And that's okay. But boy am I getting frustrated with these companies that are happy to preach about how "open source" is amazing, until someone else is making some profit with their software and then suddenly the (extremely vague) restrictive licenses start rolling out.

> I've made several contributions to ELK, and my only motive has been that it's useful open source software, and I want to make it more useful. I personally don't care who profits off the codebase, I think anybody should be free to. I personally would object to anybody trying to lock down how it can be used, and would see any attempt to do so as running completely counter to my personal motivations as a past contributor.

This x 10000. I couldn't agree more, thanks for putting that so clearly.

Frankly, I think a number of people in the Open Core movement have a psychological hangup around profit. They feel that if a company - particularly a large corporation - is making money using their software without "contributing back", that that should not be allowed. Well, if you don't want to allow it, fine, but don't pretend you're in the business of releasing free software - you're not. You want to be in the business of proprietary software, since only proprietary software lets you say "hey I don't want Jeff to profit off of my work without paying my for a proprietary license".

Some observations:

(1) It's interesting how much of the reasoning/argumentation for these restrictive licenses ultimately comes down to a more articulate form of "but that's not fair!". I also wonder how much the implicit beliefs that "unrestrained capitalism is a bad thing", "markets naturally lead towards monopolies", "antitrust law is legitimately necessary", etc are impacting peoples' reasoning here.

(2) If they can't actually compete and provide superior value to whatever managed offering Amazon can scrounge together, that's actually their fault. AWS' managed elasticsearch offering is absolutely terrible, speaking from experience. They block access to important APIs like `reroute`, any minor cluster change results in a whole blue-green deployment which very frequently hits a race condition that prevents the newer cluster from ever coming up healthy, requiring a ticket to be filed that takes multiple days to respond to if you don't have premium support, etc.

So functionally the idea that AWS is going to fleece them because they'll offer a just-as-good service for cheaper has not been the case. Elastic co's managed offering is simply far superior.

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Ultimately, Elastic has shown that they don't actually want to release FOSS. They want to release proprietary software, and that's why the (in hindsight very easy to foresee) usecase of a cloud provider offering a managed service angers them so much. They don't really breathe the FOSS mindset, because a true non-restrictive license (BSD, Apache 2.0 etc) means that a company can absolutely use your software to make money and that's okay.

Anyway, Elasticsearch is incredible software and the Elastic team has made something truly incredible. I just wish they had a vision for monetization that aligned with their open-source beginnings. It's clear that they don't, and the sooner they stop pretending they're offering a free or open-source solution here, the better.

And to flip it around, the question isn't whether Elastic envisioned use case X. The whole meaning behind FOSS is that you're explicitly saying "I don't care what your use case is, you're free to use it".

So to later turn around and say "hey we never envisioned Amazon et all turning around and selling Elasticsearch as a service" is looking at it backwards. When you release something under Apache 2 (or a similar non-restrictive license) you're intentionally telling people to do what they want with it.

Anyway, my thoughts on these kinds of situations is that it usually implies there's some disconnect between how Elastic Co wants to make money versus how they actually are making money.

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There's a related issue of open source maintainers/devs feeling "exploited". Now while having users submitting issues with unfortunate tone/wording that implies that you're obligated as the maintainer to spend your time fixing their issues is frustrating, it's also part of the game. I'm getting really frustrated with the whole "it's not fair that company X is using my free software without contributing back". That's literally what you agreed to have happen when you released under a non-restrictive license!

If you want a restrictive license, that's fine, but don't release under Apache 2 or BSD and then turn around and act shocked when people use your free software for free. It is unreasonable to put something out there for free and then suddenly expect money for it. That doesn't mean that companies shouldn't be contributing back to software they rely on - that's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned - but it does mean that nobody should be surprised when someone does choose to "consume" software without contributing back.

You need a paper trail of invoices, both of you buying sufficient supplies and having sufficient sales to customers to warrant those supplies.

The amount of money you can launder in a given period of time is ultimately limited by how much real business you have. So if you need to launder an excessive amount of money eventually you’ll have to start metaphorically or literally pouring alcohol down the drain.

Most people take your view, but I would be very careful to claim that it's actually impossible to not have limits on freedoms. There are some who believe that the state should not exist at all; those types would not concede the ground that there exist any reasonable restrictions on fundamental natural rights.

Whereas a statist (i.e. someone who is not an anarchist) would basically always concede that there are limits on rights. To use US jurisprudence as an example, even the very pro-2A supreme court justices have ruled that the state has a compelling interest in reducing gun violence and thus is allowed to take guns away from violent felons, etc.

Personally, I take the former position; I think it's better to have a society where property rights (which includes the right of self-ownership i.e. owning your own body) and other natural rights (speech, self defense [technically these are just derived from property rights but I digress]) cannot be infringed upon for any reason. I am very heavily in the minority with that position, and I'm aware of that fact.

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Anyway, switching back to the original topic of censorship of supposed "disinfo", if you don't buy a natural rights argument at all, then from a utilitarian perspective I think it's still a bad idea. In places like Saudi Arabia or Iran, the idea that women should be able to choose what clothing to wear or not wear would be considered harmful to society and worthy of censorship. In Turkey the idea that the Armenian genocide occurred could be considered worthy of censorship. In America the notion that we should not have warrantless wiretapping of all communications between private citizens could be considered dangerous to society, etc etc.

It always starts with a "good" reason. It never ends with one.

It’s slang for anarcho-capitalist/ism everywhere.

You are assuming causality here. You can't know that with associative studies.

All epidemics follow a natural curve where the pathogen initially spreads exponentially, but slows down over time as R(t) decreases due to the increased presence of population immunity. That creates a natural drop-off, and given that mandates and other "public health" responses tend to occur late in the cycle, it gives the impression that the natural drop-off is attributable to the intervention. It's rarely the case that it truly is. (By the way, if you look when they reverted to orange and then yellow the spread did not pick back up, which supports what I'm saying about this just being the natural epidemic curve)

If we want to talk masks specifically, the evidence that outdoors transmission of COVID-19 is rare anyway, and furthermore the purported mechanism of action of masks only works if (a) large respiratory droplets are the primary transmission mechanism as supposed to aerosol spread, and (b) people follow rigorous protocols to avoid contamination of the mask or from the mask. (b) is certainly not true, and (a) is likely not true when you look at the overall evidence of how viral spread (and specifically SARS-CoV-2) spread occurs.

Indeed, if the primary transmission mechanism is aerosol, masking could and likely would worsen transmission. The logic is pretty simple: masked individuals breathe more deeply to get the same amount of oxygen as an unmasked individual (this has been shown in numerous studies due to the local co2 buildup), meaning masked individuals move a greater net volume of air. Given masks cannot filter out aerosols, that greater volume of air will translate to worsened spread. This is made worse by the fact that when speaking to another individual, you have to speak louder for them to hear you through the mask.

(Sticking with the aerosol reasoning, there is one possible tiny benefit which is the masks still do alter the path of the aerosol; it smokes out and around the mask wearer rather than it being as directed as unmasked aerosol. But it's a very minor effect at best. You can look at any of the many videos of someone hitting a vape and then exhaling out of their cloth mask/surgical mask/bandana and you'll see what I mean)

So, in conclusion, no it's really not as simple as you're alleging, and this type of tenuous speculative post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning is all too common these days unfortunately.

The real distinction here is mechanism of action. Psilocybin helps fix psychoemotional problems in an enduring sense. You take one, or three, doses and your personality and self-understanding are permanently altered.

Alcohol works acutely. So I totally agree the term therapeutic is an arbitrary label; all drugs have effects and thus can be therapeutic for condition X and deleterious for condition Y. But worth noting that psilocybin and MDMA produce enduring benefits whereas alcohol appears not to.

For suckers and losers, there is an e-mail that has been verified that confirmed that due to weather Trump never made the visit. The story was also denied by Bolton who is very anti-trump.

Perhaps the term "the authoritarian left" or "the totalitarian left" would fit a bit better. I think in context their point is very clear though.

No mainstream publication has been willing to do so.

And IMO, that should be seen as an indictment of the state of the modern corporate press, as opposed to an indication that the story lacks veracity.

As we've seen repeatedly over the last four years, the mainstream media is happy to amplify absurd stories - the Trump "suckers and losers" story which was quickly debunked, the entire Russia Collusion narrative, etc - if it serves their own interests.

So to view what is reported in the mainstream media as the barometer of what is true is to commit an enormous error.

> What do you think is more probable. That every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong, while the one publication is in the right. Or that maybe, just maybe, it's the other way around and NYP published something that has not been well vetted?

Great thought exercise. I'm happy to inform you that I have actually already considered both scenarios and am confident that it really is this:

> every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong

If you look back at the media in the last four years that shouldn't be as surprising as you are implying.

Although I take issue with "every single journalist", since the point of Greenwald's piece, among others, is that even if one journalist wants to tell the truth, they will be suppressed.

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To go more concrete here though, are you specifically claim that the materials are not real, or that the story of how they were acquired is false? The former is absolutely undeniable; the latter is up for debate but I personally don't even think the laptop repair shop story is fabricated.

I personally watched (part of) the video of Hunter Biden smoking crack while receiving a footjob, so unless you think it's a body double or a deepfake there is no doubt in my mind that these documents are real. Furthermore the big smoking gun is the financial documents which should be trivially easy for a journalist to debunk. So if you want to question how the materials are acquired, go ahead, but the documents themselves are real, and they show very questionable business dealings in China, Ukraine, and Russia.

BTW, the existence for years now of the Russia Collusion hoax - namely, the debunked notion that Trump is a vassal of Vladimir Putin and directly colluded with Russia to win the US election - should tell us everything we need to know about the intellectual integrity of the corporate press.

It is undeniably not fabricated Russian intelligence. We have:

- e-mails which have been confirmed by the others on the e-mails

- videos of hunter biden engaging in sexual activity while doing hard drugs

- text messages between hunter and various family and associates

- audio tapes of Hunter Biden's voice talking about his Chinese business partner disappearing

- financial documents of the agreement between various parties (Hunter Biden, Bobulinski, and others)

It is so obviously not "fabricated by Russian intelligence". By the way, the original claims of Trump being compromised by Russia have been proven absolutely false - something Greenwald himself has written about. Greenwald is incredibly critical of the democrat establishment for the entire Russia Hoax - and it is a hoax - and he is equally critical of their coverage of the laptop story which is at this point undeniable.

You're propagating disinfo - in the real sense of the word, not the modern Orwellian meaning - with this line of criticism. Because this is a story that has absolutely been vetted, but the issue is all of the left-leaning mainstream media (read: literally everyone except parts of Fox News) have absolutely refused to cover this story.

Do you really believe if the same story were about a member of the Trump family, that NPR would refuse to cover it?

One more point on credibility - we literally have videos, images, text messages, e-mails of which the other recipients have been confirmed - this is all basically undeniable at this point. So the only question is, is the actual story of how the material was obtained (the laptop repair shop) true, or was the material hacked and then they basically used parallel construction to hide the true origins? That's a fine question to ask, but if you think that the material itself is false that's just completely incredible.

It's not nonsense, because you're missing that if you criticize someone who you are allowed to criticize, there is no risk to yourself. It's going against the herd and criticizing someone like Joe Biden that will get you thrown out of the club.

So, if it's a high-profile investigative piece on a senior trump admin official, everyone will applaud you. But as soon as you start investigating the Biden family or, on the other hand, write something positive about Trump & Co, then you'll quickly find yourself out of the club.