[btinker]

> In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all of its good connotations) it once was.

This. It is too bad they couldn't have satisfactory financial success building on open source and it is their right and perfectly fine to switch to a different model, but their justification as well as the SSPL dual licensing muddle the water unnecessarily.

At least the blogpost clearly states it is no longer open source, but then it goes "it's just definition, we're actually totally free and open, just, you know, not OSI free and open". SSPL software is not free software, it is not FOSS. Calling it "free and open software" is misleading at best.

[pjmlp]

Basically shareware with source available, we have come full circle.

[kemitchell]

I don't have any problem calling SSPL software "open source". Or AGPL software, for that matter. What's not free or open about applying copyleft to network services?

[rpdillon]

The license discriminates based on field of endeavor, invoking additional constraints on the basis of what you use the software for.

The legal team for Fedora expressed this well, I think:

> It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users. Additionally, it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt towards commercial users of software under that license. To consider the SSPL to be "Free" or "Open Source" causes that shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem, even though none of them carry that risk.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]...

I think it is this discrimination that makes in not as free or as open as AGPL and GPL.

[kemitchell]

The field-of-endeavor and persons-or-groups discrimination arguments don't stand up. They just sound nice if you want to knock the license.

If SSPL discriminates against a "field of endeavor" that is making proprietary software, or against "persons or groups" that are proprietary software developers, all copyleft licenses do. That was the point. Here's Richard Stallman on the GPL:

> I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

The quote from Fedora perfectly encapsulates the difference between the OSI review process as people perceive it and the OSI review process as it really was. Are we judging license terms, or what we believe to have been in the secret heart of the company that wrote them? What happens when someone else uses the license, as when independent hackers choose GPL, or startups choose AGPL?

Commercial software makers have plenty to fear from GPL, AGPL, and other open source copyleft licenses, because so many of their business models entail slurping up other people's open code, but not sharing their own. Those licenses prohibit building proprietary software with open code, just not if you happen to "compose" a service with network API calls, rather than build a program by copying code snippets, using frameworks, and linking libraries.