[cutemonster]

> This was an entirely foreseeable consequence

I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out.

Especially not "entirely foreseeable."

There's a cognitive bias called "hindsight biasy", namely "the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

I agree with you about AGPL.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out.

The GPL exists because of the problem of other people taking your code and hiding it in their products, placing you at a disadvantage.

The AGPL exists to extend that protection regarding SAAS.

According to Wikipedia, the AGPL is from 2007, and Elasticsearch started 4 years later.

I disagree that you need hindsight not to be surprised by how Elasticsearch was used by e.g. Amazon.

[necovek]

GPL exists because nobody can (should?) stop users from modifying software they use (at the very least, on the machine level) and such modifying should neither be illegal nor hard (thus source code).

The "sharing" bit is on top, and only comes out if you distribute your changes too. AGPL fixes the flaw where "users" don't really get a copy of the software they are using distributed to them in full (eg. only part of it with JS in the browser, but backend stuff is hidden).

So the focus point of GPL is use of the software (thus users), not writing of it (developers). Developers embrace it because they are simultaneously users of the software written by others, and they are best positioned to make the most out of those liberties ("standing on the shoulders of giants").

[necovek]

You are right: none of it was foreseeable, but rather, an expected outcome.

In case of success, which Elastic has certainly achieved with ElasticSearch, it is fully expected that other companies will jump in on the bandwagon and try to profit off of it too! And as a company, you hope for success, or rather, that to play out, but just that you'd be the go-to for earning the most off the product you created. While not foreseeable, it is not unexpected that you might not be the one to profit most from your product, and you should plan to profit enough! Where it gets complicated is that nobody expects to earn orders of magnitude less from a product they created than others relying on it.

What they did not foresee was that one of those companies would be The Cloud Provider, thus minimizing their value proposition since Amazon can throw significant resources at it, possibly even greater than Elastic themselves. One could argue that Amazon abused their monopolistic position in cloud providing to offer a bundled ElasticSearch experience that Elastic could never compete with. Even if they developed an alternative in-house product, it looks exactly the same as Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day.

Even today, if you are willing to develop an open source or free software product, if you get successful enough, you are likely to be an exploitation target of a megacorp. Companies always have an option to relicense in-house written code, and any code submitted by signatories of an appropriate contributor license agreement (CLA).

Basically, I agree it wasn't nice of Amazon, and that it wasn't foreseeable, but it ultimately wasn't unexpected either. To me, this is monopolistic behaviour that should be treated as such.

This also raises another interesting question: if AGPL is an appropriate solution, why did Elastic not relicense under it today? (I am sure they answered this very question when they published their original license, so it's mostly rethorical)

[sfifs]

> Where it gets complicated is that nobody expects to earn orders of magnitude less from a product they created than others relying on it.

And this is where the problem basically is. The core philosophy of open source licensing is that the creators who use it don't particularly care beyond compliance with the terms of the licenses (eg. Source distribution for copy left licenses)

If it turns out you *do* in fact care, then Open Source licenses are not a good fit for you. If you still go ahead release under Open Source and then change later, don't be surprised to be called out for bait and switch manipulation.

[dragonwriter]

> I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out.

The long-term commercial advantage in Free Software being for the largest established players with revenue mechanisms centered around services rather than selling software licenses was widely recognized, with many observers independently coming to the conclusion, from at least the mid-1990s.