[kelnage]

Elastic, like others at the time, have used open source to their advantage - to start. The obvious one is that it is built around the Apache Lucene, and I have no doubt that this is one of the reasons ES ended up being initially released under the Apache license.

Secondly, being released under a permissive open source license definitely helped with its adoption. I was working as a senior developer in a UK Government department in 2013 and we had need for a full-text search engine for a project - and even before v1, ES was a contender, and it was eventually selected once v1 was released. This was largely due to a) ease of set-up/use and b) it’s release under an open source license. If it had been under AGPL, would we have still used it? Yes, probably - our specific use case wouldn’t have been affected by such a license, and the dept. was relatively open to more complex OSS licenses - but I have worked for several other orgs. where even just the AGPL would have resulted in a hard “no”.

Thirdly, ES has had contributions from a wide range of people. I honestly don’t know how I’d even begin to evaluate how much value ES has got from community contributions, but I feel it’s likely to be greater than the costs of managing those contributions.

But of course eventually Elastic got funding and had shareholders to placate. I don’t really have much sympathy for them about this conflict - their early choices were in part clearly made to maximise their value, and they decided to cash in on that value at a later date - the fact that those decisions had implications for their value should have been somewhat obvious to any investor who did any due diligence. I’m still not entirely convinced that the open source model is antithetical to commercialisation, but I think it does highlight how early decisions around OSS licensing can affect such processes.

[jka]

I keep hearing the AGPL-makes-corporations-wince argument, and I'm curious: what are the reasons given?

Does the AGPL really place such burdens on the organization such that the benefits of a locked-open, community-guaranteed (albeit popularity not guaranteed) technology aren't worthwhile?

Or is it kind of a cargo-culting and cultural-norms phenomenon where people don't use AGPL projects because they've heard that other people don't use them, thus continuing the cycle?

[__app_dev__]

I the early 2000's to mid 2010's I worked at an Architecture Firm (Buildings not Software) and at the time and likely now all plotters (large printers) depend on a software called Ghostscript. It's AGPL which prevents it from being bundled with any other software unless you negotiate a very expensive contract with their sales people.

If a company risks installing it or supporting it company wide then your risk lawsuit and having your business shutdown. The work-around is that for every user's computer IT must manually install the driver (a windows DLL file).

To me if I see AGPL it makes me think that it's likely a predatory business with good lawyers; and for this reason I would stay away from it even on personal projects unless there is no alternative.

[jka]

Thank you. For me the AGPL is at the complete other end of the spectrum: it's a stake in the ground to say "this software must be allowed to progress", even if the originating entity ceases to exist.

As I'll mention in a sibling thread, I think that lawyers can be extremely risk averse in software licensing (it's their professional incentive structure) and that is my guess where this cultural meme about AGPL comes from.

[kelnage]

In one of the of the organisations I mentioned, they had a strict policy against using any GPL dependencies, let alone the AGPL. I tried discussing this with the legal policy person but they were quite resolute - they feared it’s use could “infect” our code and therefore must be avoided.

I frankly doubt there’s any sort of cost-benefit analysis being done here. Certainly in my experience it was much more driven by legal uncertainty and risk-aversion.

[jka]

Thanks - yep, that matches my rough understanding of the view from the ground too.

Statisticians and scientists sometimes talk about 'type 1' errors and 'type 2' errors - false positives and false negatives. I can rarely remember which is which, but I think that generally, software license/contract legal professionals never want to advise a client about something that later turns out to be a liability.

That's fine, because it protects their firm's reputation, and it maintains the client's trust (which needs to be strong). But I think that in the context of software licenses, this has led to an overly strong aversion (and indeed self-replicating idea) about the AGPL and other copyleft licenses.

(in the context of cost-benefit, it's hard to justify the upside from using and helping contribute towards a software commons, but I think it can be significant, perhaps depending on project context and popularity)