[rank0]

Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters?

Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software):

> On September 16, 2024, the Linux Foundation and Amazon Web Services announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.[15][16] Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation.

OpenSearch is Apache License 2.0. You can do whatever you want to/with it. How are Elastic the good guys in your mind?

[BoorishBears]

Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic.

And they were using an open source piece of software, but scaling it with closed source secret sauce on top of that. The license was saying they'd have to open up their secret sauce or pay, and their response was to leave the table instead.

OpenSearch still lacks tons of really basic functionality from Elastisearch, and watching how far ahead Elasticsearch got as a product shows how much free lunch Amazon was getting... and how much they actually cared about the product when it was time for them to put their money where their mouth was (despite AWS pulling Elastic's yearly revenue every 4 days).

Elasticsearch has generally matured like it has a passionate builder with a vision. They pushed on two major fronts (LLMs and Observability) and managed to execute effectively without letting product quality slip.

Meanwhile OpenSearch is still the place where tickets requesting 3+ year old ES functionality go to die.

-

I'm honestly on the opposite side: how is the hyperscaler offering a strictly inferior product with closed extensions and still managing to eat the main developers' lunches for the sole reason they already have sales pipelines established not the bad guy?

I guess I'm not really someone who believes in infinite scaling rules: something that can work at the individual scale doesn't have to work when hyperscalers do it (like selling hosted clusters)

[motorest]

> Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic.

Irrelevant.

Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services.

That became a big part of their business model as it drove up it's adoption rates and popularity. If Elastic kept things like Elasticsearch proprietary, they would hardly have the same adoption rates.

You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?

[palata]

> You can't have it both ways.

I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place.

The problem is not the open source licence, but rather the fact that TooBigTech can screw the competition whenever they feel like it.

[motorest]

> I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place.

Irrelevant. If you grant a right to everyone under the sun, you do not get to retroactively pull those rights from someone you decided to target.

[palata]

Of course it is relevant. TooBigTech is killing smaller companies just because it is too big.

When there are issues like this ("we made a successful product and someone forked it and it's killing us"), the "someone" is generally a BigTech, not 3 students in a garage. Then people complain about open source working/not working, and forget that the root problem is the monopoly that is screwing them.

[motorest]

> Of course it is relevant.

No, it is irrelevant. Try to think about it for a second. You release a project under a license that grants everyone the right to use it as they see fit, including building a business on it. Everyone starts using the project as they see fit.

Do you believe you now have the right to retroactively pull the license on a whim?

No, you do not.

[growse]

Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.

[nirvdrum]

> Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services.

The original licensing decision was made well before the formation of Elastic the company. Maybe Shay didn't quite give it the full consideration. I don't know him super well, but like most developers starting open source projects, I don't think he has a legal background. I confess to a certain about of naivety, thinking that contributors would adhere to the spirit of contribution rather than the absolute letter of the license. I don't think it's unreasonable to have societal expectations above and beyond the legal requirements.

I've been doing open source for ~25 years and it appears to me there's been a distinct shift in how companies approach open source. I feel like what I started with was almost a eutopic ideal and now I'm expected to just do free support work for companies that don't want to pay anything to anyone. I don't see any problem with devs realizing their mistake or changing their mind and updating the license accordingly. For my part, I used to use ASLv2 for everything and now I default to AGPL.

> You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?

Just like you have no legal obligations above what the license says, they have no legal obligations to make their work available under the license you want. It's open source, so feel free to take the commit from version before the license change. Of course, it turns out it's quite a bit messier to have two incompatible versions floating around, but as long as we're limiting ourselves to legal requirements that's a non-issue.

The most obvious reason these projects get dropped after a license change is because they now use a license that needs to be reviewed. It's a lot easier to justify spending on a new AWS service than it is getting a new license approved. But, that was more or less happening anyway. If you're already on AWS it's easier to add a new service than pay for hosting a service with a third party. I don't particularly fault Elastic for not wanting to be Amazon's R & D arm and support team.

We have a lot of systems and infrastructure in place that only mostly work because both parties hold up their own end of an unspoken agreement. Large tech companies have decided they can save money by breaking breaking away from that and just sticking to the letter of the license text. Legally, they have that right, but the other parties have predictably responded. I think what it really shows is our licenses don't fit all scenarios. Maybe I'm okay with individuals and companies with a market cap < $1T using the software under terms akin to open source but don't want to be a de facto employee for a large company reselling my software. We're well past the point of open source being about software freedom.

Most of these projects start off as a developer choosing a license without having the legal background to truly assess it and then they run into an 800 lbs. gorilla with loads of in-house counsel. Blaming them for not thinking it all the way through or realizing the implication of their license choice seems to me counter-productive. Okay, so they made a mistake. What now? They don't want to continue working under the framework where they feel being taken advantage of. I don't think they should be obligated to continue doing so because all of the non-Amazon folks don't want to incur the headache of forking. I'd love to see some of that ire aimed at the company willing to break the illusion to make some extra money than the folks that have freely given away their work for years.

[motorest]

> The original licensing decision was made well before the formation of Elastic the company.

Yes. Those are the terms the software has been distributed with from the inception.

No corporation has the right to pull those rights from end-users, no matter how profitable your shakedown scheme would be.

[jamespo]

Well they obviously do have the rights, are you saying they broke the law?

[motorest]

> Well they obviously do have the rights, are you saying they broke the law?

No, they do not. They can release new versions with some other license if they get all contributors to agree. They absolutely cannot pull the FLOSS licenses from existing releases.

[BoorishBears]

> Irrelevant.

You keep spamming this to anyone who replies to you: maybe your take is the irrelevant since it didn't stop them from pulling the rug in the first place?

> people drop these projects the moment

Noisy people always proclaim that they will, and hyperscalers gleefully market their forks... meanwhile it's mostly hyperscaler customers that they weren't going to get in the first place that actually move.

Elasticsearch was source available for 4 years and still saw massive growth.

People tried to spin Redis db-engine rankings dropping as being due to Valkey, but their trendline doesn't seem to have been affected at all by the change: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/Redis

-

But to be more direct, I'm honestly unimpressed with this brand of reductionism.

It's super easy to keep yelling IRRELEVANT THEY WERE RUNNING AN OPEN LIBRARY AND SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED SOMEONE TO SHOW UP WITH A HAULER TO TAKE ALL THE BOOKS, but it's not useful.

I'd also rather have a software ecosystem that uses targeted defenses to counter hyperscalers (which are more like an invasive species) than one that throws up its hands at them.

For anything that isn't Linux-scale, the alternative is that most of the well funded development ends up being from hyperscalers and that just concentrates their power.

[mola]

Yes, anti trust rules should have stopped amazon. But they didn't, this directly hurts open source.

I don't think elastic would've tried the license change because of competition using the open source.

The problem is Amazon, not elastic that's trying to survive.

[chuckadams]

> Yes, anti trust rules should have stopped amazon

Which ones, specifically?

[motorest]

> Yes, anti trust rules should have stopped amazon. But they didn't, this directly hurts open source.

What absurd, twisted logic. No, it does not affect open source. What are you talking about?

> The problem is Amazon, not elastic that's trying to survive.

No, the problem is Elastic trying to coerce end-users to pay them for using FLOSS projects. It makes absolutely no difference if AWS provides a managed service or if I run Elasticsearch in a AWS EC2 instance I pay for.

[matt-p]

So how should the maintainers eat? Or there should be none? Should they be Amazon employees?

[motorest]

> So how should the maintainers eat?

If a corporation wants to build a business model around FLOSS, it's their responsibility to figure out how to do that. What they cannot do is abuse FLOSS licenses to pull bait-and-switch on their userbase to coerce them to meet their revenue targets.

[growse]

Personally, as an un-paid OSS maintainer, I chose to go get a job. Other's might choose different paths.

[geodel]

They can create business with closed source software. No one demanded of them to create Apache License software.

[palata]

> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters?

The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition.

That would be the point of antitrust, I guess? I mean if regulations were actually enforced.

[growse]

This is not a suddenly emerging "gotcha".

This risk has always existed. It existed when they chose to open source it in the first place.

Time and time again we see the lesson being learned the hard way that "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".

[larodi]

> "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".

perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some very outspoken open-source proponents do not open-source their core business components. I can understand they do it in order to exist as a company, as busineses, but I don't understand why they have to endure being shamed for staying closed-source, while all their stack is open. many such companies exist.

and let's add to this all the fact that everything released in 2025 as open-source gets slurped by LLMs for training. so, essentially, you feed bro's models breakfast with your open-source, like it or not. in the very near future we'll be able to perhaps prompt a 'retell' of Redis which is both the same software, but written so that it is not.

in essence there seems to be now little reason to open-source anything at all, and particularly if this is a core-business logic. open-source if you can outpace everybody else (with tech), or else you shouldn't care about the revenue.

[miki123211]

A sufficiently capable LLM might be good enough to do cleanroom design on its own, with little to no human assistance. That would destroy the entire idea of copyright as it exists for software.

You need one agent that can write a complete specification of any piece of software, either just by using it and inferring how it works, or by reverse engineering if not prohibited by the license. You then have a lawyer in the middle (human or LLM) review it, removing any bits that are copyrighted. You then need another agent that can re-implement that spec. You just made a perfectly legal clone.

Cleanroom design is a well-established precedent in the US, and has been used before, just with teams of humans instead of LLMs.

I think some companies will be completely unaffected by this, as either the behavior of their code can't easily be infered just from API calls, or because their value actually lies in users / data / business relationships, not the code directly. Stripe would be my go-to example, you can't just reverse-engineer all their optimizations and antifraud models just by getting a developer API key and calling their API endpoints. They also have a lot of relationships with banks and other institutions, which are arguably just as important to their business as their code. Instagram, Uber or Amazon also fall into this bucket somewhat.

[dcow]

Humans can also do that, they’re just slower and presumably more expensive.

[eek2121]

Except that LLMs themselves are close to being killed off for the lack of clean room implementations themselves, at least here in the U.S.

[palata]

One can hope, but I don't think it will happen.

[bloomburger]

??????

[palata]

I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem.

I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Permissive don't protect the users in the first place, so...

[pbronez]

So who’s gonna sue an AI company asserting that all code they produce is GPL due to being trained on GPL code?

[growse]

How is training a model on GPL code and then having it write code any different to having a human read GPL code and then write code?

Unless there's a specific copyright claim over a specific piece of code that was copied and published, it's hard to see how the GPL has any relevance.

[palata]

I feel like nobody cares. It sucks, I know. Like climate change, biodiversity loss, the energy crisis.

Feels like we're pretty much screwed. Doesn't mean it's not a problem.

[motorest]

> I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem.

Why do you believe this is a problem? I mean, to believe that you first need to believe that having access to the source code is somehow a problem.

> I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences.

Nonsense.

At most, the problem lies in people ignoring what rights a FLOSS license grants to end users, and then feigning surprise when end users use their software just as the FLOSS license intended.

Also a telltale sign is the fact that these blind criticisms single out very precise corporations. Apparently they have absolutely no issue if any other cloud provider sells managed services. They single out AWS but completely ignore the fact that the organization behind ValKey includes the likes of Google, Ericsson, and even Oracle of all things. Somehow only AWS is the problem.

[palata]

> I mean, to believe that you first need to believe that having access to the source code is somehow a problem.

How in the world did you get there from what I said? Open source code has a licence that says what the copyright owner allows or not. LLMs are laundering machine in the sense that they allow anybody to just ignore licences and copyright in all code (even proprietary code: if you manage to train on the code of Windows without getting caught, you're good).

> At most, the problem lies in people ignoring what rights a FLOSS license grants to end users

Once it's been used to train an LLM, there is no right anymore. The licence, copyright, all that is worthless.

> Also a telltale sign is the fact that these blind criticisms [...]

No clue what you are talking about here.

[necovek]

AI companies have not shied away from slurping anything available with complete disregard for the licensing of the material.

As such, code available is as much a boon to them as open source.

[palata]

And leaked proprietary code.

[vin047]

This is exactly what the AGPL was made to combat against. But open source devs still choose more permissive licenses first - presumably to attract corporate clients to use their product (and because devs are suckers to large corporate interests)

[palata]

This. They choose a permissive licence, proudly advertise it ("use us instead of our competitor because they are copyleft and we are not"), and then come whining when other competitors benefit from the very fact that they chose a permissive licence.

[_msw_]

There are different FOSS communities that hold different values. I come from the copyleft camp because I want to advance Software Freedom objectives for end-users. Others are more interested in advancing software developer freedom, and they find the obligations that are designed to advance end-user rights are unduly burdensome to the software developer. Articles like the one on the FreeBSD website [1] explain why they take a different position

I choose to believe that both of these sub-communities of the larger FOSS community are principled in their beliefs. I don’t see whining from FreeBSD folks about competitors, or for-profit companies using all the permissions they give with their choice of license.

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/

[palata]

> I don’t see whining from FreeBSD folks about competitors

Sure! Then that's all good! I have nothing against the use of permissive licences (though I am on the copyleft camp too, obviously). Or put it in the public domain.

My problem is with those who do and then whine about it.

[palata]

> This risk has always existed.

Doesn't mean it was not a problem.

[growse]

The solution to the old problem of "what if someone uses my code to compete with me" is "don't open source your code".

This isn't complicated. It's trade secrets 101.

I'm being disingenuous though. Of course the bait-and-switch merchants know this, they're just banking on getting enough product momentum off the free labour of others before they cash in. That's the plan all along.

[plufz]

I think that is a little unfair. I don't know anything about the companies behind Redis and Elastic. But another possibility is that they want to make a good open source product and create some sort of business around it and find it difficult to make a waterproof moat. I'm sure that there are many other open source companies with the same basic strategy that are just more lucky, e.g. don't get AWS as competition.

[motorest]

> The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition.

Everyone can fork any FLOSS project. That's by design. There are also no restrictions on random people selling services directly or indirectly using said FLOSS projects.

If a corporation changes their mind and decide it was a mistake for them to release software as FLOSS, they have the right to do what Redis just did. What they can't do is feign ignorance or do a bait-and-switch to try to coerce their userbase to cough up licensing fees for FLOSS projects.

[palata]

> Everyone can fork any FLOSS project

But everyone is not in a position where they can put a ton of resources into a project in order to crush the competition and maintain their monopoly.

Which is why I said that the problem is the fact that Amazon is in this position, not the licence.

[eek2121]

IMO intent is everything.

Selling at a loss isn’t bad. Selling at a loss to build marketshare or kill competition usually is.

The issue is that previous companies usually use this aspect to build marketshare, so there is no other way to compete. Other tactics include lobbying, patent bullying, etc.

Shoot, as bad as Uber is, just look at how taxis in major cities were formed.

Then look at labor laws in other countries.

Under the current legal/political structure for any modern country, there is no winning without exploitation, which is why I refuse to start my own business.

[7952]

Do AWS really sell things at a loss?

[immibis]

No - that's why their pricing is so detailed and why their services have few limits you can't request them to increase.

They can afford to maintain a better branch of Elastic Search or Redis or so on, an drive those companies out of business by the virtue of efficient free market competition. At which point they'll make sure their branch is only useful on their servers, perhaps by adding dependencies on all their internal microservices - so technically they released the code but you can only run it if you're Amazon.

[flaminHotSpeedo]

> At which point they'll make sure their branch is only useful on their server

Can you think of any examples where they've done that? They certainly could, but I can't think of any times they have actually rug-pulled like that, and the motive to do so seems tenuous too. In order for Amazon to do something like this they would need established market dominance, as well as a belief that some new player will hurt their market share enough to justify alienating the FOSS community.

[palata]

Given what Amazon routinely does, this doesn't seem crazy at all. Just look at one of their countless anti-competitive behaviours.

[palata]

Sorry, I didn't want to imply that they do. This would be illegal as per antitrust regulations.

What I wanted to say is that AWS using a permissively-licenced project is fine. The project should have thought about the licence beforehand and started with copyleft from the beginning on. Their problem now.

But a more general problem I see is that even if you use a copyleft license for your project, you have the risk to be crushed by anti-competitive behaviours coming from TooBigTech. It's not rare, they do that all the time and the US doesn't enforce anything. And when others (like the EU) try to do it, the US put pressure because they defend their US TooBigTech.

The latter is not a model or licencing issue, it's an antitrust issue. Now Amazon could compete with Redis without doing it illegaly, but they can only because they are so big. And the fact that they are so big is related to the lack of antitrust enforcement (it's documented, TooBigTech have all abused their dominance forever).

[redditor98654]

Not really. I have done multiple AWS pricing and costing exercises while launching services and there was never a direction from the VP to sell it lower than what it costs to build and operate. Cost to build and operate includes everything from salaries, infrastructure and many other line items. And usually things are projected 3-5 years into the future and P&L analysis must show that eventually the service will make a profit. It does make some assumptions about minimum customer adoption for the profit margins to materialize which eventually becomes part of the product and sales teams goals.

The costing model does allow losses to be incurred in the initial years because building the thing is more expensive at first but then it should settle down and revenue should outpace expenses.

What can happen with these open source products being launched as a service is that that initial cost can be cut down by as much as 50-75% but rarely more than that because you still need to build all the surrounding infrastructure, documentation, UI. It still gives AWS an advantage by relying on an existing body of work they can start with where many problems have been thought through and solved. Also you will likely get a good product roadmap skeleton ready to be prioritized which otherwise can be a huge time sink.

In a nutshell, no. AWS won’t sell a service at a loss (there are exceptions of course) but there is room to incur a loss at the beginning but it is priced to eventually turn a profit. Whether that happens for every service in reality is a different story.

[mkhalil]

Most (all?) open source licenses allow you to sell hosted clusters. They offered a hosted solution well before they changed its license. You can also fork it; but depending on the license, you might need to open-source any fork.

: I don't know of any open source license ones that don't allow someone to sell hosted cluster. Even AGPL, which is copyleft, allows it; so long as the hosted version is either: the same as the open-source version, or it's version is also open-sourced.

[zwaps]

Nobody knows what the AGPL actually says, since it has not been determined sufficiently in court (at least in the EU) which is why the license is blacklisted by most companies.

If you want corporate adoption except AWS, you still cannot use AGPL.

I feel like there should be a license that doesn’t allow hyperscalers alone to fork without releasing source while being palatable to smaller companies

[adrr]

It’s a copyright license not a EULA. Grants rights for copying and can’t put restrictions on the using part.

[adastra22]

> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters?

Is this sarcasm?

[rank0]

Not at all. Free information is free information.

[adastra22]

Interesting that you use the word "free." Long before there was open-source, it was called "free software" and the restrictions on use that required derivative software to give back their changes was the entire point.

[rank0]

Except for all the instances where thats not the point. People of every community just love to gatekeep.