[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.

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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.

[palata]

> No, it is irrelevant.

Yes, it is relevant.

Try to think about it for a second: multiple problems can exist in parallel:

1. Some company uses a permissive licence, sees a competitor making a proprietary product from their base, and starts whining. Too bad, they should have used a copyleft licence from the beginning on.

2. Some company makes a nice product. TooBigTech sees it and builds an alternative (be it a fork or from scratch, I don't care). TooBigTech offers it for free (because they can, because they are too big) and capture the market. The original smaller company dies, because they can't offer their product for free. Now TooBigTech can start enshittifying because they own the market, again.

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

If you own the copyright to the whole codebase, of course you can. All those contributors who signed a CLA and are now whining should think about that.

[specialist]

> irrelevant

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

[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.

[motorest]

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

It's more fundamental that that. It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them.

This is not limited to any managed service provided by a random cloud provider. The core reasoning is a corporation identifying end-users who are profiting from a service that directly or indirectly involves a project they release to the public under a FLOSS license. They see people getting paid, and retroactively change terms to coerce them into paying them. The same argument they throw at AWS providing a managed service also applies to any company using their project. How does this make any sense?

[palata]

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

Large companies using their dominant position to compete is not a feature of capitalism. Antitrust laws prevent that. It's just that the US ignores them.

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

This part I agree with: if you build a permissively-licenced project, you don't get to whine when competitors use it in their own proprietary alternatives.

[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.

[nirvdrum]

> They can release new versions with some other license if they get all contributors to agree.

Contributors must sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before a contribution will be merged. The CLA signers gave Elastic the right to change licenses, among others, when they signed the agreement. Consequently, Elastic doesn't need to get individual sign-off from each contributor before changing the project license. The code wasn't based on copyleft license, so there's no compulsion to continue using the same licensing terms for all future distributions. That's a motivating factor for many CLAs. If you made a contribution prior to the introduction of the CLA then things get murkier.

[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

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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.

[zwaps]

They did figure it out. Contributors signed CLA and so their license change was absolutely legal and in line with what everyone agreed upon. When you started using the product, you should have known this.

See what I did there?

[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.