Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES.
In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people
contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license.
Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends.
The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos.
Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea.
The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.
Indeed, BSD projects have always provided corporations with free labor.
The BSD operating systems themselves have been largely spared from hostile forks because they are too large and no corporation wants to maintain a fork, macOS being the obvious counterexample. But even macOS cannot eclipse FreeBSD.
Smaller projects should be wary. The should start with AGPL and resist efforts coming from corporations or other open source projects to strongarm them into downgrading the license to BSD or MIT.
Especially when such other projects have convoluted licenses themselves that are only declared open source by fiat due to their historical importance at some point.
"At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring?"
Good lord - the views on HN are wild. I'm aging myself, but open source licensing (used) to not be that complicated.
The principles of open source are being violated by Elastic not AWS - just so we are clear. That is not so complicated.
If Elastic wants to make it so contributors to the software have FEWER rights than Elastic, that is fine, but that is not open source.
The principles of open source are normally that if I contribute to something that is open source licensed, that I can then use the code in the same way as anyone else. That includes hosting it for myself, doing a small consulting practice to build out some hosting for others, doing shared service hosting etc etc.
This is a live view of a new generation learning about the difficulties of market competition.
We're seeing this pattern in several contexts in the industry: Rather than compete, which requires listening and responding to customers (talking to people is hard), they prefer a magic wand (a new license, or regulation or something perceived to be "easy") to force large successful companies (which they see as immutable fixtures that can never be defeated) to break up or neutered so that smaller entrants can succeed.
"Be careful what you wish for". Smaller entrants aren't necessarily more ethical nor do they offer a better service than large incumbents. It really varies.
Elastic is a public company worth 15B dollars now. Not the underdog.
> at what threshold should someone ... stop caring
You’re not caring about OSS, but about keeping your turf and “ownership” of a product that is not yours. There really is no question here that Elastic is the one doing the “corporation” move and not the other way around.
> to undermine the business that was setup to sustain it
Successful OSS don’t need one business to sustain them, they rely on the combined efforts of their users - including Amazon. They have no reason to undermine a project that makes them money.
If you’re simply thinking of size, consider Amazon is a 500x more diversified business. I doubt they pull anywhere near as much revenue as Elastic does (half a billion/year) from their Elasticsearch hosting alone. Apples and oranges.
I was thinking in terms of AWS, which while more diversified has lock-in, and someone who's already using AWS is probably never going to use ES own cloud hosting
Exactly - I once used a more full stack provider, and we checked to make sure their stack was open source for key areas we spent time on, so if we wanted to switch to another HOSTED provider, all our config files, etc etc would still work - but the other providers also HOSTED this software - that wasn't considered a violation by anyone. This was before the days of the mega providers like AWS - where now I think you just have to accept lock-in - but AWS has never raised rates so it's not as scary as doing an oracle lock-in as an example.
In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...