Comment by virgilp
4 years ago
That is not entirely true, of course. Not if you don’t want to pay. As proof - just look at Amazon, they can’t (that’s why they forked it).
4 years ago
That is not entirely true, of course. Not if you don’t want to pay. As proof - just look at Amazon, they can’t (that’s why they forked it).
I don't think it's the freedom to run it anywhere. It's the freedom to run it anywhere and make changes to it that you don't contribute back:
1. Amazon wants to make private changes to the management layer for their cloud offering and not share those.
2. ES doesn't want that, so the 7.11+ license restricts it.
3. Amazon doesn't want to have to explain to their customers why their ES offering is stuck on v7.10, so they're changing the name of it.
4. Elastic was really hoping this wouldn't happen, but they overestimated the value of their brand and Amazon called their bluff.
So yeah, nominally OpenSearch is unrestricted, but realistically few other entities are in a position to make or benefit from the private modifications Amazon will be making. For us normal people, ES and OS are equivalent today, so it's more about how they're going to diverge over time in terms of fixes, features, whatever.
The SSPL directly prohibits offering the software as a service without releasing the source code of your entire operation regardless of if you change it or not:
> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge...
> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.
AKA someone must be able to create aws.example.com if aws uses SSPL code. Not exactly the 'freedom to run it anywhere'.
https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license....
Doesn't a lot of that hinge on what the "service" is? Like, if I run some generic knowledgebase website and use my own ES installation to provide user-facing search, does Elastic want to see my Ansible scripts? Or just the ones related to the search function?
If this interpretation holds, I feel like it could be a pretty big problem for companies like GitLab, who not only have deep integration with ElasticSearch, but offer it as a premium-tier feature:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/elasticsearch.html
Maybe this really is just a cash grab from the Elastic side, like, "it's too easy to self-host rather than paying for our SaaS offering, so now you need to pay us for many common self-hosting use cases also."
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Great point. SSPL is basically the open source equivalent of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” In order to protect their IP from being “taken away” because of their original licensing decision, they basically chose a new license that’s effectively no longer open source (although it is “source available”).
Err, SSPL which Elasticsearch is licensed under isn't AGPL - it's a viral, proprietary license - not quite the copyleft we'd want if we wanted a fair playing field between all actors working on it.
If you think this is about Elastic caring about openness and freedom, ask yourself why they don't drop the CLA for a DCO and let themselves be beholden to the same terms
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It's a viral open source license, it literally requires open sourcing code, there's nothing proprietary about it except that we allow a council of elitist snots to decide what is and isn't Open Source(TM), and they have decided Google and Amazon support is more important than viable businesses which are building open source businesses.
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