Comment by jrochkind1
4 years ago
Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?
4 years ago
Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?
This can't happen because Lucene is controlled by the ASF, not a commercial entity.
Allowing one of various foundations to take control of an open source project, can be beneficial for the community as its licensing is unlikely to change in the future. However it does present challenges for any future commercialization.
A good example of this is Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Kafka. LinkedIn, where Kafka was originally developed, transferred control of Kafka to the ASF. As the original developers, the Confluent team still has a lot of influence and contributes a lot of code to Kafka, but they do not wield absolute control. While this has presented some challenges to build a Kafka-centric business, and even led to them creating their own Kafka fork ("Confluent Server") they have still been successful. The community also has long-term confidence in the Kafka's license.
They would have to triple-quintuple-backflip-down on "open." So, maybe? It depends on how much value is being created besides the code, in squishier parts of the business like service, support, pricing models, marketing, and so on.
But it's moot, since Apache Lucene is part of the Apache Software Foundation and has much stronger promises about its licensing and governance. Which is not a small reason why Lucene is the de facto standard for search technology.
Yeah. It just seems to say something if the license they are insisting is the "spirit of open source" that everyone downstream of them should be okay with... they are counting on not having to deal with upstream...
Elastic contributed to Lucene. (They have committers as PMCs.)
If Lucene had adopted SSPL they would have been forced to fork. But basically nothing really interesting happens at the Lucene level for ES anymore. (Sure, there's always a lot to speed up, optimize, etc. But anyone who buys ES needs the fancy stuff, security/audit/management, not a few percent more RAM efficiency.)
Sorry, but this is not true at all.
Some of the biggest changes within ES come from Lucene, like _massive_ reduction in memory footprint, enabling ES to use cases not even possible before.