ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. From the ES perspective, their FOSS contributions were done in good faith which basically boil down to, "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free".
AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.
You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate.
Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.
>What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end.
Gaps in open source licensing? The license Elastic chose explicitly allows anyone to take the code, run it as they wish, and not contribute anything back. There are other FOSS licenses that are slightly more strict about this; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. And then they could have used a proprietary license from the start if they didn't want others competing with them at all using their code.
Launching a competing offering using FOSS that someone else wrote is nothing new at all though. Red Hat built their business around subscriptions for and support of free software, much of which they wrote, but they hardly had exclusivity over the distribution (see CentOS and all the providers offering it) or the software they wrote. (It's all free software after all!)
> they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example.
So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close?
EDIT: I do think it's fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is worse than the AGPL, but I do think it's important to point out that it's possible to believe in open source licenses and to think that the way AWS uses software violates the spirit of open source. The people who work on GNU seem to think that!
>So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close?
The gap in that case was that the GPL was not sufficient to ensure that software remain free software when companies started using SaaS for software that previously would have been run locally. SaaS was in effect a workaround for the GPL's distribution requirement (enabling companies to avoid giving the software's users the freedoms associated with free software), so the AGPL was created for software that was meant to run on a server.
This is different: the point of contention here is not that Elastic's software was being made proprietary (they could have easily used the AGPL if that was their concern, the AGPLv3 predates the first Elasticsearch release by three years) but that Amazon is using their software to compete with them. That's something that's pretty fundamental to both free software:
>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
...and open source:
>The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Freedom 0 is a feature, not a bug! It may be a "gap" in Elastic's business model, but it's certainly not a gap in FOSS licenses - the freedom to use the software as you wish is a pretty core value of free software.
Now that said, I do think that taking FOSS and making it proprietary certainly does violate the spirit of free software. Amazon doesn't seem to have done that here, though - their fork is under the Apache 2 license.
Amazon doesn't need to use a proprietary license, the product they have built around Elasticsearch is itself proprietary. They have produced and are selling Elasticsearch-as-a-service for their AWS environment.
I see it as “there are a variety of licenses from which to choose, depending on your goals”. BSD, Apache, and MIT all represent different points in space, as do GPL and AGPL.
When I choose Apache or MIT, I do so for a reason and if you or Amazon use code in compliance with that license, I’m happy and you’re not “exploiting a gap” but rather “complying with the terms I offered”.
Fully agree with this. Free is free, you could always argue that there is "a spirit to open source"; but as with everything there's always going to be people exploiting and using it, that comes with the free.
To me it boils down to if you think that it's worth it: whenever I put MIT or Apache 2.0 on my public Github projects, I don't mind anyone going out making millions on them. Other side of the coin; if I make millions on some obscure library I found on Github with an MIT license, I do not expect them to be outraged about it.
If you do not think it's worth it, as you said there are a range of other licenses out there. I love the notion of human knowledge being free and available to all to the fullest extent, I think it will drive (and has driven) immense value for humankind.
People also seem to miss a point when trying to invoke the "Spirit of the Open Source License": The only reason why Elastic is changing their license is because they want to profit from it. So, isn't that exactly against the "Spirit of Open Source License"? If they truly cared about that, they should be angry about it at all.
Choosing sides here seems to be choosing between two profit seeking companies. Why, as a developer, you should take a side?
I as a developer take the side that allows me to use the open source code as I see fit based on the license terms provided. Elastic initially chose a license which would allow them to capture more of the market/mind space of developers and now that they've accomplished that they want to fully monetize those developers.
It's worth keeping in mind that we don't always know which projects will truly become successful. The precursor to Elasticsearch, Compass, wasn't hugely popular. When I started looking hard at Elasticsearch, with plans to actually use it, I had to spend a lot of time explaining why I didn't want to use Solr, which was much more popular at the time.
In my opinion, the bottom line is this: if Amazon's exploitative behavior is continues then we're going to see more and more open source products shift towards janky-kind-of-open-source or entirely closed licenses. Small or experimental projects will have open and permissive licenses, their authors will have plans for shifting licenses should the product become really successful.
I think it marks the end of this idea that you could have an open source project and then build a commercial offering around it. No matter who you are, odds are good Amazon will get such an offering off the ground faster and they have a built-in market of AWS customers.
Elasticsearch has made their motives clear: they have real concerns that Amazon is diluting their brand and they feel that Amazon is costing them too many customers with their proprietary AWS product. We can quibble about the morals of Amazon's move (they have none, corporations have no morals) but let's not lose sight of the outcome: Amazon has forced another OSS project to switch to a closed license[0].
Amazon's behavior may feel exploitative, but it isn't. That would be like saying Red Hat is exploitative.
Part of the whole concept of free software is that you have freedom of choice with vendors (this is derived from "freedom 0"). Amazon is providing the software and its support as part of the Elasticsearch offering as a managed service. Elastic is a competing vendor, both as a managed service and in a traditional sense too.
Elastic made this decision because they wanted to be the exclusive vendor for Elasticsearch. That's fine, but it's not in the spirit of free software.
If anything, Elastic has exploited the third-party contributors who contributed to Elasticsearch under a CLA by promising to not do what they did and then blaming AWS for doing it anyway.
I don't think it's fair to say that Elastic wants to be the exclusive vendor of Elasticsearch. They have registered and own the trademark, I believe it is fair to say that they want to be the only vendor who can use that trademark. I don't think this is uncommon or unreasonable.
Other companies have built products on Elasticsearch (I worked one one myself at one time) and they haven't been sued by Elastic. In my experience, Elastic has behaved in the spirit of free software. Now that their license has changed I would expect they will receive fewer submissions of code from outside companies. In my opinion, the difference here is both scale and misrepresentation of the offering by Amazon through unauthorized use of Elastic's trademarks.
This is not the first company to change their license in order to avoid providing free improvements to Amazon's proprietary services, I believe that this is unique to Amazon, perhaps because of the size of their AWS customer base. I can't find any similar stories of companies changing their licenses because their code was being used by RedHat.
I'm not sure what value the word "chosen" has in this context.
Amazon is one of the largest and wealthiest technology companies in the world with a large captive audience of customers locked into their AWS product. On what terms could Elasticsearch compete with Amazon, especially when any improvements to the product would effectively be improvements to Amazon's product as well?
While I may step out of the way of an oncoming train, is it really a choice? No, it's clear that an oncoming train forces people to step out of the way.
Elastic wants to get the benefits of permissive licenses without the drawbacks.
Having a permissive license is a massive asset for getting people to adopt your software, but it means you will have no control over what they do with it.
They want the goodwill and other benefits of a permissive license without loss of control that these licenses bring.
I have to disagree, I see no reason to think that Elasticsearch is seeking to avoid "the drawbacks" of a permissive license. I believe the project has been using a permissive license since it's first release in 2010.
What they are objecting to is having their project co-opted by Amazon, one of the largest and wealthiest technology companies in the world. Elasticsearch and Amazon have been battling this out for a couple of years now, this is the latest move in that battle.[0] They have been very clear that the reason they are changing the license is Amazon, not "the drawbacks" of an open source license.
They could also collaborate with Elastic as a customer. In fact, the model where a company develops a managed service and offers it on cloud providers infrastructure (i.e. "app store") would have everyone benefit:
* Amazon, from the wealth of innovative managed services they could offer without fully maintaining them themselves
* OSS companies, for the ability to financially sustain their projects and still offer it for free for those that want to self host without offering a managed version of the same software
* End users, who can both use the software however they wish and also choose to get a nice managed version of it.
Instead what will happen due to AWS behavior here is that there will be a lot less incentive to develop innovative new services, at least in a non-proprietary way => therefore there will be fewer services in general for AWS to offer without doing all the product work from scratch, fewer tools in general for engineers and fewer OSS tools in particular and more Firebase-like offerings. So everybody loses here in the long run.
I'm going to go on a limb and say that whichever of the cloud providers figures out the "app store" equivalent for managed services is going to be able to take over from AWS.
Commented on your earlier comment, but didn't see another user basically wrote the same thing, as I hadn't refreshed. Isn't Amazon just an "end user" in this case? End user doesn't have to mean someone who queries an ElasticSearch cluster, it could be someone who hosts one and charges for that.
Are Amazon writing the software that transforms and loads the data into ES, as well queries ES? If yes, they are an end-user. If not, they are a managed service provider.
There is no ambiguity in this case, they are offering the exact same elasticsearch API.
But this is not even the point. I'm not interested in the legal distinctions here at all, thats for the lawyers to delineate in more detail. The point is that Amazon are practically throwing away a huge business opportunity that would also encourage more FOSS to be built in a sustainable way ("app store" / "managed service store") for some short term gain, by throwing companies such as MongoDB and Elastic under the bus.
Totally agree. I think you could also say a similar thing about Amazon however: they are benefiting off of the permissive license Elastic chose to use, without the drawback of having to spend developer time improving the open source project they are profiting from.
I don't think this is a fair critique: they have a pragmatic goal of running a business while being as unrestrictive as possible.
With their Apache choice a pragmatic balance was met where developers could use/modify it as they please or use a managed solution from EC or even a managed solution from another company. The ecosystem thrives and their company can thrive.
But a managed solution from AWS ends being materially new and different: AWS is able to undercut them on every front, and people end up viewing AWS ElasticSearch as the canonical ElasticSearch.
Maybe trademark infringement aside, Amazon didn't break the law but they created an unprecedented situation that changed the effective balance of power which changed whether Apache was achieving their EC's goals or not.
The AGPL is nearly 2 decades old, and its tradeoffs are well known among people working in open source. If Elastic had wanted its protections (and restrictions) they easily could have chosen it.
AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague for the legal team to confidently understand the "bounds" of the copyleft license.
Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like Elastic because companies like Amazon didn't "take" profits from Elastic (and others).
What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them.
The "cost" of being a FOSS company was lower than the "reaped" benefits of the network effects.
That has shifted with "predatory" behavior from companies like Amazon. That abuse of the "vulnerability" in the FOSS ecosystem is a tragedy of the commons. It means that companies have to be more cautious about what they choose to open source.
This is just my opinion, of course. As a founder of a software company though, I see this as a real struggle. I would prefer have https://refinery.io be an entirely open source tool and we make money via supporting the ecosystem.
Unfortunately, it just isn't clear cut. The best option that I see today is a model like what MongoDB and CockroachDB have with licenses like BSL. But, they're not truly "open source". And that sucks.
We are living in a time where there are no good answers in the face of exploitative behavior by companies like Amazon. It means companies like mine have to maintain a proprietary platform in order to make money.
As a developer, it hurts my ideals. As a business owner, it's a risk I can't afford to take. That's why this behavior is a problem for FOSS.
> What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them.
I've run a couple of COSS companies and have a few arrows in the back on this subject. The 'code of honor' is not enough to float even a small company. I don't think it ever was.
Most people simply won't pay if they don't have to. It's not just a matter of money. Buying software in established companies can be a head-exploding hassle--as in 6 months of fighting procurement. Plus those do-a-good-deed contracts have a habit of disappearing as soon as there's a budget crunch or the enlightened manager who pushed it through moves to something else.
I'm not knocking such contracts in any way. They are kind of like crowdfunding for OSS and can be lifesavers. But it's naive to build a company on them.
To have a profitable COSS business you need to sell something sticky that customers need and can't get elsewhere, so there's a real exchange of value.
In these specific contexts, it's important to stop using the term "FOSS." It just clouds the issue. FOSS is Free Software and software so permissively licensed that it could be relicensed and extended as Free Software. Open Source is simply giving up your ownership of the code one wrote, and this Spirit of Open Source is when one pretends that people won't actually take advantage of explicit grant of rights for reasons.
Open Source is for getting popular, and all of the arguments that Open Source people make against Free Software are about the ability to get popular (corporate usage and corporate contributors.) The reason companies use Open Source is because when you license something that way, it's theirs now. They're investing in their own property.
Free Software doesn't intend to have this problem, and if it sees a problem, it fixes the bug. You don't own Free Software, you own the devices that you install it on. You still might end up competing with someone, but you'll never fall behind.
No FOSS license would have protected ES from the problem they have with Amazon. Amazon is in full compliance with the AGPL for example, so if ES had changed the license from Apache to AGPL, nothing would have changed - that is why they had to move to a non-free license instead.
Basically, their problem is that it's impossible to compete with Amazon on delivering a managed SaaS, and most of their money was coming from that.
In terms of the software itself and user freedoms, the licenses used have achieved their goals - ES is free, people using it can control exactly what they are running, can patch it and redistribute etc. No one owns ES itself, so it is Free Software in your sense.
The people who are having a problem though are the project behind most of the work on this. Now, whether this is a real problem (the company is struggling to remain profitable because of Amazon) or just a fake problem (the company is profitable but it's not growing as expected in some 5 year plan) I don't know, but this is the reason for this type of change.
As someone who has used OSS Elasticsearch, the Amazon managed offering, and the licensed and supported product, I don’t think that’s true.
Amazon has a small team for developing their version and at the end of the day, it has to fit into the operating constraints that they have. There are plenty of huge gaps in managed ES that the vendor can (and does) exploit.
This comment is really insightful. Thank you for the perspective!
It's an interesting idea to think that "Free Software" creates a sort of "distributed code base". In the sense that "code will be eventually pushed to the main repo when the patch is created". That's an interesting perspective.
Not necessarily. "Just" making it free software (eg slapping a GPL v2 on Elasticsearch) doesn't require AWS to share any changes to the codebase, and wouldn't have prevented the current AWS/Elastic drama as it wouldn't have prevented AWS from monetizing Elasticsearch.
Now AGPL might have, if it was used from the start... not because it would prevent any monitization, but because it might bring enough legal uncertainty for AWS to even consider using it
None of this is new. GNU was founded and developed its licenses to address this issue. But there’s a tradeoff. One that GNU happily accepts. But there has never been a “code of honor” in this space. Give me a break. Companies have been offering Apache- and GPL- licensed software as a service for longer than Elastic has been a company. Elastic wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They overplayed their hand here and now they’re paying the price. They’ll likely soon lose control of the code base. But that’s the whole point of open source.
The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. Suppose Elastic does lose control of their codebase, and it winds up getting maintained entirely by AWS. Then what's to stop AWS from taking their forked Apache2 code closed-source? Bam, no more ElasticSearch. Without professional maintainers, CVEs will pile up and it will gradually become abandonware.
Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich.
The dream is that Elastic can keep maintaining ES but ES remains Apache2. Given AWS's presence in the market, it seems like that's not an especially viable option. For Elastic to keep maintaining ES while switching ES to a more restrictive license which doesn't prevent normal use cases but hamstrings AWS is less desirable, but still preferable to Elastic folding, because ES remains a tool which we can all use and patch as needed to power our own services.
> Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich.
On the contrary, the commons gets the version of ElasticSearch that is most useful to end users. If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.
> If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.
Not really, because Elastic doesn't get money from people using their free product. So, Elastic could theoretically go bankrupt even while providing an arbitrarily more popular ElasticSearch version.
AWS on the other hand is charging money for using their service, so they only need to compete with Elastic on the hosted version of ES. If their fork of ES is very hard to host on your own, that's a net benefit to AWS, regardless of how easy Elastic's fork is in the same scenarios - neither company is making money off the non-hosted version.
ES has to provide a much better service to win. Amazon can use their market power and vendor lock in to drive adoption of a worse service and squeeze out a better ES.
Network effects are great for behemoths but not so good for consumers.
Well, it's actually a job for Elastic, since their primary concern is ensuring that they continue to turn a profit. But I'm certainly not opposed to antitrust.
> The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons.
If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.
Even if we take out the whole morals aspect of it all, because capitalism, I think this this is really right. Yes on: amazon is free to do whatever the license allows. But no on: if that wee the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license.
I think the point of OSS - and there are various flavors so this isn't some unitary point, but more like a general direction - is the insight that copyright isn't actually a good model for software development. OSS licenses are a hack to sidestep fundementally misdesigned legal structures while staying within them. But because OSS uses licenses to create a more open development model, it's restricted in what it can do; it's "just" an EULA essentially.
Ideally, we'd fix this in the law, not via tricky licenses, but we don't live in a world where that ideal is anywhere even close to a serious enough problem to be addressed - at least, that's my take on "the point of the [OSS] licensing".
The various flavors of OSS try additionally to either use various other approaches to encourage a more open model in a closed world, or conversely don't bother since it's a hopeless endeavor, or vary exactly how open they want things to be; but the general gist is that the license is a hack; it's a design limitation, not by design.
They make perfectly legal use of that code. What they're doing seems to be in my interest because if they do it, it means I could also establish a business using permissive code to run it and hopefully make money off it. It's good news for many wannabe startup founders out there.
People getting mad about a code of honor in a decades old, brutal business environment is truly bizarre to me. This isn't a playground pickup game, it's business.
So, according to some in this thread, as a business owner you are "exploiting open source" by taking more permissively licensed code and making money off it. Shame on you! /s
The people expecting a “code of honor” in American capitalism are hopelessly naive. You may as well ask a lion to observe a code of honor and not target any sickly antelopes.
A strong lion may seemingly indulge such a code of honor for a while - not because of honor, but because healthy antelopes taste better and the lion is fast enough to catch them. But these conditions can change at any moment.
This mirrors how, in general, markets approach human values. They're a nice thing to have if you can afford them, perhaps you can mention them in your marketing - but the moment competition threatens your margins, you'll drop these values to stay competitive. Ethics is a market inefficiency, and expecting companies to behave ethically over time if not explicitly forced to is, indeed, naive.
RMS once said: the GPL doesn't restrict how you USE the software.
If it restricts who can use the software or what they can do with it I believe it isn't classified as free software.
The AGPL is slightly different than GPL. It confers more responsibilities on cloud providers, so that the users of the software (as a service) have the right to the source and any modifications.
I thought Stallman created GPL so software can be "free as in speech". It's another dimensional of ideology, and respectably so. It, however, has nothing do with whether it is moral for AWS to host an Apache-licensed open-source package.
The A in AGPL stands for Affero, which was a company that produced a version of the GPL (with FSF permission) -- that was AGPLv1, written by a commercial company in 2002 to fix the loophole in the GPL.
"When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."
https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS
They are now. CentOS was originally created outside of Redhat to remove all of Redhat’s trademarks from RHEL, since that was the only part of RHEL that wasn’t freely redistributable. When CentOS originally came out, my impression was that Redhat was not very happy, similar to Elasticsearch here.
Sure, of course. They're still both free software, they're still both used by companies who aren't paying for Red Hat subscriptions, there's no shortage of consulting companies who will provide support for CentOS or Fedora like Red Hat would for RHEL, etc. That's the point: Red Hat has plenty of competition, including from others using their own software, and that's fine!
EDIT: And honestly the fact that Red Hat owns both makes it extra clear that they're fine with it, because again, they're a company built on free software.
Well, before the IBM acquisition anyway. We'll see where things go from here.
Yes, but, while RH is the 900lb gorilla in the "pure OSS" business (and yes, we should be thankful for their contributions all over the OSS ecosystem even if we aren't RH customers), from a business perspective they are not that spectacular. Looking at wikipedia, the company was formed in 1993, has a revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular.
Partly due to releasing all their code as OSS, they have poor pricing power over their primary product (support and services (RHEL)) as that's a commodified market with a bunch of competitors who are happy to take their business (offering support for CentOS or other RHEL rebuilds) if they charge too much, or customers might just decide they have the in-house knowledge to support themselves.
Revenue is meaningless, profitability is the important thing. Amazon was net income 0, but it was always enormously profitable, it immediately spent that money on growth.
RedHat wasn't really that profitable. Sure it also spent billions on growth, but Amazon spent hundreds of billions on growth. (Sure, Amazon is a conglomerate, from books to gadgets to groceries to basically everything and the biggest digital infrastructure platform on top.
(I'm simply using Amazon as illustration, it's really coincidence that this submission is about ES and AWS.)
I'm not quite sure I agree with your words here; generally speaking, net income is profit (accounting profit, to be precise -- there are other profits but we normally talk about accounting profit).
Secondly, revenue is super not meaningless! It's the capacity for you to be profitable! Amazon had 0 net income but were able to spend money on growth because they had revenue, and were able to classify their R&D as an expense, which pushed their profit/net income down. Without that, they would've been a positive net income/profit company who then reinvested net income/profits into R&D.
You can do all the expense classification shenanigans you want to to muck around with profit (ex. have profit & spend that on growth, or classify your growth as an expense and have no profit), but it's a lot harder to grow without having the money to put to growth. You'll get that of course in two ways -- increasing capital (equity/liabilities), or well, revenue!
I wrote profitability exactly for this reason. Revenue in itself is just as meaningless as profitability, I agree. (That's what aggregates like NPV [net present value] and other indicators are for.)
RedHat is big, it has a lot of revenue, but it also has a looot of expenses too. Hence it's profitability is low. Whereas Amazon is a lot more profitable (even if it had no accounting profit), and that's exactly how it grew this big.
If RH were this profitable it would have probably also grown bigger too.
Of course some business models, sectors are truly niches, and you can't grow arbitrarily big. RH probably suffered from this to a degree. Selling Linux support is a niche market compared to selling almost everything that can be shipped in boxes. Of course both Amazon and RH are survivors of the early 2000s big boom-bust cycle, so probably there's a big survival bias and chance/luck at play here, so it's probably not right to say that RH should have expanded to bigger markets. (How come "AWS" is not a RH thing? It's likely that Amazon's extreme "black friday" scaling challenge it not unique to them, yet they were the ones able to successfully capitalize on this.)
Perhaps this would inform the discussion better, but how do you define "profitability" if not by accounting profit? There has to be a strict measure in order to make sense of things. As. I said before, the convention is to use profitability = accounting profit.
I judge by your statements of RedHat's expenses/revenue/profitability that you're defining it as operating profit? That's not a great measure to look at things: certain sectors can expense things and make a mess of it - like depreciation & R&D.
That's also a measure of the core operating portion of the business alone, it. doesn't include non-core portions, nor spending on investments/divestitures (although the latter should show in pro formas or future reports. Also to be fair that would never be counted in a profit definition, but judging from what you find important, I suspect you would prefer to include it? ).
NPVs are calculated by Free Cash Flow streams discounted at whatever your discount rate.
RedHat is not a "product" company but a "service" company, so comparing it to other big tech companies is an apples to oranges comparison. The nature of big tech is scalability (product), whereas Redhat is more of a sustainable business focused on providing support around OSS software, it isn't aiming to do anything new and revolutionary. Not every company has to be gunning towards world domination..
RedHat was never worried about CentOS, the people/companies using CentOS never had the budgets for RedHat anyway and the companies using RedHat often need certification and support contracts (due to regulations). So CentOS never was seen as a competition I would argue.
I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back.
The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service. So Elastic switched the license to the non-open-source SSPL, which makes offering a hosting service essentially impossible (to satisfy the terms, Amazon would need to open-source effectively all of AWS).
This license switch is more antithetical to the spirit of open source — that is, user freedom — than what AWS was doing, which was offering a hosted version of open-source software that competed with Elastic's hosting business.
Ultimately I think selling hosting of a single piece of open-source software as a funding model for developing a single piece of open-source software (e.g. Mongo, Elastic) has proven to not be a very sustainable funding model; at least, not if you're hoping for VC-backed company sized returns. And... I can see why that doesn't feel great. At one point, hosting was believed to be the silver bullet model as compared to consulting. But ultimately I think it's just not worked out: hosting as a model makes sense for proprietary software, but for OSS, either:
* You pay developers to build the software and also pay more developers to build the hosting stack — but then your competition only pays for the latter and can beat you on price, or
* You only pay to build the hosting stack, but then — what's the point? You haven't solved funding the software development.
>The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service.
I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying on AWS" they have to be able to translate that into profit. This seems like a lose-lose for Elastic as they have effectively ceded all that away to this fork. The use of SSPL also seems like nonsense here that won't result in them seeing a dime from Amazon.
Seems sad to be them but this has always been the case with open source. There has been countless successful businesses established that run with on source software (think Linux, glibc, etc) and almost none of them payed back open source developers or contributed anything.
To say that developers/authors of open-source believe that if their projects get picked up by some big company they would also be payed seems silly and childish. This has never been the case, why would they even believe that? It was rare when a company payed open source devs for their work (and it made the news, like when RedHat gifted Torvalds a lot of stock before going public and it's not like Torvalds was the only kernel dev at that time).
Maybe the main driver is that self-hosting of Elastic seems to be a very frustrating experience since it easily consumes a lot of memory and the default install seems quite insecure. Still AWS of course has automated all this. I guess completely free projects that are also controlled openly like Postgres don't have these problems and some of core developers seem to do lucrative consulting work. (So individuals are much better off I guess, and there is not the pressure to be like a Startup)
Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?
My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is:
1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES
2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES
3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES
And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software project will die. But like... isn't that the point of OSS? If a software project lives and dies with a single company, what exactly is the point of it being OSS?
>AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES
AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.
With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.
That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.
> >AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES
> AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.
> With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.
> That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.
There's a lot of businesses with a lot of budget who want to use ES and don't want to go near AWS. Let's not pretend there's not an enormous opportunity out there for a good hosted ES platform not on AWS.
I think the "war chest" argument here is that AWS can out compete any other hosting solution by "slowly burning" their way to the top. AWS is a conglomerate and can afford to lose money on a single service. Companies like ES cannot without going under. It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.
Plenty of businesses compete with AWS just fine. Looking at Elastic Co's financials, they also appear to be competing just fine.
If they tell you they're not, what they're actually saying is that they've chosen a poor business model.
In this case, it looks like they've got a perfectly reasonable business, but they're upset it's not even bigger, and therefore they'd like a monopoly over ES hosting.
> It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.
I think a good example company to answer this question would be: What happened to RethinkDB? They shuttered. How has development changed for that project? Is it still alive and healthy?
That would be a single data point to start with, at least.
What makes you think this is a "gap in Open Source licensing"? Is it not more easily explained as Elastic's business plan having a gaping hole instead? Don't put the cart before the horse.
They built on top of a license that gave the user a set of freedoms they don't want the user to have. End of story.
Now they've patched this hole, but they want to keep the goodwill that comes from Open Source licensing instead of owning up to their decision and decide to blame AWS as a scapegoat, all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition where you cannot set restrictions on specific fields of endeavor (in this case, the same field the product belongs to).
A hole which didn't exist in this way 10 years ago. But well you could have seen it coming tbh.
> all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition
So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited?
If so then why do GPL and similar exist, which are normally considered as Open Source?
It's just that the landscape changed and with this the problems around it changed.
While in the past bundling it into non free programs (+some committed aspects) was seen as a problem and as such GPL was created today the problem are similar but instead of distributing that bundles they are provided as managed services.
In this context the Server Side Public License is as much in line with the core values of Open Source as GPL is.
It's just that Amazon cares to some degree more about free software being free as in not costing them then they care about it being freely inspectable and modifiable. But cost free-ness was never a core value of Open Source, just a side effect.
The hole did exist ten years ago, though. The AGPL was released in 2007, three years before Elasticsearch was created, to fix this exact problem.
…except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies. Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the wide adoption of open source software, while also preventing people from competing with them. That's not how open source works.
> …except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies.
They wouldn't have to. This is a common misconception about AGPL.
AGPL is meant to address the situation where someone takes GPL code, such as a database server, runs it on their systems (possibly with proprietary modifications), and provides network access to it to users, and does not provide those users with the source code. That is perfectly acceptable under GPL, GPL doesn't trigger if you aren't distributing the program.
What AGPL changed is that they made it trigger on distribution (like GPL) and on interactive access of modified versions over a network.
If Amazon's plan had been to make money by hosting a proprietary fork of the server, which would give them some sort of advantage over other clouds like Azure or Google that only have the non-proprietary version, AGPL would thwart them.
But that doesn't seem to be the case. They don't appear to trying to make it proprietary. They seem happy to run the same code that everyone else does. They are making money from it by selling management and support services for it.
If you're using a database that's not tightly integrated into your project and distributed with it, I don't believe you'd have to open your project. The API is the boundary:
- your project running on Linux kernel doesn't become GPL
- your project talking to MySQL doesn't become GPL and one talking to mongodb pre-2018 doesn't become AGPL
- your project talking to elasticsearch wouldn't become AGPL
If you modified the software and then sold a hosted solution using the modified software you would need to release the source code for your modifications. Or if you built a plugin that was directly linked to the software you might have to release the source for that plugin. But if you had other software that made network calls to the software I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have to open source that as well.
Amazon is in compliance with the terms of the AGPL already for their managed ES. Switching ES to from Apache to AGPL would only affect other users of ES, not Amazon.
> Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too.
That doesn't follow from your preceding statement. Elastic doesn't want to constrain all users of their software by using AGPL; and instead they adopted a license which imposes restrictions only on cloud providers. That's better compared to AGPL for general consumers, if you ask me.
The "have their cake" is enjoying widescale adoption of a liberal open source license. The "eat it too" is thereafter making that license restrictive to shut down competition.
I want to clarify this. Building a SaaS product with Elasticsearch or Kibana on the backend is okay and not prohibited, as long the service is not “managed” Elasticsearch nor Kibana. For example, a music service that uses Elasticsearch on the backend to provide music catalog search is okay. A service that offers site search powered by Elasticsearch is okay. A log search service powered by Elasticsearch is okay (again, provided it doesn’t expose Elasticsearch functionality). We welcome applications built with Elasticsearch or Kibana in the backend, even those that would be seen as competitors, as long as they are not managed Elasticsearch nor Kibana services. The Elastic License allows this, and you can do it for free. See this [item][0] in our FAQ. If you have any doubt, reach out to elastic_license@elastic.co and we would be happy to clarify.
Disclaimer: I am on the Elasticsearch team and work for Elastic; I welcome any and all feedback.
What exactly does `provided it doesn’t expose Elasticsearch functionality` mean? Is exposing KQL via a search field in violation or not? Is exposing the Lucene query language okay or not? Is selling an on-prem monitoring solution that uses ES/Kibana as datastore and visualization interface ok? Is accepting payment from a client to run and maintain that solution in the clients datacenter okay? Is running that solution in a clients private cloud okay?
Can I get that in writing from someone with the power to make binding legal statements?
The problem is never in the clear cases, it’s in the edges. Now, all of a sudden, when thinking about features a legal dimension enters the picture, something that hasn’t been there before.
I agree and find that caveat baffling. "The ability to search a store of information for user-supplied input" is fairly clearly elasticsearch functionality, but it seems that is allowed? They have to be more specific on what this means.
IANAL and I am pretty sure they will need to be involved in a serious way to iron all this out. I have my understanding of the intent, which I would not invest money in at this point trying to prove, and that's as much as I can offer. It seems that you can have users search your data in your Elastic+Kibana instance. What they're precluding is you offering an Elastic instance for your customers to load their data into and then search or offer for search to their users.
I understand the intent, but elastic has proven to create legal confusion despite being warned against it and then sue over it in the past when they mixed the APL source and the x-pack source under two different licenses in the same repo and then sued floragunn over copyright violations. They might be technically correct on that lawsuit, but IMHO they knowingly created that situation.
I’d not say “intentionally” as I don’t think that this was the motivation behind the change. I’d consider it “knowingly” - they were or at least should have been aware that the change was going to create confusion about the license that individual code parts and changes were under. It was pointed out at that time.
Why didn't Elastic release some SSPL v1.1 or SSPl v2.0 with this kind of clarification? SSPL v1.0 is considered by many kind of vague in terms of p. 13 "Offering the Program as a Service".
> A log search service powered by Elasticsearch is okay (again, provided it doesn’t expose Elasticsearch functionality).
You speak as if Elastic has any say in how people use OSS. Why would anyone use the newly hampered version of ES when they can use and contribute to Amazon's truly open fork? Aside from the bad taste left in everyone's mouth from the whole "Doubling down on open" nonsense, all that reasonable people are going to see now when looking at Elastic's software (ES 7.11+) is unnecessary risk and legal ambiguity.
The disingenous market speak on Elastic's blog post was so thinly veiled that it quickly became insulting. It was gross to watch such a shameful justification form on why everyone should be okay that Elastic will continue using the marketing terms "free" and "open". By forcing a well funded fork by Amazon, Elastic may have just relegated themselves into obsolescence.
This might very well have been your intention, but the license you chose (SSPL) is extremely vague in describing this (section 13, IIRC).
For one data point, my company attorneys interpreted that, even if we present a search box in a web page, allowing visitors to search our own indexed data, it could be understood that we "offer a service" -- and thus forced us to abandon Elasticsearch and figure out alternatives.
We might be unique, but I doubt it.
GPL would not solve the problem Elastic has - it's perfectly legal (and in the spirit of the definition!) to take GPL software, host it yourself, sell the hosted service, and not pay the creator a cent.
It's also perfectly legal to run GPL software on a Windows machine without open-sourcing Windows.
`So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited?`
And how is a company using open source software exploitative? I mean, isn't that the point of releasing open source software, that companies use it? And aren't companies in the business of making money, so at some level, they are profiting from your work?
Actually the opposite of open sourcing a system like this would be a massive fragmentation of the market with multiple competing proprietary systems emerging and total headaches for users with obsolescence a part of their daily lives. That is the grim alternative, not companies profiting from selling services based on open source software
I have been involved with open source since 2000. I have been a member of the ASF for many of those years and worked with Apache licensed projects throughout. I have been in the position Elastic is in where I managed the employer-sponsored team working on an employer-sponsored Apache licensed project, though thankfully not against a behemoth like AWS.
I have some sympathy for Elastic, but I just do not agree that AWS is doing anything wrong or against the spirit of open source. When they run into things that need to be fixed or improved in the projects they upstream them. The majority of work AWS does is in "operationalizing" the project for their cloud. It might be cool and interesting if they let us see how they do this but it is not like that work directly translates back to the open source project. Anyone that has worked with Google open-source stuff has run into the same issues where there is some behind the scenes magic that Google has internally that the projects can leverage to make them scale better etc.
It is Elastic's right to change the license if they so choose. If they own trademarks that they believe are violated it is up to them to take those challenges to a court and seek damages. Elastic is trying to have it all ways though. They want you to believe the new license is open source .. sort of true but not really. They want you to believe AWS has done something wrong. This I do not buy at all. What is special about Elasticsearch? The entire Internet and the Cloud is running on all kinds of open source software up and down the stack. It is in the interests of the behemoths that run these stacks to upstream fixes and improvements and generally they do. That does not mean they have to contribute the proprietary wrappers they have put in place around them as part of building their business model.
AWS needs to be focused on its customers, not companies like Elastic and Mongo. If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve.
> If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve.
How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?
* Since their license is Apache (most likely because they have an Open Core business model) instead of AGPL, they could offer extra services on Elastic's managed service. Amazon wouldn't able to offer since these parts are proprietary.
* They could partner up with other Cloud Providers (Microsoft, Google, ...) to offer a managed Elastic on these clouds, before these cloud providers do it themselves.
* They could offer other proprietary products that run on top of elastic (managed by them), that would force customers to use their managed service.
They actually do all of these already. Most of their development and marketing for the last couple years has been pushing their add-ons (things like machine learning, threat detection, application tracing), that are only available on their cloud or on-prem with a paid subscription.
So that's what's really puzzling to me, what's really driving this change? Is their considerable revenue from all of that still not enough to justify their valuation and growth? Or is it really just a personal vendetta against AWS?
AWS has a lot of closed source components behind the scene that makes Elasticsearch scale and run reliably in their cloud environment.
Elastic can develop similar closed source components to make things scale – in non-aws environments – in private clouds – in on-prem deployments.
Why does this matter?
There are a lot of those customers – banks etc – who will stay on-prem and medium size cloud customer for whom public cloud is more expensive than private cloud. These are the ideal customers for Elastic.
Among them, there will also be some who will do hybrid – onprem + AWS. Elastic can price their product to compete with AWS's and use their service in both on-prem and in aws seamlessly.
It might be too late, I am not sure really. If the customer wants the service provided by AWS then it is hard to change that. That said, the AWS Elasticsearch service is not that great and it is expensive so there is room to do it better and maybe just offer better support and plugins etc.
I realize that the cloud took off after Elasticsearch existed, so it is hard to fault Elastic for not having a crystal ball, but the time to get the business model right was at the beginning.
When my company chose an Apache License for the product we sponsored it was because we knew we could not do it all ourselves and so we wanted to build and foster a community. So while that means competitors could and did emerge that could take the product and do a better job monetizing, that was the only way for us to get the product we needed. The community was important.
Elasticsearch would be an also-ran without the Apache License and the community around it. Changing the license now because AWS is able to monetize just stinks, IMO.
Given that Amazon's customers are inside Amazon's proprietary AWS environment, I think it's unreasonable to expect that an outside company can meaningfully compete inside that environment. In terms of customer preference, AWS customers will _always_ prefer a product offered by Amazon to a similar offering from an outside company. Amazon will always be less expensive and better integrated with other AWS services.
Amazon customer here. We use Elastic's offering because it has a fairly good management layer. That said, there's a lot of room for either player to improve things. One example is user/access management. Kibana tries to be all things to all people and ends up doing very few of them well. If I never had to log into Kibana again it would be a good day.
Perhaps the issue is that Elastic is getting so little from the Amazon product that they resent, essentially, adding features to the Amazon product for little or no return. Elastic noted that, in their experience, some unspecified number of Amazon customers believed the Amazon product was somehow associated with Elastic. Elastic implied this was a result of Amazon's use of their trademark but all of this is hard to verify or quantify.
RedisLabs fought a similar battle with Amazon, they also ended up making changes to their license. I really do think the issue here is the scale of AWS and the very large pool of customers tied to Amazon's offering: there are so many existing and potential customer using AWS that companies like Elastic or RedisLabs feel they can't write those potential customers off. It seems to me that if Amazon was interested in the well being of those customers, they would figure out a way to continue to receive improvements from these projects instead of forking their own versions.
> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit.
I don't actually agree AWS violates the spirit of the license. The spirit of the Apache license is explicitly - "I don't care if you succeed with my code wildly beyond what i achieve, more power to you, just credit me in the byline". I license my own code in Apache usually because that's precisely my position.
There are other licenses implying a different spirit if you want to take a different position - but complaining about AWS because they chose Apache is not a great look. They're certain to lose community developers.
I don't really want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective.
But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term:
I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good thing for society.
For the longest time I dreamed of creating my own open source tools and products and simultaneously monetizing it to create a comfortable life for myself and maybe even eventually turning it into something bigger, and leave my mark on the world.
However, as the years past and events like ElasticSearch v Amazon unfolded, I became more and more disillusioned on the realistic prospects of such an outcome.
Today, I'm in the process of building something that would probably see more success in terms of adoption and do more good in the world if it's released as open source software, but at this point I've basically made up my mind to release it as proprietary software to have a realistic shot of monetizing it to achieve financial independence and eventually build a company around it.
Basically I've weighed the tradeoffs and chose to put my own ability to capture the value of what I created over trying to maximize the value my software could create if open sourced.
This was not a easy decision for me to make, but I suspect I'm not alone in having thought about these tradeoffs and reaching these same conclusions. And as more and more people witness the struggles of companies trying to build viable businesses on top of open source software, more and more people could make the same decision, and thus society would be robbed of all the value that having these pieces of software as open source could have created.
I think the chilling effect these kinds of case studies have on the proliferation of new open source software, and the loss incurred by society as a whole as a result, is at the core of what we should be trying to figure out a solution for, not some philosophical discussion around who's in the right or wrong.
(reposting from a comment in a previous submission that got buried)
It's frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no reason for you to feel the need to justify building a business off of your software product, but I can completely understand why you do.
Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad thing, and that the only true way to be a developer is to give your work away for free as Open Source. Even silly things like negotiating for a market rate salary from your employer are frowned upon as caring only for money.
But that's all backwards. There are good reasons to release your work product as Open Source, and those all share the quality that they give you or your business some tangible benefit. So it's simple: do the benefits of open sourcing your thing outweigh the downside? If yes, go for it. If no, don't. But don't spend even a second worrying about whether it's the "right" thing to do for silly moral reasons.
If there was one thing I could change about our industry, it would be to remove the 5 year Open Source Indoctrination brainwashing session you need to go through at University before entering it. Because we'd spend a lot less time being taken advantage of later in life.
The OP is isn't ashamed but more frustrated because he wanted to do good for the world and is disappointed by the fact that he may not be able to now because gree corporations like Amazon will take all the hard earned work of contributors and profit from it, thus breaking the spirit of open source.
At least that's how I interpreted his comment..
Yeah, I think the fundamental problem we're seeing here is how difficult it is for creators of open source projects to effectively capture the value they create in the world, especially at the higher end of the scale of _extremely_ popular projects that gain widespread adoption and create a mind-blowing amount of value, like Elasticsearch.
I would argue that by releasing a project as open source, we create more value in society than by releasing as proprietary.
An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation.
Our society does a pretty good job of rewarding and incentivizing value creation for proprietary projects, but seems to do a horrible job of incentivizing value creation through open source projects.
I think it's in society's best interest for open source creators to be rewarded every bit as handsomely for creating value in the world as creators of proprietary projects, if not more, so we can incentivize the creation of more open source projects.
Have you considered BSL [0]?
The fresh versions are source-available, but older versions convert to open source (GPL, Apache or something) after a few years.
You can still build a business on your software -- as long as you keep developing, no competitor will be able to use up to date version. And people who want to rely on open source can do so, knowing that the software will get open-sourced eventually, no matter what the company decides.
It’s not a chilling effect. It’s how value is exchanged in a free market.
Open source makes sense when many companies benefit economically from sharing resources to develop common software/tooling.
Open sourcing code from inception can lead to adoption and create profits.
At some point that code may be more valuable to another company in some way and they profit from it.
I don’t see Linus Torvalds complaining about companies that profit from Linux but then again Elastic Search has shareholders to answer to and their trademark has been violated.
They're literally describing the chilling effect. It shows a lack of imagination if you think this "free market" is the only way to create valuable software.
PS. In a truly free market, there would be no enforcement of license violations except that which companies could muster themselves, i.e. Elastic would be able to hire mercenaries to loot and pillage AWS' data centres
I think a possible solution to that problem could be a universal basic income, itself funded on the likes of Amazon.
If you had the assurance that you'd always have something to live with, wouldn't you be more open to take the risk of going open-source and see if you can run a business of that ?
I don't know. I've worked for a couple of companies who open source their software and they don't open source because they believe it's good for the world (they may or may not, but it isn't the driving motivation), they open source because it's a near requirement for building a profitable business. It's easier for a no-name company to convince enterprise clients to use your software when the code is open source - it's often a non-starter if your code is closed-source. It's easier to get developers and keep them happy. It's easier to get community contributions. It's easier to get your name out there (you lose a LOT if you have a software product without a GitHub).
As long as open-source is a near requirement for getting traction, I don't think there is much to worry about.
I think you’re right that OSS is a customer requirement in many domains today. But I think the consequence isn’t that companies will open source despite the AWS threat — it’s that tremendously valuable software will never be built in the first place.
I like FOSS and even just OSS and I have good arguments, largely borrowed from others, for why it's good and why we should often use it. It's not a panacea, though. I'm about to write some things that RMS would not endorse.
If the code is your original, differentiating product, go ahead and make it proprietary if it helps you. If there's some code that supports your product, that helps make your product possible, or that complements your product but doesn't really differentiate your work or create a bespoke advantage for your users, then seriously consider making that Open Source or Free Software.
For example, let's say you have a new, great music recommendation technique and that's why people would choose your music player or music web site or whatever. You could build that with an OS DB on the backend, on an OS operating system, using an Open Source language and Open Source libraries and still close the source for your recommendation engine. However, you could still offer a F/OSS client to an API for that for various languages. You could contribute to the projects underlying yours. You might write a whole new configurable data wrangling system that's not specific to your recommendation code but is really useful to populating your database, and you could release that as F/OSS for the community to use. You might make your own front-end toolkit for the browser, or your own websockets code on the backend, that can be used by any application. You'd be able to contribute that to the community as F/OSS without undercutting your main differentiator, too. I kind of think of this model akin to open core, but in this case it's a "Closed Core" with open everything else. Improve everything that's in common with others in a common space, and differentiate your offering in your own different, compartmentalized space. Just make sure the bindings between the parts are at the appropriate level so the licenses don't clash.
Does this mean some competitor could come along, tie all of your F/OSS together, and plug in a different core? Absolutely. If that core's not your true differentiator, though, your plans have probably already gone awry. Making it easy to plug other code in the place of your proprietary code surrounded by an open platform is almost as good for the community as making the whole thing open source, and lets you compete on what you've decided is going to be your competitive advantage.
Clearly, as you say, there's nothing wrong here legally. By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now.
Ethically, I can't find anything wrong about this either. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a "spirit of open source". Open source is a way of doing business. Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live with the consequences.
One could certainly argue far too much power is getting concentrated with Amazon and other web giants, but that's an entirely different subject...
I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though.
Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.
Take an example what Amazon did with Mongo - First they launch a closed-source competitor (totally fine) but then they also take Mongo's source and rebadge it as their own fully-managed DocumentDB (Mongo 1.6 but with closed source additions). It's having your cake and eating it too. There's nothing legally wrong with this, but I do think this is market abuse (because they can only do this because of AWS market penetration) just to make the worlds richest man richer.
'AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.'
Well, they DID actually contribute patches as the whole ES project was 'upstream-first', this is mentioned in the post with proofs.
From what I can find online, it looks like DocumentDB is actually a layer on top of the AWS Aurora PostgreSQL offering. This means they created a MongoDB compatible API, but are not offering a hosted mongodb cluster. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397)
Without wanting to come down on either side of the argument I'd like to say that the Pull Requests they reference in the blog post are over a span of roughly two years and touched somewhere in the vicinity of 1k lines of code. One of them changed one line by adding a synchronized modifier to a function..
I'd not consider that actively developing a product and adding new features.
Even if MongoDB was closed-source, it would not stop anyone from creating a product that was compatible with the MongoDB API. Put another way, your API cannot be your USP.
Lots of companies offer S3-compatible APIs, for instance. They compete not on the API, but around reliability, price, features.
Of course, we have Oracle v Google coming up in the US Supreme Court, so things could change, but this is the way things are now.
Part of the reason elasticsearch is popular is because they choose a very permissive license. That was the tradeoff they accepted for getting such high market share.
> By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now.
> Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live with the consequences.
Everybody should be allowed to change its mind when presented with new data or circumstances.
> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.
Or Amazon (or a third party) may take over maintenance of ES if it's worth it to them. That's the whole point of open source.
> You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate.
There's no exploitation here. ES are grownups and responsible for their own business decisions. Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients.
> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.
The whole point of "open source" as distinct from "free software" was to get away from all the ideological baggage and focus on pragmatic licensing that would appeal to businesses. Guess what: it worked.
> Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients.
I wouldn't necessarily say AWS' ability to use ES as a loss-leader for their Data Transfer charges is better for AWS's clients in the long-run. I can certainly see the argument for calling it exploitation.
For me, exploitation has always required the exploited party not having a choice. Customers of AWS ES vs. Elastic ES definitely have a choice in this matter and have done so deliberately.
Due to the market share of AWS for many potential customers it will come down to a decision between
a) click here in the aws marketplace and have my service added to the invoice my company gets every month anyway
b) start the painful process of onboarding a new vendor, get a quote, have procurement haggle with them for months etc etc etc. (overstating it a bit, I know)
And that is where to me it becomes a question of using/abusing your position in the market to a certain extent..
Oh I'm sorry, I'm referring to AWS exploiting the free software, not their customers, but I can see how I was not clear.
The rest of the 500+ comments here do a good job arguing both sides of it so I won't rehash that. Just saying that I can see that AWS taking the free thing and using it as a loss-leader (i.e. no possible way Elastic can compete) could be construed as exploitation of the free thing.
First-off, it's not clear to me ES is a loss-leader for Amazon, they seem to charge for it commensurate with their other hosted services, which from their filings all seem profitable.
Even if it is though, I'm just not sure I find the idea of free software being a loss-leader a bad thing. Having a loss-leader implies that AWS is providing + capturing value elsewhere. In this case, you assert this is from Data Transfer. But regardless of where the cost-centers are, AWS is delivering value to their customers and charging for it. There is competition in the cloud space, and in all honesty moving clouds generally isn't a huge deal, at least if you've architected your systems with that in mind (which any SysAdmin worth their salt should be doing in 2021).
The fact is, customers like having all their cloud managed under one roof. Customers like the exceedingly strong uptime guarantees provided by AWS. If customers have choice (which they do), and they're choosing AWS, why is it a bad thing if Elastic can't compete? If AWS is winning, it's because they have a holistic offering that customers like better.
> The whole point of "open source" as distinct from "free software" was to get away from all the ideological baggage and focus on pragmatic licensing that would appeal to businesses. Guess what: it worked.
Which OT1H is a valid reason not to go all "spirit" and "ideology" in business; OTOH, if what you're all about is spirit and ideology, it's a valid reason to stop thinking what you're doing is "Open Source" and go back to the original "Free Software" terminology.
As I think someone else mentioned already in this discussion, the term "FOSS" does more harm than good by conflating these different things, and should be avoided.
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.
From where i am sitting, it looks like a bait and switch: use the permissive open source license to get popular, once you are popular, switch to closed source license.
Which is not to say what they are doing is wrong, they are just as much within their rights as amazon is.
> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together"
I think that's BS if you are talking about bsd-style licenses. Maybe i could see an argument about spirit violations if it was a GPL-family license, but the entire point of bsd style licenses is so that businesses can take the code and adapt it to their business needs.
> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end.
First, Elastic sells a buckload of licenses for on-premises ELK, which is a vastly bigger market than managed services. And second, how is Amazon different from "other companies" you mention? Just because they're bigger and have a ton of experience with managed services they should be forbidden from offering managed ELK?
If you believe that just because you can exploit a license doesn’t mean you should, do you believe Elastic have wronged ElasticSearch and Lucene’s contributors by not compensating them(other than those that are employees)?
I don’t understand the argument that a company should get to “own” all the profits for a particular FOSS project.
Its not exploited. There are several other license options Elastic could have used other than the one that says "Do whatever you want".
The license communicates to others how you approve the usage of your copyright work. If you aren't communicating "do whatever you want" don't pick a license that literally says "do whatever you want".
> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source.
Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, and Eric S. Raymond, the people who invented Free Software and Open Source, all specifically said, at the very creation of the god damn licenses, that this would happen, and was perfectly fine. They specifically wrote their licenses to allow this. It's not an accident or exploitation, it's a fundamental part of what they exist to serve, which is the user's rights.
The Open Source Initiative, Debian, and Fedora, have all banned licenses like SSPI which exist solely to punish cloud service providers. If that's not the open source spirit telling you where you can stick it, I don't know what is.
You are trying to twist things here. If the people who invented the thing said this is to be expected, then it's part of the spirit.
I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple.
And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are sometimes interesting with bit players, but the FAANGs of the world they could just build a tool like this from the ground up if necessary.
I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software licenses and, it seems to be implied, that it should be seen to supersede the bare terms of a license. This reasoning is then used as the basis of ethical usage of open source software. So, when Amazon takes a piece of software and uses it not in the ‘spirit’ of open source, their compliance with licensing is irrelevant. I don’t particularly agree with this point of view, but I get the impression many people do.
If there is a "spirit" to open source, it's a lot closer to "I can take software that you released and use it however I please, while also possibly releasing my changes so that you can do the same" than "Because I wrote this open source software, I am entitled to some arbitrarily defined 'fair' level of financial rewards, despite not giving my business model much thought."
When it comes to the "spirit", the people criticizing it seem to be talking about the "spirit" of Stallman and Free Software; the term Open Source and the OSI as an institution were explicitly built on friendliness to running side by side with proprietary software and to third-party commercial use.
Nope I get it and I think it’s absolute bunk. And while I grant others are entitled to their opinion I think the implicit dismissal of my (not uncommon) opinion is condescending. As pointed out RMS doesn’t support this idea, and while he’s not some absolute moral authority I’d say it’s a strong counter argument to some absolute consensus on a “spirit” of free or open source.
Why does Elastic deserve to be deferred to here, though. They are making the license overly restrictive. Now I can’t start my own ELK stack hosting company. Meanwhile Amazon will likely benefit more users by keeping ES and Kibana open in a way that encourages their use and encourages contribution. I’m certainly not going to submit patches for Elastic’s forks now.
For people who believe in this, please study your history — look up the claims and counter claims around Emacs, specifically how it was created, commercialised, and then liberated (then forked and merged again).
“Good intenshuns” (my somewhat humorous term for “spirit”) is no way to settle even moderately complex commercial disputes — say for a text editor which in those early days of late 70s/early 80s, had very niche appeal and a small user base.
In the 21st century, with bigger markets and more money at stake, “good intenshuns” matters even less and this is why we have a bevy of F/OSS licenses to suit every need.
It’s very telling that RMS needed to create a license to support his vision of Free software. Perhaps from his experience he realised that legal code was the best way to enforce desired behaviour.
> "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free"
Except that's not how it works with Elastic. I know at least one company (Acme Inc) that doesn't offer anything like Amazon, but does have clients who can access their "own" (client-specific) data hosted in Acme Inc's Elasticsearch cluster; it's a somewhat marginal (but still important) feature in the product, yet still, due to it, Elastic maintains that Acme Inc resells Elasticsearch and thus needs the "Enterprise" license to be in compliance.
So, Elastic are not only going for AWS and people who cannot host their own Elasticsearch, they are going a bit wider than you imply here.
> This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing.
That's not really accurate, is it?
Few if any open source companies has survived on a monopoly on hosting the product. MySQL doesn't do it at all, netiher does Red Hat, and many others. Those who do bundle it with support services for added value. They have to compete in the open market after all. They don't claim to have a monopoly.
Wordpress makes most of their money from hosting, but they don't go after AWS or any of the thousands of smaller companies all over the world that host it. Their exploding market share has been more than enough to sustain their own hosting business. And it does seem like Elastic is in a similar situation, with their hosting business still rapidly expanding.
Forget Amazon for a second. I know many people in the web hosting business and pretty much everything they host is open source software. If this is a precedent, if the opinion that hosting is morally wrong gets widespread, then that would affect a whole industry.
This comment kind of highlights how pointless this debate is.
If you go off of what the law says, how this open source license works, and the understanding that all businesses are competing to make money, what AWS did here seems pretty reasonable and perfectly legal.
If you come at it from the perspective that AWS is always evil and the little guy is always good, you’ll view this as a terrible injustice. There’s not much substance to the justifications here, seems like you had your mind made up and then half heartedly tried to backfill some sort of reasoning. Just assert that everyone else has it twisted, of course AWS always exploits, try to evoke the spirit of open source as if that’s a single, easily defined quality.
Allowing others to fork for profit and give nothing back is entirely the point of permissive licenses.
"Permissive" means exactly that developers are permitted to give nothing back. Licenses without this permission are generally copyleft.
> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together"
Not at all. That's the spirit of copyleft. The spirit of permissive licenses is that "I don't want developers to have to give anything back."
Usually this is done to deliberately allow private companies to profit off of the work without having to disclose their proprietary improvements. That is, presumably, why MIT and Berkeley licenses are permissive: they moved IP out of the university system into silicon valley as a type of indirect economic stimulus.
> This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing.
The open core model never got much sympathy from the community or customers. The only reason there are people siding with ELK here is because the other side is the eminently unlikable Amazon. It also never worked very well.
Yes, you can sustain a company with it, and even make it large. But it's limited in size and any idea that you can get VC money on a large evaluation and things will go smooth is ridiculous. The model also has a limited lifetime, after what you'll see your business slow down or you'll have to fight against your customers. It certainly can last enough to make people rich, but it's not sustainable, unless you diversify your software. None of that is caused by cloud providers.
> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product.
Therein lies the flaw in the argument. If a company decides to develop something and open source it, it's not a product. If the company chooses to assign their time and resources to help develop it, great, but the moment it no longer becomes beneficial for them to keep supporting it, they'll drop it and leave it to the community.
Many companies invest time and resources into furthering open source projects without being the owner/creator of it. This is no different, whether they created it in the first place or not - they chose to open source it.
Building your business around something that you give away for free will always be a terrible business model.
> Building your business around something that you give away for free
Although it’s great for new entrants to the market who’re looking to build mindshare and marketshare. Because it’s hard for incumbents to compete with Free.
“Open Source bait and switch” has been a thing for a while now. Elastic is just the most recent/high profile example.
If every legal agreement were interpreted by internet commenters' impression of its "spirit", what's the point of all that fancy language anyway? There is no universal definition of "open source/FOSS" or what its spirit might be, which is why everyone uses concrete licenses.
It's Elastic's fault. I support their new license and wish they had picked it from the start; but they didn't. If you explicitly grant someone permission to use your hard work in a certain clearly defined way, you can't be surprised when someone uses it in that way.
If taking an open source product that is released under a license that allows you to use in some ways and then using it that way and making money off it somehow is considered to be "exploiting open source" then yes, Amazon is guilty of that.
I for one wouldn't use that word in this use case. They are just one of the many companies that legally use the product to make money with it.
EDIT: While on this subject, does that mean Amazon is "exploiting open source" by building and selling products using their own Android fork off the open source code and not paying Google for it? :)
> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.
I don't get how you came to this conclusion.
If Elastic goes bust, why would Amazon suddenly drop support for product? They have customers paying millions for the service, why the heck would they drop it?
If anything I would expect Amazon to keep the service and work harder to ensure good service, so they can absorb that portion of the market not being served.
I dont't agree with "If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported."
Unlike Google, Amazon is fantastic about supporting older AWS products. I can't think of any off hand that are completely gone. There are some that might be deprecated that you can no longer create new ones of though. An ancient database service comes to mind but I can't recall it's name.
So Amazon forking ES is then ensuring that if Elastic dies, ElasticSearch doesn’t go away, right? Part of the problem here really is that if I am using AWS for the rest of my stack, why would I run my search elsewhere, introducing latency, etc? Elastic’s opportunity was to approach AWS and try to get bought. But their business model really isn’t as good as it seems.
So if we assume the level of service is not much better, AWS is the more prudent choice, no? So trademark issues aside, AWS does ES better than Elastic?
To me that would depend on whether AWS Elasticsearch is actually profitable at that price point, or whether they are running at a loss to grab market share.
The quality of the service you get depends on if AWS makes a profit?
Also, do you think they make a profit on the bare EC2 instance? If so, why do you think that running a few management scripts that manage ES running on it would add up to more than $0.094/hour?
After all that twisting you're doing, not clear if you understand what the ALv2 is about. It is what it says, not whatever subjective "spirit"s you're trying to twist into it.
To add a voice in support of your comment, I agree with you. Amazon and others is why we can't have nice things.
I'll quote Bill Burr here:
> Just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's right.
And just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Because of this shitty behavior, we will need to write new licenses to restrict who can do what with our software. Society moves at the pace of its slowest members. I guess for opensource, that's "at the pace of our most exploitive and cut throat business".
ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. From the ES perspective, their FOSS contributions were done in good faith which basically boil down to, "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free".
AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.
You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate.
Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.