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Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again (www.elastic.co)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[D.N.A] Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called Open Source again. It is hard to express how happy this statement makes me. Literally jumping up and down with excitement here. All of us at Elastic are. Open source is in my DNA. It is in Elastic DNA. Being able to call Elasticsearch Open Source again is pure joy.

[LOVE.] The tl;dr is that we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks. We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.

[Not Like Us] We never stopped believing in Open Source at Elastic. I never stopped believing in Open Source. I’m going on 25 years and counting as a true believer. So why the change 3 years ago? We had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing. So after trying all the other options we could think of, we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't follow. ElasticSearch was only available under proprietary source-available licenses. Now, it's also available under the AGPL, which is open source, meaning ElasticSearch is now open source software. What part of this is deceptive or contradictory?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Because it does not comply with the Open Source definition?

SSPL violates these two:

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

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.

License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open source software.

ELv2 violates these four:

Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

Integrity of The Author’s Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of “patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

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.

Simply putting in the AGPLv3 does not remove unfair restrictions. I mean, SSPLv1 is not compatible with AGPLv3.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Do you... not know how multi-licensing works? You can use the project's code under the terms of whichever license you prefer, you don't use all three at once. Simply putting the AGPLv3 does remove unfair restrictions, because it means you don't have to use either of the proprietary licenses the project was previously only available under.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

This is getting so tiring because I've mentioned it earlier too - section 13 of AGPLv3 and SSPLv1 have different scopes. Just read this article by ScyllaDB - this is with respect to MongoDB, which has a similar licensing model. If it were "really" open-source, then RedHat wouldn't have removed MongoDB from their "free" repositories.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The SSPL is irrelevant, you pick the AGPL license and the SSPL doesn't apply to you.

Qt is dual-licensed as proprietary and LGPL and nobody complains about that, KDE is in most distro's repos. You pick the LGPL licensed version and you're good to go, the proprietary license doesn't apply to you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What benefits does the developer get from using both licenses, if the user gets to decide which one to use? Serious question, by the way. I truly don't know.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 weeks ago

The developer benefits from reaching more people, some of whom are likely to purchase the proprietary license. Or sometimes you dual-license just so that licenses are compatible. Each license has pros and cons for both the developers and the users.

Qt for example, the LGPL means you need to dynamically link to it, and if you ship your own Qt libraries you must provide the source code for it. But if you're a company that writes proprietary software and can't dynamically link, then you can purchase the proprietary license which allows you to do a lot more, but you're compensating the devs for it. And for the Qt devs that's good because either you pay them, or you use it for free but must share your changes with everyone.

For ElasticSearch, that makes it so Amazon can't just patch it up and sell the modified version without sharing what they changed. They wanted to add back a FOSS license to stop the bleed to OpenSearch which many in the FOSS community switched to purely for the license because even separate software should be compatible license-wise if you want a sustainable FOSS project. But the AGPL requires sources merely for being able to talk to it over the network, so Elastic gets the free dev work, or the juicy license payments. The other free licenses achieve similar goals with technical differences that might matter for the user. But as a developer using ElasticSearch maybe you do want to ship your software under the SSPL, so you can pick the SSPL version.

Dual-licensing MIT/GPL for example, you can build proprietary software, or GPL software where you can vendor it in as GPL-only as well, and thus guarantee your user their GPL rights.