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Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary. Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code. This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid). Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate. In addition, the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular. This means that the majority of new Elasticsearch users are now, in fact, running proprietary software. We have discussed our concerns with Elastic, the maintainers of Elasticsearch, including offering to dedicate significant resources to help support a community-driven, non-intermingled version of Elasticsearch. They have made it clear that they intend to continue on their current path.
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When you publish open source, this is what you sign up for. As a publisher of open source software, I think "open core" does a huge disservice to the community as it feels deceptive. While there is no denying that creators needs to be paid, communities thrive on freedom and openness, and dual licensing takes that away.
Companies that publish open source must realize that they cannot make money from the "software". Open source gives companies a brand, that they can then leverage to do other services like support, consulting, hosting, merchandise, events, etc.
There was a time when service companies wanted to move into products because of high margins and artificial scarcity, but enough open source will ensure that software licensing is not a sustainable model to seek rent, and product companies must also move to services to be able to grow and sustain.
Reminds me exactly of an article I read this once. It's about the concept of companies commoditizing their product's complement.[1] AWS sells hosting/infra, for them lowering the entry barrier is beneficial. (I'm not taking sides just a thought)
Looking at it rationally, is furthering open source admirable when it's done by a community activist, and loathsome when it's done by someone who has a business interest in the exact same outcome? Why isn't the end result the most important part of the equation? If a stronger, open sourced Elasticsearch comes out of this, why is that a bad thing because it was backed by Amazon?
Just be honest, and don't pretend to be open source, when you are attempting to harness goodwill towards open source in order to make a buck. As pointed out, ES builds on the work of hundreds of other contributors to other open source projects. Is Elastic compensating those developers?
In my mind, a company that makes lots of free contributes to open source is an open-source-friendly company, but this thread and the other on the Elastic post made me realize just how many people think that a True Open Source Company (whatever that means) should prefer to go out of business to dealing in proprietary software.
I personally don't care for any of these puritanical viewpoints that deny economic realities (there's only so much a person or a collective can afford to give away for free, money doesn't grow on trees, etc). Open source is good, but thriving, sustainable open source depends on a symbiotic relationship with for-profit institutions.
Well said. The issue is most of the core devs don't want to touch "support, consulting, hosting". It's a mental block. They think they can skip around doing only the "cool" stuff.
The commercial entities associated with the most popular open source technologies are taking measures to protect themselves from Amazon simply taking their software and turning it into a service, whether it's introducing proprietary components or new licensing. Wouldn't be surprised if we saw AWS do something similar for Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, etc.
> Wouldn't be surprised if we saw AWS do something similar for Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, etc.
They started on their own Redis fork a while ago as ElastiCache has had baked in SSL for over a year and half now. While it's possible they've added it via an stunnel type software stop it, I'd bet for efficiency and simplicity it's baked into their internal fork: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-elasticache-now...
They already did their MongoDB-compatible NoSQL document database. Not sure what's under the hood but I assume an altered MongoDB engine adapted to their scalable cloud storage architecture.
" Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary. Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code. This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid). Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate. In addition, the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular. This means that the majority of new Elasticsearch users are now, in fact, running proprietary software. We have discussed our concerns with Elastic, the maintainers of Elasticsearch, including offering to dedicate significant resources to help support a community-driven, non-intermingled version of Elasticsearch. They have made it clear that they intend to continue on their current path. "