Anonymous Hash

> As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself.

You very profoundly and deeply misunderstand what the SSPL actually says, which is understandable because Elastic have helped promulgate this misinformation. Please go read the license. It is not straightforward, it's very vague and exposes an organization to enormous uncertainty. If you don't want to read the license itself, then start with https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearch-and-kibana-are-now-business-risks

Additionally, organizations that commit to running free software, are forced to drop Elasticsearch now (or more accurately, they're all going to just run the best fork of 7.1.0 and call it a day). So Elastic's statement that it doesn't impact users is just a complete lie.

Finally, this whole discussion is irrelevant because the license change won't actually protect Elastic's business. Amazon is going to behave no differently, except that now they have a better codebase to work with because they don't need to worry about Elastic rejecting pull requests that cannibalize their proprietary features.

> You may disagree with this strategy, but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Because I think there is an issue of how people can sustain a business centered around open source.

Absolutely not, I refuse to explain that for you, because you're…

I would encourage people to read the article. VM Brasseur has a click-baity title, which is fine, but the point they are making is actually a bit more subtle. I'll quote from the article:

> There is a great number of potential business models, but “open source” is not one of them. It is, instead, one of the many tools that can be employed in order to make a selected business model work as expected.

> Therefore open source ... does not ... concern itself with business any more than food concerns itself with business. If there is a business that has a business model that is not living up to expectations, and if that business model uses open source as one if its tools, it’s illogical to blame open source for the failure.

The gist of the article isn't "open source and business are incompatible", rather, it's saying "don't blame open source for a failure of your business".

VM Brasseur focuses on open core specifically, a subset of an "open source business strategy", talking about what kind of expectations one should have engaging in that strategy, pointing to John Mark Walker's post on "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms" [0].

As an aside, I would like to point out that there are successes in some businesses pursuing an "open source" strategy, for a broader form of open source, either using open source as a key feature or because the technology was open sourced, abandoned and picked up by someone else. Arduino [1] comes to mind, where they used the open sourced…

If your organisation uses the Apache v2 licensed Elasticsearch or Kibana in its projects or products, it must now assume that it is at risk one way or another. It can upgrade to version 7.11 of these projects, thereby accepting the terms of SSPL and potentially also being required to release the code for its entire stack (a great deal of which it will not have the copyright over and will be unable to release, thereby potentially being in violation of SSPL). It can remain on version 7.10, but then it will no longer receive future updates, including important security fixes, thereby taking on another sort of risk.

https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearch-and-kibana-are-now-business-risks

This seems like someone with a ideological bone to pick. You don't need to opensource your software that uses their products.

They link this article of their's at the bottom:

https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2019/06/07/the-problem-with-amazon-and-open-source-isnt-amazon/

This tells you everything about their stance:

"If these companies actually cared about the projects, they would have invested the resources to build stronger communities around them. They would have reached out to Amazon, encouraged them to contribute back to the projects, and helped them to do so."

They're very pro AWS.