<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ryukafalz</author><text>&amp;gt;So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn&amp;#x27;t sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it&amp;#x27;s unfair to call this a &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; that ES is now trying to close?&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s distribution requirement (enabling companies to avoid giving the software&amp;#x27;s users the freedoms associated with free software), so the AGPL was created for software that was meant to run on a server.&lt;p&gt;This is different: the point of contention here is not that Elastic&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s something that&amp;#x27;s pretty fundamental to both free software:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;p&gt;...and open source:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Freedom 0 is a feature, not a bug! It may be a &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; in Elastic&amp;#x27;s business model, but it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Now that said, I do think that taking FOSS and making it proprietary certainly does violate the spirit of free software. Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to have done that here, though - their fork is under the Apache 2 license.</text><parent_chain><item><author>cwyers</author><text>&amp;gt; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example.&lt;p&gt;So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn&amp;#x27;t sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it&amp;#x27;s unfair to call this a &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; that ES is now trying to close?&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I do think it&amp;#x27;s fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is worse than the AGPL, but I do think it&amp;#x27;s important to point out that it&amp;#x27;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!</text></item><item><author>ryukafalz</author><text>&amp;gt;What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t want others competing with them at all using their code.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s all free software after all!)</text></item><item><author>kodah</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t really get how people get this twisted.&lt;p&gt;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, &amp;quot;If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;AWS knows that if they take too much of ES&amp;#x27; market that they won&amp;#x27;t survive. If they don&amp;#x27;t survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there&amp;#x27;s an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be &amp;quot;we can all succeed together&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;s creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn&amp;#x27;t happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you should.</text></item><item><author>markphip</author><text>I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that.&lt;p&gt;AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been widely used and successful. It is up to Elastic to come up with a business model that works, not blame others if it is not.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>sokoloff</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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”.</text><parent_chain><item><author>cwyers</author><text>&amp;gt; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example.&lt;p&gt;So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn&amp;#x27;t sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it&amp;#x27;s unfair to call this a &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; that ES is now trying to close?&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I do think it&amp;#x27;s fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is worse than the AGPL, but I do think it&amp;#x27;s important to point out that it&amp;#x27;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!</text></item><item><author>ryukafalz</author><text>&amp;gt;What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t want others competing with them at all using their code.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s all free software after all!)</text></item><item><author>kodah</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t really get how people get this twisted.&lt;p&gt;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, &amp;quot;If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;AWS knows that if they take too much of ES&amp;#x27; market that they won&amp;#x27;t survive. If they don&amp;#x27;t survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there&amp;#x27;s an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be &amp;quot;we can all succeed together&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;s creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn&amp;#x27;t happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you should.</text></item><item><author>markphip</author><text>I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that.&lt;p&gt;AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been widely used and successful. It is up to Elastic to come up with a business model that works, not blame others if it is not.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch</url></story>