If your organisation uses the open source versions of either Elasticsearch or Kibana in its products or projects, it is now at risk of being forced to release its intellectual property under terms dictated by another.
Yeah, GPL is much better, but it’s still no guarantee that they did actually foster a community equipped to continue development.
They can (knowingly) fuck that up by:
Not pulishing documentation.
Not accepting outside contributions.
Accepting outside contributions, but only under a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which allows them to re-license the contributed code.
Not mentoring outside contributors.
Not open-sourcing everything that’s required to actually make the software useful.
Making it only profitable for themselves (e.g. Android pays for itself via the Google ads that you can integrate into your app with a handful of clicks)
Putting more development effort in than any fork could.
And these strategies work especially well, if you’re developing:
a platform (where a competing fork will need to stay compatible with you at first)
a centralized communication service (where you have natural friction, because no one wants to leave, because none of their contacts are elsewhere)
security-critical software (where using a fork is potentially risky)
Yeah, GPL is much better, but it’s still no guarantee that they did actually foster a community equipped to continue development.
They can (knowingly) fuck that up by:
And these strategies work especially well, if you’re developing:
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