Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks
anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com
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.
  • Ephera
    7·
    4 years ago

    This is why I’m becoming more and more wary of projects that are just nominally open-source.

    If there’s no sovereign community, open-source projects can be killed off at a moment’s notice.

      • Ephera
        5·
        4 years ago

        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)
  • brombek
    21·
    4 years ago

    Wow, this license sounds like a ransom attempt :/

      • Ephera
        2·
        4 years ago

        Well, yeah, it is just more aggressive. But too aggressive for most, if not any use-case.

        E.g. do I need to publish the source code of my processor’s microcode? I don’t know, if that in particular is proprietary, but most Linux distros have binary bullshit somewhere down there.

        • brombek
          2·
          4 years ago

          Yeah, so from other info it looks like the scope of the license in much wider than of AGPL and includes other (not well defined) supporting software where in AGPL it only includes the software licensed. Also AGPL kicks in on modification of the software where the SSPL on mere use of it.

          So just the fact you install and run some program with SSPL would mean that you suddenly need to licenses who know what else. No other license does that.

      • Pectojin
        1·
        4 years ago

        It’s neither recognized by the FSF or the Open Source Initiative as free or open source software.

        It’s not free software.