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Ask HN: Why isn't the Elastic license considered open-source?

by cabronerp on 3/1/24, 9:15 PM with 8 comments

My understanding is that it grants all rights except to provide a hosted version of it for money.

That seems very fair and open to me. You can use it. Self-host it. Modify it, etc. All the benefits of open-source, imo.

It just prevents the only thing I really care about if I'm trying to build an open-source business.

I guess my other question is, why are we -- as a community -- opposed to calling our software "open source" if we use the Elastic license?

  • by thesuperbigfrog on 3/1/24, 9:38 PM

    >> why are we -- as a community -- opposed to calling our software "open source" if we use the Elastic license?

    The term "Open Source" was created by a group that later became the Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/history

    By definition, a software license is not "Open Source" unless it meets all the criteria of the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd

    The Elastic license does not meet point six of the Open Source Definition:

    "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

    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."

    Therefore the Elastic license is not an Open Source license.

    It's your software. License it how you want.

  • by mindcrime on 3/1/24, 9:37 PM

    It's pretty simple: a substantial percentage (a substantial majority I'd wager) of people in the tech community consider the OSD[1] from the Open Source Initiative[2] to be the de-facto (as opposed to "de jure") definition of what it means to be "Open Source".

    Along with that, it's generally held that licenses with prohibitions like the Elastic License violate some combination of planks 1, 5, or 6 of the OSD.

    Now all of this is debatable, and the OSD isn't anything legally binding, but it is widely acknowledge and respected.

    [1]: https://opensource.org/osd

    [2]: https://opensource.org/

  • by theamk on 3/1/24, 9:49 PM

    One of the major benefits of open source is the lack of dependency on the original company. For example if I build a business on MySQL and it is suddenly bought by a commercial company famous for raising prices... it's not a problem, as it is an open source license and I can always switch to a forked version. This applies even if I prefer to pay someone for a hosted version of a database - one provider raises prices or goes out of business, I can switch to a different one with a modest migration effort.

    This is very much not a case with Elastic. If you build your business on their cloud offering (and use all the latest APIs), it's a great risk. They increase prices? You have to pay more. They go out of business? sucks to be you. The self-hosting alternative would be very disruptive as you'd urgently need to get operational expertise in running and tuning the services, and that's not a simple thing.

    So no, Elastic license is not providing major benefits of open source, and thus one should not call it "open source". It's a single-supplier commercial license. Nothing wrong with this, they wrote the code after all, but one should be aware of it when choosing a storage system.

  • by cabronerp on 3/1/24, 9:18 PM

    Full disclosure, I had the idea to move my project to the Elastic license, and then someone who runs an open-source business told me about how HN will rip me a new one if I say my software is open-source and licensed under the Elastic license. So I wanted to come straight to the source.