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With today's relicensing to SSPL Elasticsearch and Kibana are no longer open source but are instead business risks (anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (2 children)

I think that's party why I prefer GPL licenses over more permissive ones. A GPL license is essentially a declaration that one wants a community built around the software. A permissive license like Apache/MIT is saying, well I reserve the right to sellout later if I feel like it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

Really good points