> The point is not that they couldn't do this, but that it's a dick move which betrays the trust of their community, and is ultimately harmful to the goals of open source.
I understand that a re-licensing to proprietary from upstream it self is really annoying and hurtful to the open-source project itself. However the only distinction of upstream doing this with a CLA and somebody else is that upstream can reuse use the project name, infrastructure, etc.
Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else?
It could also be the beginning of something new: See OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.
>Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else?
Yep: the community is built around the upstream project, and has a lot invested in their continued existence as an open source entity. This move will force the community to start from scratch to build a new entity which continues to meet those guarantees - something Elastic plans to capitalize on by capturing more users on its paid offering while the open source community struggles to set up a new entity at the same level of sophistication from scratch.
The community is not without options, but that doesn't change the fact that what Elastic has done is wrong.
Note: HN has been rate limiting me rather strictly today, so I'm losing my ability to keep up with this discussion. Sorry.
> Yep: the community is built around the upstream project, and has a lot invested in their continued existence as an open source entity.
Ok, that was what I meant with 'upstream can reuse use the project name, infrastructure, etc.'. Probably a very big 'etc.' here.
So your point is more about that the contributors and the community helped build the brand and recognition of ElasticSearch, which is now, taken away from them.
That is a fair critique, IMO.
However, that Elastic as upstream of the project suddenly disappears for the community, I find is something, that unfortunately, many open source projects have to go through sooner or later.
>the community helped build the brand and recognition of ElasticSearch
and the software itself. Elasticsearch accepts patches from the public, albiet accompanied by a signature on the CLA that grants Elastic unfettered rights to do anything they want with the code.
>However, that Elastic as upstream of the project suddenly disappears for the community, I find is something, that unfortunately, many open source projects have to go through sooner or later.
Maybe, but it still doesn't make it right. This wasn't an accident, or the consequence of a company gradually succumbing to attrition. It was deliberately done for the profit motive in an already profitable company, and excused away with gaslighting and misinformation. This is why I chose to criticize them on my blog.
Often when licenses change, the old versions of the repositories, that are still under the old license are still available. Isn't that the case here as well?
Granted, employees of Elastic, might have unknowingly written code that is now under a proprietary license. But code of most other external contributors should still be under the APL2.0, right?
> Maybe, but it still doesn't make it right. This wasn't an accident, or the consequence of a company gradually succumbing to attrition. It was deliberately done for the profit motive in an already profitable company, and excused away with gaslighting and misinformation.
You are blaming a for-profit company for making supposedly for-profit decisions, which is nothing new. If you could show that their actions where dictated by short term greed (which is mismanagement in a for profit company), then this argument would bite more IMO.
A good argument for your critique is also their press release, where they try to explain 'nothing has changed' while in fact the license has.
> This is why I chose to criticize them on my blog.
Of course its a very annoying situation and IMO you are right in criticize them for causing it.
I understand that a re-licensing to proprietary from upstream it self is really annoying and hurtful to the open-source project itself. However the only distinction of upstream doing this with a CLA and somebody else is that upstream can reuse use the project name, infrastructure, etc.
Or are there any other consequences of upstream doing this vs. someone else?
It could also be the beginning of something new: See OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.