open source, elastic, amazon

[rjf]

It's been quiet here. It occurred to me that there might be some

parallel to Sage, or at least a cautionary tale, from the travails

of Elastic  or Elasticsearch and Amazon Web services.

Any of you closely following this dispute?  My very very

superficial take on this is that Someone (= Amazon) has

monetized Someone else's open source.

Just an historical note.  Many years ago IBM software was

free, because you could only run it on IBM hardware.  

That changed.

If we are in a situation where the software is free but you

can only (effectively) run it on AWS -- because of the AWS

ecosystem -- is it sort of the same?   Is this a problem that will 

hit other open source projects? Or has this already happened?

As I said, I haven't studied this, and may have misconstrued

the nature of lawsuits etc. Are there people with well-informed

opinions willing to venture comments here, or suggest pointers?

(that is, pointers to educated commentary, not random rants...)

Best wishes for the holiday season!

Richard Fateman

[William Stein]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 3:33 PM rjf <fat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's been quiet here. It occurred to me that there might be some
> parallel to Sage, or at least a cautionary tale, from the travails
> of Elastic or Elasticsearch and Amazon Web services.
>
> Any of you closely following this dispute? My very very
> superficial take on this is that Someone (= Amazon) has
> monetized Someone else's open source.

Some of us (including me) monetized Sage (via https://cocalc.com) and
this made a top Sage contributor (N. Cohen) angry. I suspect he read
the GPL and realized that a big point of the GPL is that it doesn't allow
discrimination against groups of users (e.g., those who monetize), unlike
other licenses like "no military use" or "academic use only" licenses.
Possibly as a consequence, he stopped contributing to Sage.

> If we are in a situation where the software is free but you
> can only (effectively) run it on AWS -- because of the AWS
> ecosystem -- is it sort of the same?

Do you know of any nontrivial free open software that can only run on
AWS? I don't
know of any. Usually if software is written in a way that can
only run on AWS, it is likely proprietary. E.g., there's certainly an
absolutely massive
amount of closed source software that only runs on AWS, and that software might
even go so far as to hardcode a lot about the specific deployment
right in the software.
But here I'm thinking of the software that underlies many SAAS apps.
But I don't
know of any instances like this where the SAAS app is free and open source.

Alright, I'm going back to work on my closed source SAAS software that only runs
on Google Cloud Platform...

-- William