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It's kind of an interesting perspective, just the fact that there's this OSD that's been drafted. I think the last time it changed was 2007, if I recall correctly. It's been a while back, but the criteria is changed. |
**Heather Meeker:** It was a long time ago. It basically hasn't changed in the time that I can remember looking at it. But I think what's interesting about that is that what OSI is doing is trying to create community consensus, and isn't wedded to this written definition. By the way, I say that because that's what they... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The fact that this OSD document hasn't changed in a while though - is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because you might say it's a bad thing because it doesn't reflect the way that modern software is developed and deployed into consumer's hands. And then you might say it's a good thing because it'... |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, I actually agree with you that it's kind of a good thing and a bad thing... It has worked pretty well over the years, and it's been remarkably robust over the years. Maybe it's time to revisit it, but that would also be a very long process, and possibly very controversial. There are other defi... |
I would say that whether the definition changes or not is one question. I do think that the transparency of the criteria for approval is very important to the community. |
**Jerod Santo:** What's at stake for these companies and organizations? Maybe they pick SSPL, whether or not it's an improved license or not - what do they win or lose based on that? Is it the marketing value of the term, is it goodwill? What's at stake? |
**Heather Meeker:** SSPL is used as part of a dual licensing model, and that is something that has been around for a long time, but it's not as popular as it once was. So it was really pioneered by MySQL, and so what they did was they said "Here's our software, it's under GPL (actually, they used a variant of GPL), and... |
So the strong copyleft licenses like GPL, and then later AGPL, and then finally SSPL, were all used -- in other contexts as well, but as part of these dual licensing initiatives. The reason that companies adopted them in a dual licensing strategy is that they were intending that people who are using the software commer... |
So then companies that were doing dual licensing models moved to AGPL when it was released in (I think it was) 2007... And SSPL is kind of a logical extension from that. So that's what they're trying to do - they're trying to allow people to use the software to test it out, to use it on a small scale, to use it to do c... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, because a cloud provider is a user essentially, right? I mean, at that point. |
**Heather Meeker:** Yes, that's actually a very perceptive comment. They are users, they're not distributors of software... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Heather Meeker:** It's a little bit of a complicated question, but I don't think there's too much doubt about that. So what that means, if you look (say) at the GPL, it specifically says that the license doesn't control the user of software... So that is where the issue comes to play... Because the cloud providers ar... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. And it's kind of odd \[unintelligible 00:33:21.14\] individual installations, but they are providing it to many. So it's still a one-to-many, it's still a many scenario. That seems to be where the issue is - the language of the future of software, the way it is, especially in cloud, is not a ... |
**Heather Meeker:** That's right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a single installation \[unintelligible 00:33:41.13\] user model. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. The means of distribution have changed. You're no longer sending a binary or source code to be compiled by a bunch of people, you're setting up a service and then charging for the service. It's a new(er) way of doing it. |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah. And copyright law treats use and distribution a little bit differently. I think that one of the things it maybe didn't anticipate properly was copying at scale in order to deploy software for hundreds or thousands of users. That is something that is relatively new. So as software licensing has... |
**Jerod Santo:** So when it comes to the letter of the SSPL, as reactions to Mongo initially, and now Elastic relicensing now... there have been critics, this is a debated thing about the topic - is it open source? Is it fauxpen source? ...which I think is a terrible term... \[laughter\] \[unintelligible 00:34:49.00\] ... |
**Heather Meeker:** Oh, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And she says she showed it to some IP lawyers, and she says "By using an SSPL project in your code you are agreeing that if you provide an online service using that code, then you will release not only that code, but also the code for every supporting piece of software, all under the SSPL. It's not a s... |
This is one interpretation of the license itself, saying effectively that there's perhaps this collateral damage that might happen because of the way that it's written. I would just love to hear, as the author of it - and I'm sure you've thought through these things - how do you respond to that, what do you think about... |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, I do think it's an oversimplification of the terms of the license. And don't get me wrong, these kinds of provisions are very complicated to read, so it's hard to reduce them to soundbites. I do think, on the question of business risk -- this is the way I look at it... I work with many, many c... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Heather Meeker:** And SSPL will be there, too. Any network copyleft license, meaning any license that has source code sharing requirements when you deploy over a network - those will all be on a stop list. So when you say it's a business risk - well, yeah, but already a lot of the copyleft licenses were defined as bu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you know. This isn't blindsiding you, this concern. It's known from the outstart. |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, of course. I mean, you would not expect people to greenlight SSPL software. What they would do is they would look at the license and say "Okay. This is okay with us, or it's not", and then they would make a decision about it. So that's something that users have to decide for themselves. |
I do think that what you quoted was overstating the risk somewhat, but you know, it's not useful to get into the details of it. You have to actually look at what the license requires, and it really is focused on particular use contexts, where people are providing software as a service. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanna say thank you to Vicky for writing this post, because I'm gonna quote one more and ask you about this... But very helpful, Vicky, in doing this call with Heather. She said, in regards to the SSPL, "Basically, it's a hostile proprietary license masquerading in open source clothing." |
**Heather Meeker:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Now it's getting vicious. |
**Heather Meeker:** I don't know what to say about that... \[laughter\] Proprietary is not open source, so it's really the same issue. I actually think if you look at the FAQs and announcements and so forth for Mongo and Elastic, they're pretty forthcoming. So I'm not sure what was is being masqueraded there... I think... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. The primary concern with the SSPL really is Section 13. A lot of the concern isn't really elsewhere in it. Obviously, it's a long license, but it's primarily Section 13, which describes what we talked about here, which is redistribution, restrictions on usage etc. |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah. If you were to redline it against AGPL, or even GPL 3, you would find that almost all of the substantive changes are in Section 13. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, Heather, thank you so much for joining us and explaining these things in ways that we could only fumble around in the dark to understand. I think it's been very helpful. Anything else that we didn't ask you, or anything about the license itself, or about the situation that is being discussed/deba... |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, I would remind people that the alternative is probably to go to a source available license. So if people are calling it names and so forth, what they should consider is that businesses are going to do what their business strategy requires. And so most companies that don't adopt something like ... |
I would say the reality is that most companies are actually going to use licenses that are truly restrictive, in a way, rather than SSPL. So I would say anybody who is using SSPL is at least trying to go down something like an open source route, even if you don't believe it's open source. |
**Break:** \[41:00\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Up next we're talking to Manish Jain, founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs. Manish came on this podcast a little over two years ago on episode 322, talking about licensing and relicensing Dgraph, so we thought it'd be fitting to get him on this episode as well... Here we go. |
**Jerod Santo:** So Manish, you and Dgraph are in a somewhat similar situation to Elastic. You're not Elastic, but you're set up a lot like Elastic. Is that right? |
**Manish R Jain:** That's true. Elastic's licensing, the way they have done it is that they had their open source code collocated with their proprietary code; it's all source visible, except the open sources under Apache, if I'm not wrong, and then the proprietary code is under Elastic... Similar to Dgraph - our open s... |
**Jerod Santo:** So as \[unintelligible 00:41:56.14\] where did you hear about this news? Did you read both sides? Have you read what AWS has had to say, and what's happened after the relicense? What's your purview? |
**Manish R Jain:** I mean, Hacker News, right? Hacker News went into flames over this, and that's where I came to know. No, I actually did not have a chance to look at what AWS actually had to say about that... But I've read through the multiple blog posts that Elastic released about what they're changing, and some of ... |
**Jerod Santo:** And you guys went through similar things as well, because we even have a whole show for you back in October of 2018, where we have you on the Changelog, "There and back again (Dgraph's tale)", an excellent name if you're a fan of The Hobbit... |
**Manish R Jain:** \[laughs\] I am. |
**Jerod Santo:** Like I am. Episode 322. So you've told us this story before; I guess we don't need to rehash the entire thing, but this has been an area of struggle for you and your company as well. |
**Manish R Jain:** I wouldn't say it's such a big struggle as something like Elastic, where Amazon is directly "attacking" them... For us it's more of like a forward-thinking scenario, where we realized that we love open source, and just like the founder of Elastic mentioned in his blog post, I got my feet tapped into ... |
So a similar trajectory there in terms of our interest towards the open source community. So yeah, I think the open source theme is similar there. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what's happened since is that AWS has forked both Elasticsearch and Kibana, and are going to carry on open source forks - community forks, as they're being pitched as. What do you think about that? Are they gonna succeed, are they gonna fail there? Is it a real risk for Elastic, or no? |
**Manish R Jain:** They did that once before with the Elastic Open Distro, and I think people were really concerned about how that would pan out... And Elastic's share price has not decreased too much, right? It hasn't gone into a spiral downward. So I guess they are doing well. They'll probably survive another attack ... |
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