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**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Paul Dix:** So Amazon's claiming they have the moral high ground, and it's not true. They're just doing what's best for their customers and their shareholders. They're trying to optimize shareholder value. And obviously, all their customers are saying "Host Elastic for us." And then Elastic is trying to say like "Oh,... |
So Elastic is just upset because Amazon outcompeted them on the hosting front... Whereas other hosting providers, like Compose, and \[unintelligible 01:19:28.08\] and stuff like that, didn't really make a dent in Elastic's top line. So their claim, like "Oh, we have to do this" - like, no, you don't. You could have kep... |
This is actually one of the things that I agree with Amazon about, where they said the reason they created the open distro was because Elastic was polluting the open source repo with code under different licenses; under the Elastic license, and stuff like that. And what they've done now is they've gone all-in on that s... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're being permissive. |
**Paul Dix:** You're being permissive, but that also means that anybody could take your software and compete with you, which you have to be okay with. Anything that you can really call a platform is only a platform if the total economic activity of it outstrips that of any single vendor. So if you claim you're a platfo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...a monopoly, as you said in your tweets. |
**Paul Dix:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This comes back to something you were saying, and your stance for - not 2.0 in terms of Influx what you're doing, but the next version; I think you called it IOx, this maybe version 3.0, I'm not sure what you call it, but... You said by design it's permissive, and you've designed your architecture i... |
**Paul Dix:** Right, exactly. Their hope was that they would get this massively popular project - which it is; Elastic is a top ten database project, used the world over... But then they want -- like, the classic strategy is you spend a bunch of money to get optimized growth, and then once you have scale and a monopoly... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, Paul, fascinating stuff... Thanks for sharing your take with us. We definitely wanna have you back once you've rolled out this new - what do you call it, complementary model? |
**Paul Dix:** Yeah... |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and have some real-world results to report back how it's going, if it's serving the needs of you and your users and the open source community the way that you hope it will. We'd love to have you back on the show. |
**Paul Dix:** Yeah, just one closing thought on that really quick, which you reminded me of... I think for people to think about - can permissive open source survive in infrastructure software? I totally think it can... But I think the people who are producing it have to think ahead of time about how they commercialize... |
**Jerod Santo:** Hm. Stay tuned for results as they come out. Thanks, Paul. We really appreciate you coming on the show. |
**Paul Dix:** Alright. Thanks, guys. |
**Break:** \[01:23:53.13\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Next we're talking with Vicky Brasseur. Vicky has been in free and open source software for 30 years now, and she's been working with startups and enterprises doing open source and free software business strategy for quite a while. We use Vicky's post titled "Elasticsearch and Kibana are now busines... |
**Jerod Santo:** Alright, so here is Vicky Brasseur. Vicky, share with us first of all your position in the open source world, what's your angle at the conversation that we're having. Where are you coming from? |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** I do corporate strategy around free and open source software. So I work with startups and enterprises in various organizations to help them be more successful by contributing, releasing and just generally becoming a good citizen in free and open source software communities, in a way that's both... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. And you've been doing this for a while, it sounds like... |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** Yeah, I've been in free and open source software for over 30 years, and I've been doing this specific thing for quite a while now. |
**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. Well, we're glad we've got you on the show then. So you wrote a piece called "Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks", in which you lay out the case for that headline... Do you wanna share that with our audience, just the brief synopsis on why you believe that's the case with this ser... |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** Well, I mean, SSPL I'm going to leave to the lawyers. This is a legal matter, but it is not an open source license; it is however being portrayed as open, which everybody is going to interpret as open source, because that's just the way we speak about things. So I think that in and of itself is... |
But the bigger problem is that this is a license change. And if you are going to use something, you are agreeing to that license. If you upgrade Elasticsearch or Kibana to - I believe it was 7.11, if I recall... But if you upgrade, tacitly or otherwise you are agreeing to this new license, SSPL or Elastic license (it d... |
**Jerod Santo:** I see. So the sideswipe is a big problem; the fact that so many people might upgrade, and unbeknownst to them, their agreement with the software that they're running and the companies involved has changed. Is there no transparency to that change? Is it not something that people are aware of, or how doe... |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** The only transparency really is going to be that blog post - or I guess there's two blog posts now - with Elastic finger-wagging at Amazon, and also screwing over their entire community and ecosystem. But hey, that's their strategic decision to make; they seem to think that was the right move f... |
Yeah, that's really the only warning... You're otherwise not going to know, as far as I know. I haven't obviously looked at the code, but it doesn't make any sense that there'd be some sort of new clickthrough on Elasticsearch and Kibana, for instance. As you're installing them on your server, how are you going to conf... |
So it's very likely people are going to upgrade and tacitly agree to this, whether they know it or not... Or maybe they know about this new license and they decide not to upgrade at all. Well, now you're not getting security updates to this software, to Elasticsearch and to Kibana; that's another potential risk to your... |
Well, that free version is now going to get relicensed and you're going to be screwed, but if you're building a company on top of this open source software and your company relies upon it, and you're not already paying for some sort of support, either from Elastic or someone else, you're also putting your company at ri... |
So there's a lot of really important, strategic things that people need to be considering when they are selecting open source software, and you need to remain aware of your entire free and open source software supply chain... Because as we are seeing right here, it can shift out from under you. You can have license cha... |
So there's a lot of risk there for a company, and most companies I've worked with are completely unaware of this. It's potentially a disaster waiting to happen. As we all know, this is what happened with that credit reporting thing... It starts with an E... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Equifax. |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** Equifax, thank you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** I've been saying Elastic so often, that's all I can think of. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the only E in your brain, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** We're here for you. |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** Exactly. Thank you, guys. Yeah, Equifax was not paying attention to their open source software supply chain. They had a piece of software, and I believe it may have been Apache Struts, or something like that, that had been upgraded to fix a security hole, but they hadn't bothered to upgrade it ... |
So if you're not paying attention to stuff like this, not only Elastic, but the larger picture, you are just one bad day away from being the next Equifax. And do you want to do that? |
**Jerod Santo:** Is there a right way that Elastic could have done this? ...in terms of, just forget the decision, the SSPL, but let's say I just want to change my license. Is there a correct -- do you have to start a new project with the new license? Is there like a best practices for changing a license that doesn't s... |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** For an open source project -- there's obviously many different ways you can do it, and Elastic has their perspective, which is going to come from a very corporate perspective, "We're looking to make money", and then the community will be coming from a different perspective. So you can have diff... |
This caught everyone by surprise. That shows that Elastic is not respecting the community and the people who have been contributing, and who rely on this software. So they have essentially looked at their ecosystem and said "Yeah, we don't care. We don't care what you're doing, because all we want to do is screw over A... |
So they should have communicated, they should have told people "This is going to be coming." Maybe they should have done it, for instance, at version 8.0... |
**Jerod Santo:** A major version. |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** ...rather from 7.10 to 7.11. Yeah, go to a major version. Maybe that would have been smarter. Maybe cut a major version right there. Just do that. Maybe you could have forked it internally, and start developing internally, and then leave the open source project alone for other people to build u... |
There's lots of different options they could have done, but the one thing they should have done and did not, was communicate with their ecosystem, with their community. They popped this on everyone, and it was kind of rude. They've violated the trust of their community, and you can't really get that back at this point.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Somewhat to Elastic's credit - and maybe I'm wrong by even saying this - but it seems like they've gone through a lot. Shay, the CTO of Elastic mentioned the litigation, and the behind-the-scenes discussions... And I think from the outside it might be easy to say "screwed over", but the nuance there... |
**VM (Vicky) Brasseur:** I know that this is a podcast, so people can't see me, but picture me rolling my eyes right now... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... |
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