Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
I don&#x27;t think most of Amazon&#x27;s behavior actually violates any norms and values of traditional open source communities.<p>I think instead we are finding that norms and values of traditional open source communities are in some ways contradictory&#x2F;inconsistent; that there can be competing interests where it isn&#x27;t true that either one of them is the one that &quot;opensource norms and values&quot; privileges; or that the traditional &quot;norms and values&quot; don&#x27;t necessary lead to the world that enthusiasts had fantasized about.<p>In a lot of these discussions, I think the underlying basic thing is that some are alleging, often implicitly, that included in the &quot;norms and values of open source&quot; are that if anyone is making money from value provided by open source, it should be authors of that open source, or at least they should get a cut.<p>I don&#x27;t think that is in fact one of the traditional norms and values of open source community.  In some ways it&#x27;s even counter to the tradition.<p>The actual world&#x2F;ecosystem around open source has evolved to be very different than the one imagined by traditional norms and values though. Compare to how apache httpd was originally written -- 6 or 8 people, each from a different organization, collaborated on company time each getting paid by their employer, to produce something of value to all of their employers, where the only desired &#x27;profit&#x27; was the thing being available for all to use.<p>That is sort of a stereotypical traditional fantasy of open source. It is of software being created <i>without a profit motive</i>, in an ecosystem where people would contribute to such things on &#x27;company time&#x27; (they had a steady salary from some company already). The more people using the software you wrote, the <i>better</i>, and you never wanted a cut of their profits -- that is the fantasy of traditional open source norms and values.<p>That is not the world we ended up with though.<p>So the problem is that now it is &quot;obvious&quot; to some people that if we wrote the the thing, and then formed a company <i>around</i> that thing we wrote -- it&#x27;s not &quot;fair&quot; if someone else is making money from it without giving us a cut.<p>But this isn&#x27;t a value encoded into open source licenses at all, and that wasn&#x27;t an oversight, it was intentional because this wasn&#x27;t in fact a traditional &quot;norm and value&quot; of open source at all, and in fact it is in some ways <i>counter</i> to the actual traditional norms and values, one of which I would say was: Your desire to make a profit from this code should not in fact be allowed to prevent anyone else from using it.  It is ElasticSearch which is acting contradictory to norms and values of open source in believing nobody should be able to use their software without giving them a cut of profits from it.<p>These disputes will keep happening, not because some companies are violating the &quot;norms and values&quot; of open source, but because the actual traditional norms and values of open source are increasingly unable to power a sustainable economy where people can get paid (in the manner they think they deserve?) while producing open source.