The battle of open-source licenses
Earlier this year, Elastic reignited the open-source licensing debate when it announced it would be changing its license model to better protect its open-source code. Over the last couple of years, a number of companies — including Redis Labs, MongoDB, Cockroach Labs, and Confluent — have been switching their open-source licenses to avoid what they call “the big code robbery,” where cloud providers like Amazon take their successful open-source project, adopt and profit off it as a cloud service without giving back to the community.
“Cloud vendors do not care about monetizing FOSS projects, they are about getting more workloads running on their infrastructure — hence, to be the preferred destination for such workloads,” said CloudBees’ co-founder and chief strategy officer Sacha Labourey.
Confluent created a new community license, and MongoDB announced its Server Side Public License (SSPL) to combat cloud providers. In January, Elastic announced it would move its Kibana and Elasticsearch open-source projects to a dual license under the Elastic License v2 and SSPL.
