Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.

🧵 A thread.

1/18

There's a lot of talk in the open source community about the cost of forking.

2/18
- "Forking is best avoided."

- "Forking is a last resort option."

- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."

3/18
Forking is seen as impractical and extremely expensive.

And that's a Really Good Thing(tm).

It's a forcing function for figuring out solutions that are broadly acceptable across the community.

4/18
The thing is, the cost of forking is mostly a function of three things:

1⃣ the size of the community that you can bring along with you,
2⃣ whether you need to rename your fork (who owns the trademark), and
3⃣ how much infrastructure you need to rebuild.

5/18
When that "community" is your employees, when you own the trademark, and control the infrastructure, then forking is really cheap. You just tell your employees to now contribute to your new fork, and you're done.

6/18
So the whole forcing function that the threat of forking has on the community is essentially lost. You don't get your way, and you fork.

7/18
Of course, with GPL, you can't just fork and close-up the source code, unless you've secured re-licensing right from all of your contributors. This is why the GPL+CLA combo is so prevalent with FOSS vendors.

8/18
With permissive licenses, there is no such need. You can literally embed the software into anything that is proprietary. As long as you give proper attribution and keep the open source license around FOR THAT PART OF THE CODE ONLY.

9/18
No one can stop me from forking Node today and releasing it as proprietary software.

10/18
What I can't do however is:

1⃣ move all of its community to contribute to my proprietary fork overnight,
2⃣ use the "Node" trademark, and
3⃣ leverage all of the existing infrastructure that isn't mine.

11/18
So the problem with Elastic forking ElasticSearch isn't the CLA, or its new license.

It's that it:

1⃣ *is* the community,
2⃣ owns the trademark, and
3⃣ controls the infrastructure.

12/18
So from the very start, none of what would have made forking costly was ever an issue for Elastic. At any point in time, Elastic could have forked at practically zero cost.

Of course, that's a powerful weapon and an incredible power imbalance in a community.

13/18
A key element of community stability (the shared threat of forking) was lacking from the get go.

The lack of open governance, of community trademark ownership, and of a genuine community of contributors beyond Elastic employees, are at the heart of the problem.

14/18
Folks like @beep and @adactio have started calling this "nominally open source."

I think it's more "Schrödinger open source."

Despite the license, you don't really know whether it is open source or not until you open the envelope and find out the cat is dead. 😿

15/18
With that framing in mind, ElasticSearch was never really open source. It was always in this unstable, "quantic" state of being both open and close, up until a decision was made and it was no longer open.

16/18
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We really need to start looking beyond licensing to understand open source and really assess the risk of buying into an open source project.

https://t.co/wuUJMh1RtX

17/18
Licensing clearly is a factor, but community health, governance, and trademark ownership are just as important.

It's time we truly recognize this.

18/18

More from Tech

1. One of the best changes in recent years is the GOP abandoning libertarianism. Here's GOP Rep. Greg Steube: “I do think there is an appetite amongst Republicans, if the Dems wanted to try to break up Big Tech, I think there is support for that."

2. And @RepKenBuck, who offered a thoughtful Third Way report on antitrust law in 2020, weighed in quite reasonably on Biden antitrust frameworks.

3. I believe this change is sincere because it's so pervasive and beginning to result in real policy changes. Example: The North Dakota GOP is taking on Apple's app store.


4. And yet there's a problem. The GOP establishment is still pro-big tech. Trump, despite some of his instincts, appointed pro-monopoly antitrust enforcers. Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim helped big tech, and the antitrust case happened bc he was recused.

5. At the other sleepy antitrust agency, the Federal Trade Commission, Trump appointed commissioners
@FTCPhillips and @CSWilsonFTC are both pro-monopoly. Both voted *against* the antitrust case on FB. That case was 3-2, with a GOP Chair and 2 Dems teaming up against 2 Rs.
So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manage control over limited areas in Iraq's few urban centers. Only ~8 in 100 Iraqi adults owns a personal vehicle. That rate is > 1 car/adult in America yet I have never seen any doctrine paper or work of fiction address this


We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.

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🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
#talesofkrishna https://t.co/E85MTPkF9W


Now Suniti was the daughter of a tribal chief while Suruchi was the daughter of a rich king. Hence Suruchi was always favored the most by Raja while Suniti was ignored. But while Suniti was gentle & kind hearted by nature Suruchi was venomous inside.
#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"