2/18
Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.
🧵 A thread.
1/18
- "Forking is a last resort option."
- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."
3/18
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
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
6/18
7/18
8/18
9/18
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
It's that it:
1⃣ *is* the community,
2⃣ owns the trademark, and
3⃣ controls the infrastructure.
12/18
Of course, that's a powerful weapon and an incredible power imbalance in a community.
13/18
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
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
16/18
https://t.co/wuUJMh1RtX
17/18
The problem we\u2019re facing in the open source community is a mixup between, on one side, open source practices and norms, and on the other, open source licenses.
— Tobie Langel (@tobie) January 21, 2021
\U0001f9f5A thread. https://t.co/iVXwnlZ0XI
More from Tech
I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.
I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.
Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.
And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.
God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.
For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.
That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
The tragedy of revolutionaries is they design a utopia by a river but discover the impure city they razed was on stilts for a reason.
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) June 19, 2016
I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.
Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.
And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.
God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.
For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.
That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
