The real question is whether Elastic will continue the benefit of externals creating pull requests against their (now) non OSS code base. I for one have some reservations about that. Kind of the whole point of having an OSS code base is getting externals to put in their time and effort.
I'm hardly a major contributor but I have provided some fixes over the years. This license is a bit of a deal breaker for me and I'm not likely to volunteer more time on this. I charge premium rates for commercial software development. I'm sure most bigger companies would also not be very eager to put any time and effort into this code base under this license where in the past this would have been less controversial with e.g. legal departments doing due diligence.
No amount of "clarifications" is going to fix that. It's not a problem of people stubbornly misunderstanding: it's people disagreeing with them. They'll be dealing with negative press and FUD for years to come around essentially any press release, announcement, or other bit of news in the foreseeable future. IMHO it's actually bad for business. And it seems the stock price is trending down the last few days; so maybe it's not just me. Not to late to correct this mistake, just saying. I assume share holder value was the driving force here. Not served by any of this apparently.
As for forks, I don't think Amazon has the right people currently to do anything more than very minor/trivial updates. I doubt that they will fix this by putting a large product team together to actually try to innovate. That would involve poaching people from Elastic or other projects. Easy to predict, because so far they haven't in the two years of opendistro having been around. I don't know about crateDB but I think they are a fair bit smaller than Amazon; so it's doubtful they can keep up much. I guess for them, the key thing is actually keeping up with Lucene updates.
> The real question is whether Elastic will continue the benefit of externals creating pull requests against their (now) non OSS code base.
SSPL is still open source, it's just aggressively copyleft. (Note that Crate is upset about them going GPL, not going SSPL.)
As for the question, depends how much their code diverges... Shoudln't be any reason Elastic can't continue to absorb contributions made to Amazon's Apache-licensed fork, until they move too far apart for the code to be relevant.
It's not an OSI endorsed license. Elastic insists on copyright transfers for any code contributions as well, so that makes contributing under a different license not possible (their choice).
Crate is upset because they've created a significant derivative work which complicates their business under the new license. Apache 2.0 is intentionally designed to support this kind of thing; which is why it is a popular license for companies working together on OSS projects.
Copyright transfers like Elastic is practicing are of course a big risk for such companies. IMHO, any such projects has long term challenges. Most long lived OSS projects have a multitude of copyright holders. E.g. re-licensing Linux would be very impractical as it as many thousands of contributors some of whom have passed away (i.e. their families inherited the copyright). That's a strength of that project; it's forever stuck on GPL2, which provides enough wiggle room that the likes of Google, Samsung, and many others can use it to create software for their products.
Amazon's work is of course less significant but this license is designed to prevent derivative works from being likely to succeed commercially. Even Amazon's use which technically did not involve actually modifying the source code (not a single line, they used a binary OSS release provided by Elastic and added plugins) would be illegal under this license. That's not open; sorry.
I'm hardly a major contributor but I have provided some fixes over the years. This license is a bit of a deal breaker for me and I'm not likely to volunteer more time on this. I charge premium rates for commercial software development. I'm sure most bigger companies would also not be very eager to put any time and effort into this code base under this license where in the past this would have been less controversial with e.g. legal departments doing due diligence.
No amount of "clarifications" is going to fix that. It's not a problem of people stubbornly misunderstanding: it's people disagreeing with them. They'll be dealing with negative press and FUD for years to come around essentially any press release, announcement, or other bit of news in the foreseeable future. IMHO it's actually bad for business. And it seems the stock price is trending down the last few days; so maybe it's not just me. Not to late to correct this mistake, just saying. I assume share holder value was the driving force here. Not served by any of this apparently.
As for forks, I don't think Amazon has the right people currently to do anything more than very minor/trivial updates. I doubt that they will fix this by putting a large product team together to actually try to innovate. That would involve poaching people from Elastic or other projects. Easy to predict, because so far they haven't in the two years of opendistro having been around. I don't know about crateDB but I think they are a fair bit smaller than Amazon; so it's doubtful they can keep up much. I guess for them, the key thing is actually keeping up with Lucene updates.