Amazon: Not OK – why we had to change Elastic licensing

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/programming

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  • Elasticsearch

    Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

    If I'm understanding correctly, most people/companies will want to use the Elastic License, which doesn't require any of the radical source code requirements of SSPL. However, if you can't meet the Elastic License requirements, such as if you're building an Elastic Cloud competitor, you are forced to use SSPL and abide by it.

  • Typesense

    Open Source alternative to Algolia + Pinecone and an Easier-to-Use alternative to ElasticSearch ⚡ 🔍 ✨ Fast, typo tolerant, in-memory fuzzy Search Engine for building delightful search experiences

    There are also alternatives like Typesense: https://github.com/typesense/typesense

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • linux

    Linux kernel source tree

    There is an explicit GPL linking exception that some projects use, the Linux kernel has something similar (explicit syscall exception)

  • cockroach

    CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database.

    They've made an additional post since this one, suggesting that they're considering the BSL. The BSL, with a reasonable usage grant, is a little more promising. Logically, it doesn't seem too problematic given the right usage clause (like CockroachDB's, which at least includes contractors in their "third-party" restriction-- unlike the SSPL). It ultimately falls back to open source and gains all of those advantages, is still usable by most open-source projects and doesn't strictly conflict with the GPL licenses. It looks like the OSI member might have some concerns over some things like revokability-- it'd be great if some of that can get resolved.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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