Wow elastic seems salty. I don't think this blog post was a great idea. While I understand that they need to monetize their project, I have been put off by them putting their security features behind a paywall. They literally advertised "Security" as non-existent on their XPack pricing page for their basic free plan.
Furthermore, I am still laughing about how the author litteraly wrote that Amazon "bluntly copied" them, "sadly, painfully, with critical bugs".
On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
11–20 of 131 posts
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#12I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit. If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro. Anyone have a different take?
Just my 2 cents. I don't care about Amazon's distro, I think it won't work. Others have tried, e.g. MariaDB vs MySQL, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Time will show though...
Edit: The thought was about big companies with their own agenda behind open source initiatives. Sorry about confusion.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#13Lot of bitterness about people forking and bundling ES. If it was so painful for Elastic maybe they should have gone for a more suitable model - you get everything open source and pay for support and priority /early access to security updates. Unlike the current model where you get basic features as open source and have to pay for and use different license if you want to use essential features like monitoring and per…
> pay for support and security updates.
Impeding security updates seems rather unethical. Unless you mean backports to old/stable versions, which is still iffy in my mind but does at least maintain a way to stay secure for everyone.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#14It would be interesting if someone pushed a PR that contains more or less all the "secret sauce" of X-Pack, and see what reasons they'd use for rejecting it. Clarification: Not push X-Pack itself, but features comparable. Like they suggested people do in the post.
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Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#15I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit. If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro. Anyone have a different take?
Just my 2 cents. I don't care about Amazon's distro, I think it won't work. Others have tried, e.g. MariaDB vs MySQL, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Time will show though... Edit: The thought was about big companies with their own agenda behind open source initiatives. Sorry about confusion.
What pattern are you seeing in those examples? Most Linux distros today ship with LibreOffice and have MariaDB in-repo. From where I sit, the open forks won.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#16I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit. If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro. Anyone have a different take?
Just my 2 cents. I don't care about Amazon's distro, I think it won't work. Others have tried, e.g. MariaDB vs MySQL, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Time will show though... Edit: The thought was about big companies with their own agenda behind open source initiatives. Sorry about confusion.
Thanks. Grateful to hear your opinion.
I guess a big driver for me is a lot of the proprietary features (example: encryption in transit, RBAC, audit logging) seem absolutely basic to me. Not basic as in easy to implement, but basic as in as an operator I’ll need them for every type of logging/monitoring infra I’d ever spin up.
Worth noting I consider Elastic’s managed offering to be superior to AWS’ in a lot of ways. But personally I’ve always chosen to build my own setup off EC2
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#17With the rise of cloud computing, the effort by cloud providers to commoditize their complements, i.e., software, inevitably leads to this particular kind of conflict between companies backing OSS software who wish to deploy their own SaaS offerings and cloud providers with their own SaaS offerings. A common response is that OSS backers can build businesses based on support and consulting but I believe that's overly…
The post describes how Amazon offered more than a token engagement. Elastic rejected them, as such a partnership would have included "preferential treatment that would place them above our users". That's consistent with what I've seen from other OSS-backing companies; they want cloud providers to contribute to their community, but flatly refuse to go out of their way to enable it.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#18Lot of bitterness about people forking and bundling ES. If it was so painful for Elastic maybe they should have gone for a more suitable model - you get everything open source and pay for support and priority /early access to security updates. Unlike the current model where you get basic features as open source and have to pay for and use different license if you want to use essential features like monitoring and per…
> pay for support and security updates. Impeding security updates seems rather unethical. Unless you mean backports to old/stable versions, which is still iffy in my mind but does at least maintain a way to stay secure for everyone.
I meant priority/early access to security updates really. Updated my post to reflect that.
For example enterprises may want quicker access to well tested bug or security fixes - they can get that first and then the patches appear on GitHub for open source users.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#19Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. Elastic, mongo, Kafka, redis, all are being preyed upon.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#20Why write emotionally charged letter instead of one backed with facts? Amazon is claiming [1][2] that Elastic has been intentionally unclear about what part of Elastic stack is open source vs proprietary. It would best serve Elastic if they respond to that with facts.
If the claims are true, and done intentionally, it's a really bad move on part of Elastic. The ambiguity around licensing hurts all their users and not just Amazon.
[1] "Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary."
[2] "Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate"