On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company • Hacker News Board

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#51

Post by spudlyo » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #30

It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party. When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 ) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing. When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either. It may be that the collectiv…

> I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source.

I believe you're conflating "open core" with with "open source". I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish. While this may be a blow to the open core FOSS business model, there are a number of other models that continue to exist that do not involve proprietary enterprise extensions.

While these models may not be attractive to venture capitalists, they can certainly provide a way for developers to make money.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#52

Post by scriptkiddy » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations.

That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead.

Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason to choose ElasticSearch over RethinkDb? ElasticSearch does have a larger ecosystem, but with how good RethinkDb's API is, I'm not entirely sure any 3rd party packages would actually be necessary.

Add to that RethinkDb's ability to do joins and changefeeds and this decision becomes a no-brainer for me.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#53

Post by throwaway12iii » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #39

throwaway12iii wrote: post #35

Remember that AWS pays the Open Source Initiative, and that their members often post on Open Source related topics here without disclosing their conflict of interest. Remember that AWS takes from developers, but doesn't give back anywhere near what they have made from the communities work. Rather than supporting Elastic... they decide to make a hostile fork. AWS are a bunch of jerks.

> Remember that AWS takes from developers, but doesn't give back anywhere near what they have made from the communities work. For a "bunch of jerks" they sure do a lot of open source stuff. https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

For the amount they make off community work, they contribute a tiny amount.

Right near the top of their list (in your link) they brag about contributing to Linux. Let's see how well their brag stacks up? Looking at the contribution reports on Linux, are AWS in the top 10?

AWS are not even on the list. https://twitter.com/ibrahimatlinux/status/768631239683158016...

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#54

Post by KorematsuFred » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

I think a lot of open source people forget that large companies worry a lot about licenses and clarity around that. Without that clarity and control they get sued left and right and on this very forum we end up discussing how evil this large company has been.

Elastic search is a great product and there is no doubt about it. However I understand Amazon's viewpoint that it should be clear which part of ES are open source and which are not.

A the end of the day Amazon or Google can easily buuld a clone of ES from ground up.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#55

Post by newaccoutnas » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

I'm sure Shay et al have good intentions, but to have any degree of usability with elastic.co you need to buy x-packs which goes against the grain a little. I'd still like to have auth (not just basic-http) on personal projects.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#56

Post by farnulfo » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

hypto wrote: post #36

wgjordan wrote: post #34

Actions speak louder than words. Amazon's words [1] were backed up by action- specifically, the public release of Open Distro for Elasticsearch and several useful, advanced features under an Apache 2.0 license. This post from Elastic consists of vague claims of 'FUD' and of their commercial code being 'bluntly copied', without any further clarifying details or responsive action to back them up. (E.g., if you have rea…

actions? I think this is speaking for itself: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss What has Amazon contributed to yet? Repackage other open source projects that was already existing? I don't call it a contribution.

What is the path to get this link from front page ? I can't get it from the homepage: https://www.elastic.co/, "download" https://www.elastic.co/downloads/ : no download link for the oss distribution

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#57

Post by striking » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

shasts wrote: post #47

what would be the next move from Amazon? Open distro for Kafka, MongoDB and Redis, and all other successful opensource tools? Just don't know where Amazon is going with this approach of re-packaging existing opensource tools and calling it their opensource contribution.

Amazon is rewriting the proprietary enterprise features of ES from scratch and giving them away for free.

Also, their MongoDB "distro" is just "Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)". That's not going to be open source, because it took a lot of work to basically rewrite most of Mongo.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#58

Post by throwaway12iii » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #38

throwaway12iii wrote: post #35

Remember that AWS pays the Open Source Initiative, and that their members often post on Open Source related topics here without disclosing their conflict of interest. Remember that AWS takes from developers, but doesn't give back anywhere near what they have made from the communities work. Rather than supporting Elastic... they decide to make a hostile fork. AWS are a bunch of jerks.

What is the "Open Source Institute"? If you mean the Open Source Initiative, then yes, I have posted on open-source related topics here, yes, I am a member of the OSI (I joined... two weeks ago? mostly so I could vote for OSI board members who are committed to opposing corporate influence over the open source definition), and no, I do not have a conflict of interest. I paid the OSI $40 to join. I receive no money fro…

An Open Source advocacy group with cloud providers on their board, and cloud providers who pay them hundreds of thousands per year. Their mission is to be evangelists for their definition of Open Source. The one that benefits cloud providers.

Of course a lobby group like this should be transparent. But I don't expect a group like that with closed mailing lists to actually be Open.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#59

Post by brylie » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

scriptkiddy wrote: post #52

I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations. That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead. Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason t…

From what I gather, RethinkDB hasn't seen a release since July 2017:

https://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2.3.6-release/

The project may be transitioning to new governance.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#60

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

spudlyo wrote: post #51

jrochkind1 wrote: post #30

It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party. When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 ) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing. When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either. It may be that the collectiv…

> I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source. I believe you're conflating "open core" with with "open source". I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish. While this may be a blow to the open core FOSS business model, there are a number of other models that continue to exist that do not involve proprietary enterprise extensions. While these models may not b…

> I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish.

The question is, who is going to write open source projects at a complexity/polish level similar to ElasticSearch. And how are they going to pay their rent?

People working on it need to pay the rent somehow.

I am suggesting that the way people paid the rent while working on open source historically in the "first phase" of internet open source (doing it on the clock at jobs for which the open source was useful for their job role, but producing the open source was not their job) -- is no longer working to get software written at the complexity level of 2019 software, as software gets much more complex requiring more people coordinating with themselves and spending more hours.

I agree, at least for the sake of argument, that "open core" is distasteful and problematic. I believe it was a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living." It may not be a satisfactory answer. I'm not sure what other answers exist. If there aren't better answers, open source will shrink, including by "open core" and such.