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

elastic.co

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

#101

Post by smugworth »

zokier wrote: post #90
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…

> But those days are gone I have to strongly disagree here. Stuff like Kafka from LinkedIn, Envoy from Lyft, Prometheus from Soundcloud are just the tip of the iceberg of people writing tools because they need them, not because they are in the business of making infrastructure software. I believe that selling software, be it foss, open core, or fully proprietary is not good business model, neither from business nor f…

Funny you should mention Kafka. Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, and Neha Narkhede, formerly of LinkedIn who worked on Kafka, left to form Confluent. They provide support, managed cloud, and licenses for their own flavors of Kafka and ecosystem add-ons, and recently made license changes to their open source add-ons to block providers like AWS from offering them as SaaS as well.

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

#102

Post by hypto »

farnulfo wrote: post #56
hypto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can find the link to the OSS in the notes: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch

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

#103

Post by hypto »

wgjordan wrote: post #43
hypto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> actions? I think this is speaking for itself: [link] The link is to a packaged, binary distribution of the 'OSS only' features, the assertion was regarding 'significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base'. The two are not the same. Also, from the release notes linked to from that page, Amazon's assertion that 'neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is pr…

> Amazon's assertion that 'neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary'

Which is a wrong assertion, you can clearly see that it is an under Licence feature by the X-pack mention: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr... above the name of the feature.

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

#104

Post by sokoloff »

hodgesrm wrote: post #95
timdorr wrote: post #6

For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961

Clicking through to the AWS blog article [1] we find this: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. This was part of the promise the maintainer made when th…

I think it’s fine for Elastic to seek to go to a non-open-source license (whether source-available or not) for new developments or portions of their code. It’s also fine for others, including AWS, to take the open-source portions and fork/continue developing on the open source fork. In such a situation, I’d expect open to win over proprietary.

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

#106

Post by bigiain »

hodgesrm wrote: post #95
timdorr wrote: post #6

For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961

Clicking through to the AWS blog article [1] we find this: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. This was part of the promise the maintainer made when th…

Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit.

Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None.

Same as they owe me nothing.

By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in that you can always use the code and license you've been using - but there's no way anybody can make it a "responsibility" of a maintainer to to anything in the future. They could die, they could get bored, they could get an all-encompassing job, they could get a family, they could get venture capital and license any future work with a non-open source license (as Redis and Elastic have done, at least in some people's view).

The "the promise the maintainer made" was "here's some code, under GPL or aGPL, or Apache Licence, or Artistic license of BSD three clause, or whatever the promise at the time was. Take it or leave it. No future responsibility assumed or enforced. They might even have a track record of releasing more stuff under the same license/promise. But they can stop or change things whenever they want.

If Amazon wants the maintainers to do anything else (including ever committing another line of code or fixing a bug), they can wait for them to do (or not) it at their discretion, or they can pay the maintainer (or someone else) to do it (and then, depending on the license, potentially be required to release that code under the same license.

Sorry for the rant, but that line caught my eye too, and I got immediately pissed off at Amazon's sense of entitlement there. No open source maintainer owes you shit. They've shared what they've shared, and you can take it or leave it, but you taking it doesn't place any obligation or responsibility on them.

(deep breath)

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

#107

Post by bigiain »

ldubost wrote: post #78
amirathi wrote: post #20

Why 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…

While as an open source software and company creator I highly connect to the emotional content of his response and feel the pain for Elastic when it comes to the competition by Amazon, I do agree that he does not address the factual issues at hand and uses badly the word "open" for stuff that is "shared source". One aspect Elastic is also not directly attacked on and therefore not addressing is the choice of features…

> and uses badly the word "open" for stuff that is "shared source".

This is my only complaint with what Redis/Elastic/Mongo et al are doing lately.

I 100% support their right to change their licensing terms. Applaud them even - I'm fascinated to see if their attempts at new business models will work out medium/long term.

Doing that and still claiming to be "open source" is wrong. It's co-opting a term that while not solidly defined, is universally understood to mean something different to what they're offering. They're lying to their users and customers.

Elastic are muddying the waters in a grey area - where you can build Apache2 licensed or Elastic's new non-FOSS licensed versions from the same download. I reckon they need to cole clean and make if very clear that they're "partially open source".

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

#108

Post by benatkin »

Elastic, like Redis and MongoDB before it, decided that Open Core isn't enough, but that they need to go against the Open Source Initiative (a grassroots organization that represents the Open Source movement very well, and runs https://opensource.org/ which contains the open source definition) and confuse users by misusing the well understood, but non-trademarked term "open source". This phrase in the post from the article:

"When others closed down, we opened up."

...links to another article called Doubling Down on Open [1] where they say introduce their source available strategy and in some places call it open source (with and without capital letters) and in other places differentiate between it and open source.

Please don't call things Open Source that don't fit the Open Source Definition. You have a right to do so since it's not trademarked, and I'll defend that right, but it adds confusion (the D part of FUD). And while the OSI doesn't have a trademark to Open Source (perhaps rightfully so since it's a generic term, though more generic terms like Apple have been trademarked), they do own opensource.org.

[1]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open

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

#109

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bigiain wrote: post #106
hodgesrm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicking through to the AWS blog article [1] we find this: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. This was part of the promise the maintainer made when th…

Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit. Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None. Same as they owe me nothing. By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in tha…

Maintainers are certainly free to adopt a "take it or leave it" attitude if they want.

But most maintainers (including Elastic) don't want that. They proudly declare that their developers and users are a community, and they're steering the community to produce a great and open project on an ongoing basis. The maintainers certainly have a responsibility to follow through on such promises - or at least, if Amazon is correct and they aren't following through, they have no right to complain about a hostile fork.

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

#110

Post by scriptkiddy »

sciurus wrote: post #96
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…

The fact that the company behind rethinkdb went out of business and the community has been unable to keep it alive? https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/next

I mean, the core had 3 commits just last month. Some of the client libraries are much more active:

https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-python/commits/master https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-rs/commits/next

Sure, that's not a ton of development, but at least it's actually, really, open source.

In addition, the software itself doesn't really need much improvement. It does what it's supposed to do very well and the client libraries are fantastic.

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