11–20 of 60 posts
https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
Last time I was exploring this space, ElasticSearch was hands down better than solr from a "speed to market" and "developer experience" standpoint. Those things really matter. It's one of the reasons MongoDB got way more popular than it should have based on all the compromised built into the platform by default.
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive than AGPL. They are designed to protect a business model, not your rights as an end user.
So it irks me that the only perspective I see reliably is that Amazon is screwing everyone and not how startups are willing to take advantage of the good will and marketing bonus and then switch it up when they realize it can’t be reconciled with their business model. Continuing to call it “open source” is just insult to injury, imo.
https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
Compare to Postgres. Postgres will never die. Aurora is gaining serious traction; do you think the Postgres developers are concerned? Why would they be? Their livelihood, and their ability to develop Postgres, does not depend on it being the #1 database in the world.
Naturally, ODfES has a tether to Amazon. Amazon could decide to lock more features behind AWS ESS. Its not a perfect situation, but it is better than the one ES has been in for the past few years.
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to something much closer to shared source. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive tha…
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to something much closer to shared source. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive tha…
I'd love to have a license that grants FOSS rights to people but not to corporations. There are end users and then there are corporations monetizing FOSS and giving nothing back. On top of that the monetization is via SaaS which is a more closed computing model than commercial software. With SaaS you don't even have the data and everything you do is subject to total surveillance.
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to something much closer to shared source. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive tha…
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
I used to manage a licensed ELK cluster. The licensing was expensive (order of six figures) and was really only necessary for LDAP integration. Features like timelion were cool, but definitely not worth the price tag.
I migrated to an AWS-managed solution to for two reasons: 1) to alleviate the burden of managing a cluster, 2) get away from the onerous costs associated with licensing. Even thought it was more expensive to run a managed cluster, since, at the time, AWS limited the disk space per node. The cost savings was significant enough to warrant migration.
I realize that Elastic.co offers their own managed solution. But the version on AWS was an easier sell to management due to known costs and not having to deal with sales people.
I think a lot of OSS is having difficulty transitioning to a cloud-first model. The people making choices on tech stacks want to spend less time dealing with infrastructure and more time developing stuff. And this model of charging high licensing fees for "enterprise" features feels antiquated, and provides a large attack service for companies like AWS. What enterprise engineers really want are AMIs, or better yet, fully managed cloud interfaces, to bring up and manage OSS deployments. Something that lets us focus on the products we sell; not the ones we buy.
I believe that we need to rethink how OSS is delivered and how to make money from it. "Enterprise" support looks a lot different not than it did when Redhat was founded, yet the OSS business model remains eerily similar.
Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.
I understand why this is not ideal for Elastic-the-company, but is it a bad outcome in the longer term?
As someone who is happy open source exists but uses mostly proprietary software, this seems like a natural and expected response to an open source project adopting a more restrictive license.