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Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

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Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#21

Post by liveoneggs »

api wrote: post #17
jchw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> not your rights as an end user. 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.

creative commons has many such licenses but then it's not Open Source

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#22

Post by shawnz »

fefe23 wrote: post #10

PSA: This site is basically an ad. And not one about Elasticsearch at that. I don't understand what all the noise is about. The new license does not make ES closed source, as far as I can tell. They re-license under the MongoDB server side license, which reads a lot like a rephrased AGPL to me. None of you had any reasonable expectation of getting a free Elasticsearch to begin with, and decades worth of free maintena…

> None of you had any reasonable expectation of getting a free Elasticsearch to begin with

That is sure what "Apache 2.0: now and forever", as they previously promised, means to me.

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#23

Post by latchkey »

Not too long ago, I tried to install the ELK stack to enable me to ingest some log files and easily view them on a web page. After many hours of digging through documentation, I gave up. The process was a train wreck of obscurity, complexity and heavy weight processes, just to do a relatively simple task.

I've been doing open source for 20+ years now and one thing that we still haven't seemed to get right is: a simple install process and good documentation.

ELK is dead to me, but not because of a license.

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#24

Post by jchw »

fefe23 wrote: post #10

PSA: This site is basically an ad. And not one about Elasticsearch at that. I don't understand what all the noise is about. The new license does not make ES closed source, as far as I can tell. They re-license under the MongoDB server side license, which reads a lot like a rephrased AGPL to me. None of you had any reasonable expectation of getting a free Elasticsearch to begin with, and decades worth of free maintena…

For what it’s worth, SSPL is NOT like AGPL. IANAL but...

AGPL is community oriented. With AGPL you have to contribute your modifications back even if you are only offering the application over the network and not in binary form. It extends the copyleft principle. It is still debated whether it even counts as open source.

SSPL is fascinating. Let me quote Section 13:

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version.

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

Emphasis mine. Basically “release the source for your entire stack.” That’s not the same thing as AGPL. Copyleft is concerned with linkage. This license seems to impose terms on entirely unrelated pieces of software. IANAL but I don’t even think this has been tested in court before.

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#25

Post by thruhiker »

hansdieter1337 wrote: post #3

Is anyone aware of an open source alternative for Kibana and Logstash (based on lucene)?

Fluentd (https://www.fluentd.org) is a great alternative to Logstash that I've had a lot of success with. It is easy to pair with Elasticsearch and Kibana and myriad other inputs and outputs.

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#26

Post by hodgesrm »

mrkurt wrote: post #5

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.

Maybe somebody who knows the history can answer this question: how was it that Elastic didn't just own the cloud service market before the AWS service showed up? They started in 2015 it appears. That should have been a good lead. [1]

[1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/announcing-support-for-elastic-c...

Edit: added source

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#27

Post by jillesvangurp »

mrkurt wrote: post #5

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.

By fork they mean: a binary build straight from the unmodified elastic source code using the elastic build file that creates the OSS build bundled with a handful of plugins and components to add alternatives some of the things elastic bundles. They don't even build it themselves and it gets downloaded in binary form straight from Elastic's servers.

If you don't believe me, this is the line in the code where they 'fork' in their build script: https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b...

It will be interesting to see if opendistro actually starts contributing to Lucene or adding value to the elastic code base or whether this 'fork' is effectively frozen in time and doomed to go nowhere due to a lack of actual development on the core product.

I seriously doubt that they are going to put any effort whatsoever in that. Because in two years of pretending they have a fork, there has been no serious code contributions from their side at all that I'm aware off. Correct me if I'm wrong.

If you want to back an OSS version of related technology, maybe use something like Apache Solr, which continues to provide many of the same features and is part of the same ecosystem of users and developers that work on Lucene, which also powers Elasticsearch and which of course continues to contribute a lot to Lucene; unlike Amazon.

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#28

Post by mrkurt »

CharlesW wrote: post #20
mrkurt wrote: post #5

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.

> 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.

I think we're all better off if small and midsized OSS companies thrive. Amazon is not inventing and open sourcing DBs. For the last 15 years, we've relied on independent companies to advance the state of the art for _all of us_. Amazon has no reason to build a compelling database and release it to the community. When the giant tech companies do open source they're work, it's usually an attempt to improve their existing market at the expensive of another company: Kubernetes, OpenDistro, Firecracker, and most of the CNCF projects follow this pattern.

A fork is a natural response to an OSS project license change. But when the company that _forces_ the license change also creates the fork, it's gross.

Re: Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch

#29

Post by motives »

api wrote: post #17
jchw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> not your rights as an end user. 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.

The point about not giving back is not valid in the case of AWS which has upstreamed many of its changes to elasticsearch owned repos under the onerous elasticsearch CLA. This is also true of many FOSS projects which AWS, Microsoft, Google et al contribute to under the most liberal license conditions(such as MIT licensing which you'll find in 95% of Microsofts contributions for example). Furthermore, I do not believe FOSS should concern itself with who is using the codebase, as fully open source software is about opening the code indiscriminately, whether individual dev or large corporation. As soon as you begin to discriminate between small and large corporation you are no longer truly free (and fwiw elasticsearch itself is a large corporation that has arguably exploited the good will of individual dev PRs with relicensing under a non-FOSS license).
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