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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

#31

Post by majormajor »

015a wrote: post #14
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.

I tend to think that it, more or less, is. Elasticsearch (as an open source product) is not independent. Its reliant on Elastic co, who have a demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance in favor of making more money. Of course, they had to do this; Amazon forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB. But the fact that there is a critical company behind these two databases, who can be strong-armed, is a threat…

I think having a company behind it would generally be a positive. People are paying for this product to continue, versus something with just a couple devs doing it as a hobby.

Postgres had a huge head start here, and was built in a different world WITHOUT an Amazon equivalent.

Are there a lot of major contributions to (not just on top of) ODfES outside of Amazon? If not, I'd be fairly worried about using it in a non-AWS-provided way in the long term, now.

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

#32

Post by hodgesrm »

e12e wrote: post #6
hansdieter1337 wrote: post #3

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

Loki and grafana? (not really an alternative in the sense of "full text search" over logs, but an alternative in the sense "an interface for aggregate search over logs").

There's also Cloki, which offers the same Loki APIs but stores data in ClickHouse. It looks interesting.

https://github.com/qxip/cloki-go

Disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse at Altinity.

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

#33

Post by majormajor »

jchw wrote: post #12
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.

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 think you're painting it as more cynical and malicious than it was. There was probably too much naivety, but "open source your software and charge for support and operations" was promoted pretty heavily for a while not just by these companies, but by people who wanted to enjoy those projects being open source.

And then it got torpedoed...

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

#34

Post by jillesvangurp »

e12e wrote: post #6
hansdieter1337 wrote: post #3

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

Loki and grafana? (not really an alternative in the sense of "full text search" over logs, but an alternative in the sense "an interface for aggregate search over logs").

Grafana started out as a fork of Kibana 3 if I remember correctly, which was around the time Elastic acquired Kibana. Since then, it has become a nice product in its own right. But the shared history is interesting.

https://grafana.com/blog/2019/09/03/the-mostly-complete-hist...

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

#35

Post by softwaredoug »

jchw wrote: post #24
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…

“release the source code for your entire stack”.

It’s not “your entire stack” but rather your entire stack:

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service

...

> 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.

Where:

> “The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License.

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

#36

Post by DominoTree »

thruhiker wrote: post #25
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.

I've personally found Fluentd to be flaky at scale or under heavy load, but it does talk to damn near everything and is pretty simple to stand up

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

#37

Post by e12e »

hodgesrm wrote: post #32
e12e wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loki and grafana? (not really an alternative in the sense of "full text search" over logs, but an alternative in the sense "an interface for aggregate search over logs").

There's also Cloki, which offers the same Loki APIs but stores data in ClickHouse. It looks interesting. https://github.com/qxip/cloki-go Disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse at Altinity.

It does look interesting, but maybe a little too exciting: "Super experimental". One advantage of loki, is that it is part of hosted grafana, so there's some commitment to it as a product.

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

#38

Post by mrkurt »

jchw wrote: post #12
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.

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…

"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power. It wasn't just a series of bad choices by the startups that got them here, it was concentration of an emerging market over 10-15 years.

Amazon dominates conversations because they extract the most value from open source projects. They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason.

Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users and figure out what to build. Amazon has the benefit of watching which projects become most viable (frequently because the startup threatens their revenue somehow) and packaging them up as their own services.

I want to live in a world where smaller startups _can_ OSS their work and also monetize it. And I'd like them to be able to do it without raising $100mm in VC.

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

#39

Post by CharlesW »

mrkurt wrote: post #28
CharlesW wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exist…

Great points and a helpful perspective, thank you.

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

#40

Post by throwarayes »

This is why the Apache Software Foundation exists. The threat IMO isn’t SSPL but what happens the next license change. There’s nothing stopping future changes to make Elasticsearch proprietary. It’s not out of the question that Elastic could be acquired by, say, an Oracle. Or there could be new management. Suddenly they change licenses of take a ridiculously maximal view of SSPL or Elastic license and sue everyone.

With ASF, at least the trademark stays with the Foundation. Along with an effort to build a health community spanning more than one company.

Elasticsearch has many benefits. But you have to take this risk into account if you go down the Elastic path now. I wonder if open distro though could become an ASF project, alleviating fears of license change...

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