41–50 of 60 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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 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 fro…
I mean, I still buy stuff from Amazon, use Gmail, etc.
We definitely need to rethink how OSS is delivered, but part of rethinking that is understanding how dominant AWS over OSS revenue.
Is anyone aware of an open source alternative for Kibana and Logstash (based on lucene)?
ODfE's Security plugin is a fork of floragunn GmbH's mixed-license Search Guard product, including the bits that floragunn charges for. This seems to have been done with floragunn's blessing - presumably Amazon paid floragunn for this.
But Elasticsearch B.V (the company) accuses floragunn of stealing Elastic's non-free X-Pack security software to create Search Guard, putting both Search Guard and ODfE's Security plugin on shaky legal ground.
I remember reading about this lawsuit on Elasticsearch's (admittedly slanted) blog, not sure how far the lawsuit has gone from there: https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
Amazon of course says that Elasticsearch's claims are baseless: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/launching-open-distr...
In either case, I'm not sure that ODfE will be trouble-free in terms of licensing issues, depending on how these lawsuits go.
https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
That's not even including the meta APIs like /_cat/indices and /_mappings et al that further lock one into ES-isms
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…
But there is one more factor you failed to acknowledge that is driving them to make more money: Elastic.co took VC funding.
Once you accept VC funding, it narrows the definition of success down to what your investors think success should look, like rather than what the founders desire.
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…
"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. I…
this goes to the question of history, are things structurally so determined that if you remove someone or something from history another would rise to take their place. If Amazon had not existed to take advantage of open source like this would someone arise to do it? I have to think yes, it would be bound to happen eventually, it's a weakness in the model and would be exploited by someone, and when it was exploited people would respond by doing sort of like what is happening now.
If Amazon was not here, someone would be making the history of open source exploitation rhyme.
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…
"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. I…
They make more money selling EC2, with this software installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there.
Which of these realities would you prefer:
1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers pay more for a worse product.
2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it", so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins, Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've now loaded and decides to point it at them)
3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok, all the negatives of closed source with few of the positives of open source. No one wants the source code so they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a signal for their ability to move hosting providers should they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts longer than the people who wrote it.
4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream isn't aligned with customer success, because you're financially incentivized to build a product which needs support. Nope.
5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for a worse product.
People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger. Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product Development and their Customers concerning whether they should build an open source ES. There's just "Jeeze, Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow, thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away."
The real thing that's killing these database companies is that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes what the database can do. The discussions surround "where are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc. HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in some very specific industries or use-cases it matters). Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992, update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how boring the software actually is.
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…
"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. I…
Therein lies the problem: Startups esp the ones that need to grow really fast and at all costs choose to permissively give away their proprietary advantage but still want to "capture most value" from the market they help create are making it unnecessarily hard for themselves by going down the F/OSS route just to "get users and figure out what to build". It is a losing strategy (you'd agree?) because... if the startup's F/OSS product is any popular and lots of users do use it, it is only inviting the likes of Amazon (and anyone with the chops to build a cloud offering, really) to package it as SaaS / PaaS around it.
I'd like to see startups experiment SSPL / CCPL / Commons Clause licensing from day zero (like materialize.io) to see if they can still attract users or build mind share. I'd hate for them to instead release it under F/OSS licenses (and CLA all contributions) to only conveniently turn hostile with super-strong copylefts like SSPL or non-Libre licenses like Commons Clause and BSL.