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Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

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Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#211

Post by delfinom »

thecleaner wrote: post #183
prepend wrote: post #64

So I guess the options are now to use the “OpenDistro” [0] or the SSPL distro maintained by Elastic. It’s too bad that Elastic is no longer open source, but respect the companies choice to close source their stuff. Will be interesting if Amazon just maintains their fork or abandons it to make something else. I’m not familiar with elastic as a project and not sure how many community contributions they have, but expect…

I think you are grossly over estimating the contributions that the general community has to open source. Theres a company behind this project and they do most of the maintenance work.

Yep, this happens with alot of open source. Either a big company maintains a project through paid engineers. OR some poor guy gets burnt out because everyone is demanding free changes to some OSS package constantly without providing PR/MRs.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#212

Post by mintplant »

longhairedhippy wrote: post #105

Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the last version with a friendly license and then transition to the Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a business standpoint it seems like a reasonab…

> Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork?

Um, about that...

> When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#213

Post by 0800LUCAS »

stavros wrote: post #166

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…

> by just installing and maintaining that product as a service?

You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking.

You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers working to keep those services up and make them talk to other AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to react to any failures.

I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge value in what Amazon offers.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#214

Post by delfinom »

signal11 wrote: post #49
z77dj3kl wrote: post #38

"And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. It has no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises." No, that's just not true. So many users, from small hobby side-projects, to large open source projects, and mega-corps care about the licensing of dependencies, each for their own reason, and will not want to build on top of proprietary software that impos…

If you're a paying customer, you are probably fine. If you're using SSPL'd Elastic (or Mongo DB, the risks are the same) for anything serious -- i.e. beyond a hobby, get legal advice ASAP. SSPL isn't an OSI certified license; many would call it at best a 'shared source' license because of the riders attached. [DELETED because, as user `gpm` points out, OSI doesn't own 'open source' as a trademark, sorry about that --…

"OSI certified" doesn't mean shit regardless in a legal manner. It's just toilet paper. Always have your own legal review by IP lawyers.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#215

Post by prepend »

pietrovismara wrote: post #176
prepend wrote: post #64

So I guess the options are now to use the “OpenDistro” [0] or the SSPL distro maintained by Elastic. It’s too bad that Elastic is no longer open source, but respect the companies choice to close source their stuff. Will be interesting if Amazon just maintains their fork or abandons it to make something else. I’m not familiar with elastic as a project and not sure how many community contributions they have, but expect…

The source code is freely accessible and you can use it for free. What's the difference to you as a user? Or are you simply concerned about Amazon?

I make products that use that package. I want all the packages I depend on to be compatible with my license. I don’t want to run into an audit years from now during due diligence that I have some liability from an incompatible license.

I can’t afford lawyers to determine compatibility today. And I suspect that they would say “not compatible, pay to be safe.”

That’s the difference to me as a user.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#216

Post by StavrosK »

dumbfounder wrote: post #209
stavros wrote: post #166

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…

And Elastic was built on top of Lucene. I slice it this way: as a company that is highly invested in AWS it is easier for us to deploy AWS ElasticSearch service than to use Elastic's cloud offering or set it up ourselves. But that doesn't mean I like it. Or are you talking about a different end user?

Your options are "OSS ES that you can set up on your own for free" or "Closed source ES that you have to pay for". Not "Use AWS" and "Use Elastic".

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#217

Post by dayjah »

delfinom wrote: post #185
stavros wrote: post #166

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…

Amazon is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody sees it. They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.

Sorry, what is “EEE”? Brief search turns up a horse disease?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#218

Post by acatton »

stavros wrote: post #166

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…

> Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it.

A relevant question is "would they have been that successful if Elastic were 'just another closed source enterprise product'."

Elastic was successful because a lot of companies tried it out for free and then purchased licenses, or because hobbiysts used it on their personal project and then pushed for it at work.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#219

Post by supernihil »

this post from a year ago: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/launching-open-distr...

sums up amazons stand pretty much, they talk about how they are suffering from "Elasticsearches bullying behavior" but in reality Elasticsearch were abusing Elasticsearch in their marketing ("partnering with ES.." lies), they created their own fork instead of offering back to upstream, they partnered up with a company that were stealing enterprise code from ES and selling it as their own product, i mean AWS does not have the privilige to express themselves as opensource evangelists.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#220

Post by detaro »

dayjah wrote: post #217
delfinom wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody sees it. They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.

Sorry, what is “EEE”? Brief search turns up a horse disease?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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