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

elastic.co

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

#221

Post by marcinzm »

yrgulation wrote: post #119

The cringe on this thread is appalling. Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, taking time away from their families and lives, only for companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make billions in prof…

>Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing.

And we owe them nothing. They have a right to relicense and we have right to complain about it.

If you have an argument then make it but trying to kill discussion is in bad form imho.

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

#222

Post by StavrosK »

0800LUCAS wrote: post #213
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…

I'm not saying "just" as in "it's easy". I'm saying "just" as in "they can install and maintain but don't have to develop it too".

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

#223

Post by pjc50 »

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…

This is almost, but not quite, the "Tivoization" that prompted the creation of the GPL3.

The requirement to give something back and/or avoid taking profit from the work of others is something the OSS world has a complicated relationship to. GPL is quite clear that there's a requirement to pass on source changes, if not explicitly to give them back, and many people were outraged by even this limited requirement and instead chose licenses which imposed no requirements at all.

Similarly, people want their work to be used for free by everyone .. but haven't really considered that this results in them working for the Bezos fortune, for free. Or the US military, for free.

There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a slowly evolving discussion.

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

#224

Post by mintplant »

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #169

I recently ran a project to compare AWS Elasticsearch and Elastic-hosted ES. Surprisingly, we found that AWS did better for our use-case. Better IaC - easy to set up clusters with Terraform, and associated alerts. Better monitoring and easier setup. Better price/performance. AWS is obviously lower friction from a purchasing point too once you're already an AWS user. This makes me curious if Elastic are shooting thems…

Why would they be shooting themselves in the foot? From their perspective, Elastic doesn't get anything out of your going with the AWS offering, and Amazon's behemoth-level resources allow it to outcompete Elastic's own hosted offering, as you found, while contributing nothing back to cover development costs of the software itself.

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

#226

Post by detaro »

VoxPelli wrote: post #201
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.

They seems to be a lot better when it comes to cooperating with eg Envoy and Kubernetes communities though? Not sure how good they are with eg MySQL and PostgreSQL, anyone know?

communities is the key word. Neither have one company behind them whose income they are eating.

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

#227

Post by mden »

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?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Infamous strategy of Microsoft esp in the 90s.

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

#228

Post by delfinom »

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?

One of the things Microsoft got anti-trusted for back in the day

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

#229

Post by pythonaut_16 »

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 came in and took a bunch of that money while not giving anything back

Amazon took no money from them; they competed on potential revenues.

I think people are upset, not because they don't clearly understand Elastic's motivations, but because Elastic is trying to paint Amazon as the bad guy for using the license Elastic offered. Amazon benefited from Elastic's open license, but so did Elastic. Being open source has greatly benefited Elastic's own business and growth.

That isn't to say that Amazon's size and practices around open source aren't cause for concern, just that Elastic come across as very disingenuous when they try to lay all the blame on Amazon while proclaiming how dedicated they are to "openness".

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

#230

Post by dhd415 »

VoxPelli wrote: post #198
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…

I think both are at fault. Amazon for provoking this and Elastic for over-reacting like this and totally break with the open source licensing, when that isn’t necessary to stop Amazon. They could do like MariaDB rather than follow MongoDB: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ Would be much more appropriate and alienate the open source community much less.

Notably, they are apparently considering that: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification
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