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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

#261

Post by ignoramous »

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…

Elasticsearch became popular on back of being F/OSS. The "our code" Shay talks about is community's too: All the evangelizing through blog posts, talks; and the countless hours spent reporting bugs or even fixing them. If anyone thinks a community's contributions are any less than their own company's, then they don't get to claim to be torch-bearers of F/OSS (which Elastic is without realizing the irony).

Shay keeps claiming "our users" aren't affected, but who's he fooling? They say, AWS cornered them to adopting dual-license SSPL, what's to say they woudln't do an Oracle in the future (like Sun did with Java and continue to do with their DB offerings?). Slippery slope, sure, but it is indeed slippery for a company struggling to compete with competition and seeking predatory avenues as last ditch attempt to stay alive.

I believe, in all my naivety, that Elastic could have created an Elastic Foundation (like Joyent did with NodeJS, who btw didn't throw a hissy-fit at AWS for Lambda) and invited developers from all walks to shoulder the burden of the core software (which they themselves commoditized by F/OSSing it) so that they could focus on SaaS (like AWS).

I'd like to think, Elastic's real problem is they have hard time competing with AWS in terms of pricing for SaaS (of course, AWS owns infrastructure and so it is a tough battle-front), but if they were paying any attention, AWS Elasticsearch Service was very poor in 2015 and continued to remain so for a long time (it sucks less now), but Elastic's own service wasn't up to the mark, either. I think they misplaced their priorities (see GCP's flawless execution with k8s, managed-k8s, and Anthos) and were caught asleep at the wheel when they could have captured SaaS market away from AWS in those interim years (2015-19) by focusing solely on differentiated features and not on the core Elasticsearch software (which was libre and hence undifferentiated).

Of course, Shay and Elastic know better than I do and I am indeed a grumpy developer who's upset, but I want Elastic to give up their misleading messaging viz. 'doesn't affect / nothing changes for our users'. They're being hypocritical and not doing anyone any favours.

> And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. And no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises.

No, Shay. It does affect the community, who are also the users of the software.

> We created Elasticsearch; we care about it more than anyone else. It is our life’s work. We will wake up every day and do more to move the technology forward and innovate on your behalf.

I see a lot of "We"s and "Our"s. And that's the problem with CLAs and stealing someone else's work. Companies can't tell anymore who's stealing from whom.

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

#262

Post by bcrosby95 »

eloff wrote: post #205
cortesoft wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic even existed. They couldn’t have released it as closed source because they weren’t there to release it at all. It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene. I am ok with them making money off their project, but it i…

> I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn’t like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work. Because no other companies build on a foundation of open-source software today? I think that describes every company. Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not just components of it, but does that really matter? I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here.

Complaining about AWS building off open source software when you did too seems a bit awkward. I'd be willing to bet AWS has spent at least as many person-hours developing their service as has been put into ES itself.

I don't really know where I fall on this subject. Companies need a route to monetize when developing open source products. It feels like AWS has been closing many ways to do that. Short term it might feel good for us end users, but long term it's probably bad for the ecosystem.

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

#263

Post by fencepost »

elliekelly wrote: post #65
dhd415 wrote: post #10

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification . Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That mak…

> Then after a period of time, typically 3-4 years, but not more than 5 years, the restrictions lapse, and the source code automatically converts to an Open Source license, in our case Apache 2.0. I’m not familiar with this type of license. Any idea how/when this time frame is decided? Is it 3-5 years from software release? I guess I’m confused by the use of “automatically converts” with a vague timeline. If it’s aut…

Not sure if it's still the case but Ghostscript is or was like this - a licenseable current version possibly with extra commercially relevant features (e.g. PCL) plus an open source older version.

Edit: https://artifex.com/licensing/commercial/ notably this lets you avoid concerns about integrating GPL with your commercial offering.

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

#264

Post by blabitty »

Sounds like Amazon did misrepresent their relationship with elastic intentionally, which is abusive. It was also unnecessary in my opinion because the AWS service is so much easier to use - no licensing to worry about at all as an end consumer. Compare with running ELK yourself where you quickly discover that you will need to buy a license and possibly support to get any usable enterprise features at all.

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

#265

Post by tootie »

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.

I don't see this at all. The "extinguish" phase is usually done when a product is acquired by a direct competitor to acquire it's customers. Amazon doesn't have a competing product. And their platform is well-known for supporting multiple competing software products (look at their array of databases for example). And the fact that they are now supporting their own JVM to protect users from Oracle's newly aggressive licensing.

This is, perhaps, exploitation but it seems unlikely they'll kill Elastic ever.

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

#266

Post by rsstack »

brodouevencode wrote: post #245
rsstack wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redis itself is proper open source. There are a few modules, completely separate from the Redis code base, that aren't open source (even though Redis Labs will claim they are, like how Elastic claim Elasticsearch is open source). The other non-open-source-but-wants-open-source-clout is Mongo.

I think it's more about the source of the revenue stream. Redis (from what I know, which is minimal) relies more on support - they have a hosted solution but support/licensing of modules is where they really make money. Elastic relies on hosting - they've invested a lot in infrastructure.

This isn't true. Modules are free (unless you're a hosting competitor) so there is no licensing revenue there. They might be charging a handful of enterprise customers for special module support, but that isn't their main revenue stream. Their revenue is from Redis Enterprise which is a Redis hosting solution (managed cloud, unmanaged cloud or on-prem). Redis Enterprise is entirely closed-source, but it's an infrastructure management system and not a data store (it isn't Redis).

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

#267

Post by ardy42 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #257
CaptArmchair wrote: post #236

I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It al…

> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends…

> You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area.

I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal anti-competitive behavior. Isn't that what the whole Microsoft antitrust case was about? It's too bad the government pretty much gave up on enforcing antitrust law for 20 years, since it feels like similar practices became normalized due to lack of enforcement.

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

#268

Post by kristoff_it »

brodouevencode wrote: post #245
rsstack wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redis itself is proper open source. There are a few modules, completely separate from the Redis code base, that aren't open source (even though Redis Labs will claim they are, like how Elastic claim Elasticsearch is open source). The other non-open-source-but-wants-open-source-clout is Mongo.

I think it's more about the source of the revenue stream. Redis (from what I know, which is minimal) relies more on support - they have a hosted solution but support/licensing of modules is where they really make money. Elastic relies on hosting - they've invested a lot in infrastructure.

Redis Labs only supports Redis Enterprise. They're not in the business of offering support for Redis.

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

#269

Post by whoknew1122 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #19
patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

> Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. I mean, sure. Someone can poop on the lawn. There is a difference between that, and some business coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that.

> "There is a difference between that, and some business coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that."

Is there a difference? The sign never said how much shit could be deposited on your lawn.

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

#270

Post by tootie »

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…

From a purely utilitarian perspective, I can live without Elastic far easier than I could live without AWS. From a legal perspective, AWS are faultless in using OSS for their own purposes. The only losers are Elastic's investors. And there's no way they couldn't have seen this coming with their business model as it is.
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