Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elastic.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 708 posts

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

#291

Post by nickjj »

Thank you for writing this up.

It kind of hit home for me because I recently had an issue with an unrelated company that has gotten 100 million+ in funding take advantage of my work by removing my name from the content, openly discredit my work under false claims and attempted to steal money from me multiple times while I've done nothing but help grow their business and ask for nothing in return other than our agreed upon compensation.

What I got from this write up is there's always going to be people and corporations out there who do their best to take advantage of you for the sake of profiting off your work using whatever means necessary, even if it's maybe illegal. I pity companies like this, especially the people who are making the decisions because that's the legacy they are leaving behind and if they happen to have children, they are probably forcing that mindset onto them as well.

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

#292

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

fakedang wrote: post #275
StavrosK wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a slowly evolving discussion. Certainly, and I think that if we want OSS to thrive we need to move towards a future where it's easy for companies to make a return on their investment by releasing OSS. I think Amazon and all the "I provide your software as a service" providers eat into that and hinder that future. Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, b…

I believe in a previous thread, someone suggested OSS except companies having this much of a revenue (since market cap is a bit of a variable metric). Why wouldn't that be a viable model?

It would be a much stronger restriction than they're looking for. If no developer at Amazon, Google, etc. is allowed to even use Elasticsearch, that severely impairs the viability of the project. (Depending on the revenue threshold, it could end up being a problem for Elastic too - they're not exactly a small company.)

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

#293

Post by dustinmoris »

I really like Elasticsearch. I run it myself hosted in a Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes Operator developed by Elastic, so I'm one of the people who uses Elasticsearch extensively without being a paying customer, but to be fair that is part of the reason why I opted for it. I think Elastic has become victim of its own success if I may say so. Running Elasticsearch self hosted is fairly easy, either on actual hardware or VMs or in a container cluster. Their documentation is exceptionally good and the wide adoption means that a lot of issues people might run into have already been solved or answered on StackOverflow and other online forums. If Elasticsearch wasn't such a great product then Amazon would also struggle more with providing a managed version in their cloud.

I think trademark violations are pretty bad and a real punch below the belt, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that is actually happening. Amazon also offers Redis as a service, so does Azure. They both have Redis in the name. They also offer MS SQL as a service, however that has a proprietary license which the end customer pays for so it's an unfair comparison. I wonder if the monetisation strategy, which is basically Elastic Cloud, is the best option for Elastic. They are essentially providing a mini managed Elasticsearch cluster which is away from the rest of the infrastructure which development teams are already maintaining. Of course they will be competing with Amazon then and likely going to lose, since Amazon has so much more. Other OSS products have found more lucrative and less costly monetisation models than operating your own cloud hosting provider. I hope Elastic will find a way to sustain themselves in a way which makes the owners happy, because their product is really good.

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

#294

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

StavrosK wrote: post #283
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But imagine where we'd be if this discussion had happened 30 years ago, in the days when the monetization model was charging a distribution fee. How much of the modern Internet would have had to be excluded from free software licensing to protect that? I have no issue with tweaking OSS licenses to respond to the circumstances of the times, but tweaking them in order to ensure I can make lots of money seems anti-compe…

I agree, but I think it's generally "tweaking the rules so they can stay alive" at this point, ie not about increasing an already big revenue stream.

That's certainly what it looks like Elastic is trying to imply, but their revenue was over $400 million last year.

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

#295

Post by emphatizer2000 »

Lots of hosts offer "Wordpress Hosting" - is that fundamentally different from offering Elasticsearch?

I don't think merely using the name of an open source product is such a huge ethical issue? It's the same all those Wordpress hosts do.

The other things (claiming a cooperation exists, stealing from commercial code) seem more questionable, but also unrelated to the actual open source license.

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

#296

Post by nemothekid »

cortesoft wrote: post #193
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. 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…

>It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene.

That "one guy" is the CEO and founder of the company. You are making it seem like some guy developed an open source database, and a company later came around and built a business out of it, when that wasn't the case.

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

#297

Post by fuball63 »

throw8932894 wrote: post #180

I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living. Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for…

This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the point of it being open at all if it is prohibitively difficult to develop on without tests?

To me it seems like a happy medium of being accessible while still protecting your livelihood.

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

#298

Post by jamra »

cactus2093 wrote: post #258

What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Or what every hosting provider including AWS does with the Linux kernel, sell access to a service that is running that software. I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released open source software and now are mad that…

Did you read the blog post? They are mad about trademark violation and an allegation that their commercial code has been ripped off by Amazon through a third party. They have Elasticsearch trademarked and you can't use their name with your name on it. In their mind, it is a violation.

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

#300

Post by Vaslo »

picodguyo wrote: post #116

This blog post strikes me as poorly written, overly emotional, and light on reasons to care. While not Amazon-sized, Elastic is itself a rather large company. Am I supposed to be upset that you're having difficulty getting even larger because of Amazon? Considering you're the experts on this product, shouldn't you be confident in your ability to differentiate from someone offering it as an afterthought? If anything,…

I have to agree and came here to say this - the “Not OK” thing feels like we are all being lectured. This is an (one) unfortunate side effect of social media. The author doesn’t hear how he sounds, and can’t see the cringe on some of the audiences to realize it’s an awful (cringeworthy) tactic.

Could have come across better, but otherwise I support the authors assertions.

Post reply on HN