311–320 of 708 posts
I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems like the most blatant trademark violation ever.
Against the huge wallet of Amazon? Litigation isn't free. How much "justice" can Elastic afford?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream relea…
How would the captive portal intercept s3 tls calls successfully?
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…
Agree, the amount of people who license things as MIT is terrifying. There has been a couple of posts/rants on HN about this. A large company doesn't care about you, and licensing your code as MIT doesn't mean they're going to pay you. GPL actually gives you some teeth.
see: GPLv3 ban on Tivoization. It makes anything v3 radioactive to any company seeking to make $$$.
Blatantly stealing the trademark, not even entering negotiations. Lying on Twitter about being in a partnership with a company when they are not is the kind of behavior I expect from a shady sneakers reseller on Reddit, not AWS. In my book, this is shockingly unprofessional and indicates some serious rot as a company...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? Um, about that... > When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion.
It's interesting that they phrased it like that. If they were confident about this, they would easily be able to prove this in court and it would be a very simple case of copyright infringement right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many people were outraged by even this limited requirement It isn’t a limited requirements. There is a very real legal risk that using GPL software in an enterprise code base means you have to open source of your entire code base. That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used.
So the companies can simply buy an alternate licence. What's the problem? They end up giving back in terms of $$$ then.
The core legal requirement the GPL puts on distributors is that modifications must also be made open source. That's powerful, and attainable. The core legal requirement the SSPL puts on "third-party distributors" is the requirement that all the source code for that distributor's service must be made open source. First: It doesn't even apply to Elastic. Second: Binaries are discrete; services are networked, often involving many pieces, and there's no strong legal definition for what "service" means in the SSPL.
MongoDB invented it, submitted it to OSI for approval in 2018, then withdrew the application in 2019. Its still not an OSI approved license. Every major linux distro ceased distributing MongoDB upon the relicense, under concerns that its not actually an open source license.
Elastic wants to keep the conversation focused on AWS. Look, I like AWS, but they can be pretty icky, I get that. However, this is not a dichotomy. Elastic betrayed the open source community. They started with open source as a major selling point of elasticsearch, used that selling point to gain traction and users; many of whom did not pay elastic for the service, to be sure. When they had secured a moat of success, they flipped the license to one that is not open source, and now those users are forced to come to elastic for support.
Elastic should be able to make money. In the spirit of that, we just need to be clear: They're effectively no better than, say, Algolia. Yeah, I can read the source code. I can't really change it in a meaningful way. I can self-host (which I can do with many closed-source products). I can't sub-contract a specialist like AWS to manage it for me. Them switching to the SSPL is "fine". They're just not an open source company anymore. This is not an "AWS is evil, Elastic is great" situation; this is a "they're both companies who do some good things and some evil things, but above all else they care about money" situation. There are true open source projects which aren't like this; elasticsearch was one of these, it isn't anymore, and we should focus on supporting products which support their users back, not ones which are built to support The Company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It's interesting that they phrased it like that. If they were confident about this, they would easily be able to prove this in court and it would be a very simple case of copyright infringement right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things seem like Amazon went beyond just selling their hosted version of Elasticstack: "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and cal…
> "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet. > "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsear…
Sure, but we are not talking about "the intern tweeted something incorrect, gather your pitchforks until they delete it".
We are talking about a prolonged time span where AWS completely abused their massive size and market tower to basically do the legal and PR equivalent of laughing in the face of another company they were using and abusing. Details aside, that is a pretty grim view for the world of software, no?