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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

#331

Post by ignoramous »

StavrosK wrote: post #222
0800LUCAS wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ".

> ...they can install and maintain but don't have to develop it too.

As someone building distributed systems, I'd think you'd appreciate that merely "installing" Elasticsearch wouldn't simply cut it for the scale AWS operates at.

I wish Elastic would have focused on their differentiated offerings instead and had let go of their iron grip on Elasticsearch itself (perhaps by creating a Foundation around it).

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

#332

Post by brabel »

forgetfulness wrote: post #303
35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of the license that the ES developers chose? Software isn't born under the terms of Apache 2/MIT/BSD/a similarly permissive license. The people who developed it…

Because while it's true that Amazon is following the terms of the license, it's having real repercussions in that the people actually maintaining the Software are seeing decreased ability to grow the product because a huge company, belonging to the second richest man in the world, is offering it as part of their vertically-integrated oligopoly. Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is short sighted, it's…

> the people actually maintaining the Software are seeing decreased ability to grow the product because a huge company, belonging to the second richest man in the world, is offering it as part of their vertically-integrated oligopoly.

When you choose an OSS license, you're giving permission to any company or person to exploit your product in any way they want, this is how OSS works.

Amazon is not the only one that can do this and I would be surprised if other cloud vendors didn't also offer ES and other popular OSS software to their customers.

Do you expect that just because you created some OSS you deserve some kind of exclusivity on profits made from it?? If you do, you need to understand you need to use a non-OSS license. This seems to be what Elastic has finally realised, but a bit late.

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

#333

Post by tshaddox »

judofyr wrote: post #239
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…

> 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? Ten years ago I would be very hesitant adopting ElasticSearch if I knew that they were the only ones…

> In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all of its good connotations) it once was.

That’s my attitude towards most of these license changes or “open core” pivots. These companies want all the good will and community contributions of “open source” while still being able to wield intellectual property protection laws against other companies who dare compete against them on unrelated, commoditized services like hosting.

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

#334

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

forgetfulness wrote: post #303
35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of the license that the ES developers chose? Software isn't born under the terms of Apache 2/MIT/BSD/a similarly permissive license. The people who developed it…

Because while it's true that Amazon is following the terms of the license, it's having real repercussions in that the people actually maintaining the Software are seeing decreased ability to grow the product because a huge company, belonging to the second richest man in the world, is offering it as part of their vertically-integrated oligopoly. Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is short sighted, it's…

> Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is short sighted

It's really not: the license terms are the root of the problem you are pointing out. We can either voice our (righteous, but ultimately pointless) anger or we can try to analyze what's happening and how to fix it. So let's do the latter.

Amazon offers a fully managed ElasticSearch service running on the core ES code because ElasticSearch was, up to this point, released under the Apache 2.0 license which fully supports Amazon's right to do this.

Amazon offers a fully managed MongoDB compatible database called DocumentDB. It is not based on MongoDB – Amazon reimplemented the core functionality but maintained the MongoDB API layer.

MongoDB Inc. makes the forceful point that it is not a drop in replacement[1] but a rather crippled product that lags behind what MongoDB can do and continues to diverge. This is likely very good marketing for MongoDB and probably helps their company succeed :)

Why did Amazon do this? Why would Amazon use the core ES code but go through a more difficult reimplementation for Mongo?

Because MongoDB's core was licensed under the terms of the AGPL3, but all the drivers that implemented the API functionality were implemented under terms of the Apache 2.0 license.

Beginning to see the solution?

[1]: https://www.mongodb.com/atlas-vs-amazon-documentdb

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

#335

Post by BossingAround »

rsstack wrote: post #302
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…

That's fine but that's not "Open Source" as the open source community sees it. That's just source-available. It's great: when I choose proprietary software, I'm much happier when I get the source code along with it since it can help with diagnostics and advanced cases. But it isn't "Open Source".

> That's fine but that's not "Open Source" as the open source community sees it

It's Apache 2. It's as "Open Source" as you can get [1].

[1] https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0

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

#336

Post by paxys »

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.

No, the difference is that Elastic is a massive $15 billion company which needs more revenue to survive, while Redis is still largely run by one person.

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

#337

Post by Pet_Ant »

tw04 wrote: post #144
Pet_Ant wrote: post #95

> Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us. I feel like I just said this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849 The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. ElasticSearch is trying t…

I'll be honest, I've never heard a single business say the reason they use open source is because support is commodified. It's generally cost or functionality, and quite frankly they want a go-to support expert, not a list of support options. Redhat didn't become huge because people had all sorts of options for third party support. In fact, I can't say I've ever come across a single enterprise who: uses third party s…

CentOS and WhiteBox Linux were 3rd party sources of RHEL and to a large part Linux distros are interchangeable which makes them commodities. Not perfect commodities, but still close. RHEL with subscription vs Debian & burdening yours ops guys are choices available. VMS has no such choice.

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

#338

Post by brabel »

StavrosK wrote: post #280
35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't have your cake and eat it too, and say "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't change your terms!". I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them? You seem to be the only person passing value judgements: > Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I…

> I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them? I'm talking about the general sentiment here. Either Amazon have been playing by the rules and Elastic is within their rights to change those rules, so no problem anywhere, or Amazon has been harming a part of the OSS ecosystem and forced Elastic to make an unpopular change. > Amazon used Elastic per terms of the lic…

> I care that more companies are encouraged to release their software as OSS because they can make money for it.

But they can't! Tell me how many companies make profit off purely OSS... RedHat maybe? What else?

And even if they can, they shouldn't be surprised when competitors use their OSS for their own benefit because OSS explicitly allows for that. Making money off OSS is a red herring, just because it works in a couple isolated cases, doesn't mean it's a viable business strategy.

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

#339

Post by hvis »

cactus2093 wrote: post #308
jamra wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but how does changing their license affect a trademark? If they are legally in the right and this is a violation of their trademark they should win their lawsuit about it regardless. Also my initial question was not purely rhetorical, I would assume "Linux" is also trademarked so I'm wondering what is the difference there and why Redhat selling RHEL has not been the same problem.

Because Linus has no problems with Red Hat? And because Red Hat employs a lot of the key contributors to the Linux kernel?

Also: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets-tough-o...

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

#340

Post by mintplant »

minhazm wrote: post #286
mintplant wrote: post #212

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?

They're currently suing the third party mentioned.
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