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

491–500 of 708 posts

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

#491

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

forgetfulness wrote: post #353
brabel wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ca…

Yes but that's what I'm talking about. That's a core principle in OSS so far but you can't sweep the issues of fairness to the people doing the actual work nor the issue of contributing to increasing the power of organizations whose interests are more likely counter to people's freedom and welfare. I know that prominent figures in FOSS have expressed the sentiment that you have to suck it up, but you know, the people…

You cannot release your software under the terms of a permissive license, then when faced with a large company following the terms of the license, complain that you should get first crack at monetization.

That seems to be the fundamental problem with this whole tempest in a teapot: people have decided on an idea of what "free software" means in their hearts, and many people think it's about "fairness" and "protecting the little guy". That is noble and good, but isn't extensible to an existing large body of software with licenses that clearly spell out how free they are or are not.

But what is great is that if you don't like the state of affairs you don't have to suck it up: you just have to pick a license that is better suited to your goals.

I have a handful of open source projects on my public Github. They fall into two categories for me:

* Software that is trivial, uninteresting, or easy to replicate: these I've released under the terms of the ISC license (2-clause BSD). I have no expectation it will ever come to much, so I'm happy to free it – if it ever turns up in the license file of the iPhone or a Tesla or something I'll say "cool!" (but it won't because it's not that good ;)) Hopefully someone uses it and it makes their life easier.

* Software that is non-trivial, interesting, or difficult to replicate: I've freed it all under the terms of the AGPLv3 and placed a "business use? contact me about the license" note at the top. If I ever decided to work towards building a product around the software (but I won't because it's not that good ;)) I'd look at a dual-licensing strategy, but in the meantime it's out there for anyone to extend and carry forward and build things on. But I know that the AGPLv3 essentially means FAANG will never touch it because the risk is disproportionate for the reward of using it.

This feels right to me. Your calculus may be different so you can license as you'd wish.

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

#492

Post by Yeroc »

JCM9 wrote: post #233

Elastic’s arguments are problematic considering the history of the codebase. They didn’t invent “elasticsearch” from scratch, rather they took someone else’s codebase (Lucene) and made it better. Fundamentally that’s what AWS did too... they took open source code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed service front but aren’t offer…

Lucene is a pretty low-level search library. It has no concept of clustering etc. etc. What ElasticSearch built on top is far from trivial. Furthermore, ElasticSearch pays a number of people to contribute back to the Lucene project.

As far as I know AWS hasn't contributed any code of note back to ElasticSearch or Lucene.

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

#493

Post by wizcaps »

Spivak wrote: post #451
wazoox wrote: post #363

Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and…

If it ends up being ruled that Amazon infringed on Elastic's trademark (their case here is pretty flimsy) or copied Elastic's proprietary code then Amazon deserves to get raked over the coals for copyright infringement. But Amazon offering hosted Elasticsearch and forking the project is something that I think is okay. It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers. Amazon is driving the cost of hosted Elasticsearch…

The entitlement in this thread is staggering.

> It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers.

Everyone is seemingly happy with ES not being able to monetise the product they build for the community, to subsidise the thousands of developer hours spent on it, so their company can save a few dollars. They (you) would rather than money go to Amazon for providing.. nothing to the ES community.

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

#494

Post by astrange »

remram wrote: post #381
specialist wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon convinces investors to eschew profits. Unusual. Result: lower cost of capital. Amazon benefits from extended tax holiday. Result: lower cost of doing business. Amazon appropriates FOSS. Result: lower cost of development. Amazon knocks off successful products, competing with their own partners in their own walled garden. Result: lower cost of product development. Amazon allows counterfeit products, fake reviews…

Any single entry on that "clever stuff" lists directly hurts someone and destroy the ecosystem in the long run.

Getting investors to give Bezos free money for being Bezos was actually pretty good for customers and got everyone free one-day shipping. Amazon is an investor charity like Uber, not a business.

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

#495

Post by suncherta »

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…

>> 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.

Can't client run his own Elasticsearch inside AWS? By installing and maintaining it yourself (or contracting someone to do it for you).

Then I don't see vendor lock-in sense: "We choose AWS to host us, now we have no real choice but to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service". Am I missing something here?

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

#497

Post by benjaminjosephw »

waheoo wrote: post #289
ardy42 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, thats all this comes down to in the end. Open source works fine, and does quite well as a business model (use it as free advertising). What has happened here is a plain old case of monopoly. Once markets are no longer efficient, the model breaks down. Amazon can use its resources to extinguish competition with their own product. This is why we need antitrust law. It's not a failure of capitalism, its not a failu…

> its just what happens when you run a freeish market... it would eventually right itself but this would take a long time

If we think of the system as a delicate natural balance that we should try our best not to disturb too much I think we've immediately taken a very specific stance which itself shouldn't be above critical examination. It is, after all, just a social system and all social systems involve some level of design whether we like that fact or not.

In theory, we could conceive of the possibility of an economic system that both preserves the autonomy and independence of its actors while also preventing monopolies from emerging in the first place. Its a hard problem to wrestle with but its preferable to acquiescing to the blind faith in the invisible hand. We should never give up on an effort to understand how we could evolve our current systems into ones that work better (imagine if we took the same stance with technology).

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

#498

Post by nrmitchi »

tinyhouse wrote: post #476
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…

The core of Elastic-search is Lucene, another OSS. I'm sure the ES team contributed a lot to Lucene, but do they share their profits with all the Lucene developers? You can think about Elastic as a hosted service around Lucene.

I've said this elsewhere, but no.

There are two main differences here.

1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement.

2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you think there is so little differentiation between the product you built and the product you built off of, that you are better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made any meaningful differences.

3rd BONUS difference: It is my understanding that a large part of the core Lucene team works at (or at one point worked at) Elastic[0].

[0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene

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

#499

Post by ako »

StavrosK wrote: post #238
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…

> The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".

Correct. Customers are looking for a cloud platform to run their apps, all the services are just features.

Elastic is a feature, event bus is a feature, database is a feature, compute is a feature.

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

#500

Post by ABeeSea »

lacker wrote: post #399
ABeeSea wrote: post #242

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.

That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used. Plenty of companies use Linux... this seems like something people worried about in the 90's but have now generally accepted.

Linux system libraries are released under Lesser GPL and/or have exemptions for linking that the general GPL does not have. I worked at $bigtechco$ and anything GPL/AGPL was expressly forbidden by the lawyers.
Post reply on HN