who dis clown? Where is the lawsuit? No lawsuit means you dont really care, get out of grandmas basement boy.
Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
611–620 of 708 posts
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#612I 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.
I believe sqlite does the same thing.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.
Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? Because they are careful with their data and legal obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements, but even then you might argue its better for a large organization to pay a…
You could have a lot of the benefits of both if Amazon was partnering with these companies instead of copying the product.
> The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements
When it's hard to make a living out of open source software, that's detrimental.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you need permission to advertise your product with Coca Cola™? Or in this case, would Amazon not need Elastic's permission to say "we use Elastic" to advertise AWS?
Trademark law is very different than copyright law. You are allowed to use trademarks in certain circumstances. You can’t imply a relationship that doesn’t exist, but AWS saying - this is a hosted version of Elasticsearch would probably be okay (but IANAL). Where they’d get into trouble is if they said they offered a hosted Elasticsearch, but under the hood it was something else. But, even then they could probably sa…
> The real question is: was AWS misleading customers?
Hell yes. I thought it was Amazon's trademark!
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#615Amazon 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…
> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. If we accept Elastic's interpretation of trademark law, all retail is illegal. I bought some break cereal at Walmart this morning that clearly displayed a "Kellog" trademark. Walk down any isle of the store, unauthorized use of trademarks as far as the eye can see. NOT OK.
If you try to open a series of stores with Kellog in the name, you'll get slapped down right away. And that's obviously the problem here, putting it right in the name in a way that gives no hint it's someone else's trademark.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The new license doesn't restrict others from operating Elasticsearch as a service. It restricts others from operating Elasticsearch as a service unless they release any source code patches, improvements, and/or functionality extensions they make to it. If this was AGPL, I'd agree with you. IANAL, but SSPL is so broad that it could be construed to cover the Linux kernel, which is a no-no. :(
What real , non-theoretical, "would stand up in a courtroom" risk is there if the SSPL extends to cover the Linux kernel? SSPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service" GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you release binaries SSPL+GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service or if you…
No offense but this advice is rather risky and legally dangerous, please don't tell people to potentially put their products in jeopardy by doing this. The correct thing to do is for MongoDB/Elastic to just clarify the wording in the license.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#617Lie down with a dog, wake up with fleas.
Sup with the devil: better use a long spoon.
The list of aphorisms for trading with/under/via Amazon is .. large
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the term "more open" is a bit too vague in this discussion. Sometimes people use it to refer to permissiveness (e.g. BSD) and sometimes people use it to refer to stimulating further open source work (e.g. GPL). (And if we're following the "definitions" then ElasticSearch is no longer "open source" since that has a strict definition, but it's probably not so relevant in this discussion.) I also don't really ob…
> If they really wanted an open source license which stimulates anyone to share improvements to ElasticSearch they could have picked GPL. As of now, any big company (Facebook, Google, etc) can create an improved internal fork of ElasticSearch which none of the community will ever be able to take advantage of GPL does not require releasing source code or patches except to those whom you give the binaries. If Facebook…
Isn’t this the situation AGPL3 was written for? It’d probably kill ES and lead to a fork from the latest pre-AGPL3 version, but it’s still an option.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't a comparison, it was a statement of fact, which I think is true, no? ES was based on OS from Lucene, or it was not. You're asserting a comparison where none was made.
In my opinion, the phrase "based on" implies that a lot of the Elasticsearch functionality is actually Lucene functionality. I disagree that this is the case, I think there is a lot of functionality that Elasticsearch brings that is really othogonal to the Lucene project (sharding, multi-tenancy of indexes, clustering, managing nodes, etc.) Again, you my opinion, definitely enough for it's own project. If that isn't…
Honestly, I was just quoting the opening line of the Wikipedia page.
I wasn't trying to imply anything about where most of the functionality was coming from.
Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Red Hat is a top 2-4 contributor to the Linux kernel though, depending on what source (and year) you take a look (e.g. [1]). The big difference is that Amazon doesn't contribute back. The comparison seems misguided at best. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Gi...
The real problem that Elastic doesn't like is that amazon reimplements features as part of their core offering that ES tries to charge for. I'm sure they would have no problem contributing back but Elastic doesn't want these features to become part of the core offering.
Yeah, elasticsearch making security a paid add on (with no "free" usage level) was a huge misstep in my opinion.
I wonder if Shay regrets that decision in hindsight.