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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#61

Post by belval »

mirthflat83 wrote: post #42
markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

Understandable, because a lot of people open source their code under a permissive license because it’s a cool thing to do, not because they understand what truly open sourcing their code means.

And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#62

Post by marcinzm »

markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

Your right to do something does not remove my right to call you a dick for doing it. There is a large difference between what is legally allowed and what should be encouraged for the good of society.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#63

Post by caymanjim »

AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source.

Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money off the product. They're free to do that, and create restricted-license or closed-source versions for future enhancements. But the community doesn't have to buy into that and continue to contribute to what is no longer truly an open source product. AWS is forking it and continuing with the original, truly open source license.

This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product.

AWS does plenty of things worth criticizing, and one can even criticize them in this particular instance for not working with Elastic to provide more support to whatever it was they were asking for. And Elastic may very well have a legitimate gripe about trademarks. But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.

You can't create an open source project, wait for it to gain market dominance, decide to be less open source, and expect the community to continue contributing.

Elastic shot themselves in the foot and now they can either revert their decision or get left behind as the community moves on to what will ultimately end up being the better product.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#64

Post by MrStonedOne »

markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

The trademark side absolutely kills any credibility or goodwill they could hope to have.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#65

Post by asim »

Amazon are the masters of theivery. The hypocrisy is not going unnoticed. Amazon contributed nothing of value to open source, then they basically stole the hard work of others and again contributed nothing back and now they're going so far as to preach about open source. Please. The sad part is, users won't care and customers won't care because at the end of the day ease of use wins. Elastic are taking drastic measures which will in the short term impact then but hopefully in the long term everyone will give more thought to what licenses they choose. Open source is no longer just about the freedom of choice but now a marketing and commercial strategy for big tech. Just keep that in mind if you ever want to build something of value in the open.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#66

Post by merb »

Chyzwar wrote: post #41

They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs of total 41000 in elastic repo. They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.

what aws does is more oss than that what elastic does. elastic also did it because of $$. so neither of them wins.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

iimblack wrote: post #38
mirthflat83 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t want that, maybe don’t open source your code with a license that allows others to do that?

Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open-source) part of their product. > I took a personal loan to register the Elasticsearch trademark in 2011 believing in this norm in the open source ecosystem. Seeing the trademark so blatantly misused was especially painful to me. Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a l…

> Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open-source) part of their product.

If they have actual evidence of those things, they probably need to allege them in court.

The license change does nothing to address either issue, so citing them to support the license change makes no sense at all.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#68

Post by geofft »

izolate wrote: post #49

We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but par for the course for Bezos's company.

The fundamental "open source sustainability" problem is capitalism, or at least our incarnation of it, and everyone dances around it. You can't license your way out of this problem. You can't services-company your way out of this problem. The fundamental issue is that it is good for the world for skilled developers to spend all day writing software and giving it away, but they can make much more money writing software and not giving it away.

And I'm not even necessarily advocating we change our system of governance - we can do it fine with our current one. Even the culture of academia would be fine here. There certainly are skilled scientists who find it more profitable to do secret work in for-profit labs, but far less so than in software. (In large part, that system works because of government-funded universities and government-funded research grants.)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#69

Post by floatingatoll »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #43
PunchTornado wrote: post #11

There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally. A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to the project.

There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically. They're creating value for their customers, and releasing open source software while doing so. Indeed it's Elastic who tried to get all the positives of open source with none of the negatives (as evidenced by them making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source) BTW, not that it's super relevant but the narrative that Amazon is driving Elastic bankrupt is…

It is absolutely possible that something legal can still be ethically unacceptable.

This is an instance where people believe that it is ethically unacceptable for Amazon to do what they've been doing, so strongly that they are relicensing open source software to prohibit Amazon from continuing to benefit from their work on it.

Ethics are not as simple as law, especially in technology, and very especially in open source licensing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#70

Post by autarch »

azurezyq wrote: post #35

>>> "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software." So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid OSS license? What a pirate logic here. EDIT: I think I made a mistake here. SSPL is really a weird license here, not really friendly.

The SSPL is not an open source license. This is quite clear. The Open Source Initiative, stewards of the term "open source", have said so at https://opensource.org/node/1099.

While AWS may be disingenuous, the statement you quoted is 100% correct.

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