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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#71

Post by riku_iki »

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…

> it probably just would not have been widely used and successful

also tested and fixed for free by community contributors.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#73

Post by googlryas »

jimmydorry wrote: post #48
crb002 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos is executing better than the original SAAS vendors that FOSS community editions. You want to compete with buff Jeff then make sure you support Azure/GCP too and can price below Bezos' margin above raw EC2 - usually means you have to get creative with spot instances and avoiding cross data center network.

Amazon can, and will price you out of the market regardless of what you do. And if your idea is novel enough, they will just make their own version of it (or fork it, like in the original post!).

Is that wrong? The computer revolution was ignited by other companies essentially copying the designs of microprocessors and reselling them as their own.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#74

Post by __blockcipher__ »

jawns wrote: post #3
PradeetPatel wrote: post #2

>Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community). I'm a bit out of the loop here, can someone please tell me why Elastic decided to enact this seemingly Anti-OSS license?

The announcement: https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change The "Why" behind the change: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS tl;dr Elastic alleges that Amazon is infringing on their trademark and is offering Elastic's products as a service on AWS without being a good partner. From Elastic's summary of the license change: "The SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, with the simple re…

> The SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, with the simple requirement that if you provide the product as a service to others, you must also publicly release any modifications as well as the source code of your management layers under SSPL."

The magic is in the "management layers" part. True copyleft says "you can use this software in your product but you have to open source any changes to the software". Okay, fine. This "poison pill proprietary license dressed up as copyleft" is saying "if you sell a service that uses an UNMODIFIED version of elasticsearch, you have to release every piece of software around elasticsearch, including your hypervisors, kernels, os image...the list goes on". It's very clearly an attempt to make the requirement so odious that no-one would risk triggering that clause.

Which is why functionally all they did was force Amazon (and other organizations like Wikimedia who don't sell Elasticsearch as a service but do refuse to run proprietary software) to have to fork.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#75

Post by sg47 »

weego wrote: post #58
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…

It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…

Amazon has not been contributing back to the open source projects when they offer a service based on it.

E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/performance-updates-to...

Amazon EMR release 5.24.0 includes several optimizations in Spark that improve query performance.

Why have these optimizations not been contributed back to the community?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#76

Post by aaronblohowiak »

mminer237 wrote: post #55
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…

Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.

Why Elastic and not Lucene or OpenJDK ?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#77

Post by xtf »

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…

With Apache License they don't have to contribute back and it is questionable/unlikely they'll do.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#78

Post by hehehaha »

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…

Well it could disincentivize others from keeping things open sourced or making meaningful contributions.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#79

Post by blibble »

juanbyrge wrote: post #32

The audacity of these AWS folks patronizing elastic about open source despite AWS making millions of dollars off of their open source project just reeks of entitlement. Glad I am never going to use AWS.

I suspect the era just before the cloud was the peak of open source software

these days you'd have to be a fool to start a company offering an open source server based product under a liberal license

Amazon is a parasite, plain and simple

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#80

Post by tw04 »

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…

Because an 800lbs gorilla is trying to crush an open source project? They could've come up with some agreement to oem Elastic and they both could've benefited. Instead they decided to just build a competing service at the expense of Elastic. It's the same reason most of the community had no time for Oracle forking RHEL.

>AWS contributes improvements to the project.

Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't verified). For a company the size of Amazon, unless it was one heck of a PR that's basically nothing.

*Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream.

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