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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#91

Post by __blockcipher__ »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #57
my123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not OSS if it does that, because you limit what the software can be used for. It becomes just source-available software. Being open-source to get a user base and then change the license isn't that great, they should have started as proprietary and that'd have been fine.

I don't think they were disingenuous here: I think they probably chose a license somewhat randomly (acknowledging it wasn't copy left probably?), then got developing. Down the road, they saw someone using the software in a way they didn't like and decided that as they were now bigger, they could afford to get a license drawn up with their values in mind. I doubt there was a nefarious plan to use a licence for it's re…

I absolutely reject the notion that they chose Apache 2.0 "randomly"...indeed it's what Lucene, which they use as their kernel of sorts, is licensed under.

You use Apache 2.0 when you explicitly don't want copyleft. But here's what's great: copyleft wouldn't even stop Amazon, so they have to use SSPL which is a proprietary license masquerading as copyleft.

Also, one way they were clearly outright reneging on their promise was that Elastic explicitly promised the community that the parts of the codebase that were Apache 2.0 licensed (the 'open core') would never be made proprietary. They broke that promise for this move.

And what's doubly hilarious is from a business perspective it's an awful move. It won't stop Amazon from making money - they'll just fork 7.1.0 and develop under Apache 2.0 like they just did, and keep operating their service just the same. And by the way, it's Amazon's right, legally AND ethically, to be able to operate AWS Elasticsearch for profit - just as Elastic is right both legally and ethically to use Lucene as a necessary part of Elasticsearch.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#92

Post by myth_buster »

There behavior with Elasticsearh [0] seems similar to what they did to sellers with Amazon Choice and their other knockoffs [1].

> 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.

> Recently, we found more examples of what we consider to be ethically challenged behavior. We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon, telling us their behavior continues and is more brazen. NOT OK.

0: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

1: https://archive.is/9TIu6

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#93

Post by dathos »

crb002 wrote: post #34
humbleMouse wrote: post #10

Amazon, ruining everyone's favorite open source apache projects one at a time.

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.

You say this as if it's not a sign of a monopoly.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#95

Post by truetraveller »

stefan_ wrote: post #47
m00dy wrote: post #5

If you are Elastic, how could you compete against AWS even if it is your own software ?

The AWS model isn't that they actually do novel development on this software, it's that they grab the code, add a bunch of crufty hacks to it to make it work better in their environment then sell it as a hosted version. Think of it like the Amazon marketplace equivalent: watch for products doing well, then get the cheapest possible clone made and sell it as Amazon Basic, while harassing the original vendors of these…

Very insightful comment. Thank you!

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#96

Post by parasubvert »

tw04 wrote: post #80
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 v…

You’re confused. This isn’t about crushing an OSS project: it’s about ensuring there actually IS an open source project.

What Elastic is doing with its licensing is not open source.

You might argue that if Elastic Inc dies then the project dies, but then it wasn’t a very robust project.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#97

Post by justizin »

belval wrote: post #61
mirthflat83 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to.

It seems like a lot of us perhaps rushed to discussion before reading this article, which is about Amazon forking ElasticSearch so that an OSS version would remain available.

Honestly, this is a shitty move by Elastic and I’ll be advocating against new uses of it, though /because reasons/, I doubt this will come up for me in the near future. ;)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#98

Post by riku_iki »

caymanjim wrote: post #63

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…

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

This is controversial example, in my understanding MySql creator requested to agree with his terms for all OSS commits, which gave him copyright rights on codebase, then sold his rights to Sun, and only then created MariaDb - OSS fork.

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