AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#101

Post by cosmodisk » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

sg47 wrote: post #75

weego wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because they don't want to, or see no value in doing so. I've been downvoted to oblivion just by stating that contributions to popular OSS projects, especially those initiated,or heavily used by large tech companies,are nothing more than just free labour. Amazon's business is commodity: they made books,one of the most precious things we,as a civilization could create,a commodity. The storage space, computing, even ML is being commoditised. Logistics will folow,then some more. The company's perspective and business goals are completely different than many would like to think.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#102

Post by ksec » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #54

crb002 wrote: post #6

Elastic was suing them for trademark breach. Hosting didn't bother them - it is FOSS. Lying that they were in partnership with Elastic did.

>Hosting didn't bother them - it is FOSS. They literally changed the license to one that's only different in not allowing people to host it the way Amazon did.

Precisely to fence off Amazon from using their Open Source with their Name on it?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#103

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

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.

With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source users to pay you is “doing it wrong”.

Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#104

Post by munificent » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

__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…

> Elastic pulls in $500MM in revenue

Not taking sides, but for comparison, Amazon makes that much revenue every 12 hours.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#105

Post by pojzon » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #76

mminer237 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Money

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#106

Post by ahachete » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

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.

> insane profits AWS is making

Do you have numbers on how much AWS profits from Amazon Elastic Search service?

Have you checked the profits from Elastic for their offerings?

Have you compared them?

How do you quantify "insane"?

Honest questions. Just a data person.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#107

Post by paxys » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

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…

It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight. They are both multi-billion dollar corporations looking out for their shareholders' interests. "Open source" is being thrown around by both sides as a marketing/goodwill tool, nothing more.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#108

Post by __blockcipher__ » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

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.

Forgive me for expressing my frustrating for a moment here:

What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give it away freely, sell it.

Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with Elastic submitted patches to their codebase.

Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary.

Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them more money, it will just hurt their brand image and incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an open source vendor gives away their software for free, intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. It's completely backwards logic.

To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you yell at someone using your free software for commercial purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't owe you any money.

You people seem to think open source just means "source available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that.

[/unhinged rant]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#109

Post by therealmarv » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

AWS has a point there (although I personally don't like their wording, open source is only a side effect here, it's more about how Amazon can charge for it also in future).

It only makes me sad that AWS makes a lot of $$$ with their elastic SaaS because of their size and for that reason can monetize it better than the original authors. Feels very Amazon like for me.

At end I have the feeling it could be all avoided if Amazon paid a little bit royalty to Elastic and both sides would have talked more and better together.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#110

Post by imgabe » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #62

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.

Sure you can call someone a dick for abiding by the terms of the agreement that you set out, but that doesn't mean you're right.

"Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying me."

"Ok, we'll use it and not pay you"

"What, how dare you?! You dick!"