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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#111

Post by zokier »

m00dy wrote: post #5

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

Don't try to compete on same market, provide differentiated offering. Focus on consultancy, custom development (plugins etc), on-prem deployments. You are the foremost experts of the software, capitalize that instead of trying to compete on ops stuff which is AWS bread and butter.

That might follow with recognition that your market might be smaller than what Elastic co has so far projected, and even it might not be enough to sustain $15B market cap, but bursting that bubble should not be all doom and gloom. Being small does not equate not being successful.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#112

Post by alpb »

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.

From my personal exchanges with people on Twitter on various contributions to projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, I have frequently seen that some AWS employees (and sometimes the companies they partner with) want to make it seem like AWS is _really_ doing open source with real contributions. Every time I pointed my finger and asked, I got a response from such people "you should know not all contributions to the open source are code".

I'm not gatekeeping what "real contributions" are: You can fund development of OSS, you can provide Project Manager support, you can publicize and organize events (for the sake of the tech; not sales), do DevRel for something, provide UX/UXR/design support etc. They're all real contributions.

But for some reason, AWS contributions to 3rd party OSS projects stops right at "it works fine on AWS". It's kind of a meme at this point.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP on Kubernetes/OSS.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#113

Post by dragonwriter »

majormajor wrote: post #81
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…

Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source only works if…

> The lesson I’m taking away from this is just use a license like they’re using now from day 1.

Sure, if your whole business model is “sell a SaaS”, then making the whole offering an open source product that is simple for other people to host and offer an equivalent (or, if integrated with other offerings you don’t have, often more compelling) service is a bad choice.

But people choose open source licensing for a reason, and against competing software, a proprietary license can be a negative feature which makes it harder to grow mindshare and prove out utility.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#114

Post by CapriciousCptl »

Steve Jobs said something like Dropbox was a feature, not a product. I think Bezos feels the same about literally everything. AFAIK Azure/Google have actual partnerships with the Elastic stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides and have staying power.

Part of me wonders if AWS always had planned to do this, and they were just waiting until it made business sense to fork (ie they had features and a new direction in mind but neglected to implement them because Elasticsearch was good enough as is). The alternative part is just 2 big corporations not finding a way to get along. Which means without clear direction and careful stewardship I'd expect the forks to just be cleanroom reimplementations or something like that.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#115

Post by soheil »

To Elastic: if you're a $15B [0] company you don't get to be a victim by appealing to your customer base to whine about how your competitor is profiting "unjustly" from a decision you made that led to your growth in the first place. Choosing Apache2 license ensures your OSS gets traction, but then you'll have to live with its consequences when Amazon comes knocking on the door.

[0] https://google.com/search?q=estc

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#116

Post by __blockcipher__ »

MattGaiser wrote: post #85
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.

> that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making. So legally open source but socially closed source/non-commercial use?

I'd phrase it backwards: these people think it should have the appearance of open source and get all the benefits (contributions from community, widespread adoption), but legally and ethically speaking it's closed source and they get to make all the money.

They seriously have this entitled attitude that because you used the free software project that they started, that now they're entitled to that money. It's patently absurd. Imagine if Linus Torvalds went around with that attitude, claiming he deserves to be a trillionaire because of the absurd amount of value Linux has produced. (And ironically Linux is a more restrictive license than Elasticsearch)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#117

Post by brasetvik »

While it's great that AWS has indeed contributed fixes to upstream Elasticsearch, they link to 9 PRs that are generally on the trivial end of the scale. (Though I don't doubt the PR that adds a missing synchronized keyword might have been gnarly and time consuming to debug, and that diff size does not necessarily correlate to importance)

For a project AWS was making hundreds of millions in revenue on four years ago (as per an ex AWS employee), patting your own shoulder for such a trivial amount of contributions is a bit disingenuous. They might have contributed more, but if there was something significant, they probably would have mentioned.

Notable new features like "ultrawarm" they did not attempt to contribute upstream, nor open source at all: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/aws-annou...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#118

Post by worldsayshi »

MisterPea wrote: post #82
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.

This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.

My two cents:

Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous.

However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again.

So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#120

Post by Chyzwar »

merb wrote: post #66
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.

Elastic is at least open about reasons. AWS pretend to be an OSS champion. Compared to other players Google, MS they do the least amount of OSS work. Hypocrisy is really worse than selfishness. It definitely shifted my neutral view of AWS.

I can still spin ElasticSearch cluster for my backend and I have somehow open license. Where is open source version of Aurora, Dynamo, DocumentDB, Neptune or Redshift? Where is anything OSS from AWS that is useful outside interfacing with AWS services?

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