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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#121

Post by markphip »

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.

Elastic forced the fork. AWS was contributing and complying with the license. Why should AWS not be allowed to make insane profits off open source?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#122

Post by paxys »

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…

Elasticsearch isn't two scrappy guys in a garage writing code out of the good of their hearts. It's a VC-backed $15B company which now needs to make money.

Open source is the last thing on either of the two gorillas' minds.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#123

Post by marcinzm »

ksec wrote: post #102
marcinzm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

The new license does not say "X applies if you use our name". It says "X applies if you use our source code under any name."

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#124

Post by __blockcipher__ »

dragonwriter wrote: post #103
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.

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.

> 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.

Exactly this.

Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model.

The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. Nope, it's all gaslighting. They don't need to make this license change, without it they'll still be a $50B business in a decade or less.

They're just having an immature childish response because, while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is also making boatloads of money, and that's not fair in their eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a whole is, but that's another rant)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#125

Post by motiejus »

I don't trust aws will do a good job with the fork. Can anyone tell me a FOSS project led by amazon that's not for accessing their services (boto)?

Now that elastic.co is going sideways, sphinxsearch (best search server experience I've had) non-foss since circa 2017, what are the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo search?

Edit/disclaimer: former aws employee

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#126

Post by hyperion2010 »

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…

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are writing open source software, especially if their moat is a proprietary shim that any of the big providers could rewrite in a month if they cared. Adding a rider to your open source that says "oh, and only the original authors at this one company are allowed to implement those shims" may play well with the HN crowd, but it isn't open source anymore.

I will also note that is clearly not enough competition in the cloud provider space, if there were more competition then elastic might be able to make money from the platform providers by implementing ES for each platform as you suggest.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#127

Post by RocketSyntax »

This feels like a spin? Isn't AWS biting hand that feeds them? They need a win-win strategy for open source devs. It's hard enough to compete with their version of your service (spark, kafka) without them forking your project. what's next, are they going to fork spark and kafka?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#128

Post by Seanambers »

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.

Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to contribute to free software. But when others can live in mansions because of it, maybe not so much :)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#129

Post by mcintyre1994 »

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #114

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 di…

> AFAIK Azure/Google have actual partnerships with the Elastic stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides and have staying power.

Can you elaborate a bit here? We deploy from elastic.co into AWS and it seems to be fully supported. I'm not sure what they'd be doing with Google Cloud/Azure that they're not doing with AWS. Their homepage seems to still equate them all "Run where and how you want. Deploy on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services with Elastic Cloud."

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#130

Post by choeger »

crb002 wrote: post #17
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.

They breached trademark in a press release lying that they were in partnership.

Maybe I watched too much of suits, but is that not illegal for publicly traded companies?
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