AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

Contributor efforts are remaining open source. The change in license goes into effect in the 7.11 release. Code contributed under Apache stays that way.

Typically open source projects have only a handful of core developers - with a large majority being pass-by contributors interested in fixing their problems/use case. Characterizing it to sound like all these developers are being slighted is strange.

Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic.

I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch v(FORKED_VERSION). Their continued trying to associate it to ES is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well.

I am actually quite surprised they haven't just hired a small team of core devs for it and try and out compete Elastic. The groundwork is laid, I could easily see AWS being able to maintain a "Fast Follower" + AWS Optimisation approach and be able to offer a substantial portion of the value for a fraction of the costs. Try and pick up the open source community now while there is concerns around the license.

Additionally at this point the AWS core platform is different enough then GCP / Azure / other clouds. I imagine they could build optimisations for AWS in and be able to save costs on providing the service. (i.e. it might be worth doing some work in FPGAs / ASICs, giving faster performance while only being economical when your the scale of AWS). I kind of am surprised AWS hasn't grown to attempt to have a guiding hand over many of the open source projects that are effectively their vendors. Many projects have a handful of core contributors and a hiring a key person will ensure your able to influence development in a way that assists you (assuming it is neutral to beneficial to the project).

Edit: I should probably say I don't love the idea (morality) of the "Fast Follower" capturing the value of an innovative project and screwing the people involved in making the project successful. However it is how competition works and how many other businesses operate in other industries. Since elastic and AWS can't seem to come to a mutually beneficial agreement, then I would prefer them to sort it out in competition.

> "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."

Hmmm.... is that what happened or did AWS usurp Elastic's main stream of revenue providing an enterprise cloud platform, and in response they changed their licensing in an attempt to protect the viability of their company while minimizing the impact on contributors to the framework.. As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself.

You may disagree with this strategy, but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Because I think there is an issue of how people can sustain a business centered around open source.

You’re legally allowed to call me an asshole to my face, but in a world where we expect civility...

...well, there is no but. The price I pay to live in a free world is that I can’t do anything about anyone else’s bad behaviour. I just have to put up with it because the alternatives are worse. At least I get a free world out of it.

I hope Elastic get something out of the free world in which they exist. Patches from early contributors, I’m guessing. Certainly a brand and adoption they wouldn’t have enjoyed had they remained closed source.

It’s a better world than one where we lack high quality open and free software, even if we have to live alongside the Amazons.

I think this is a negative sum outcome. The key metric is customer value and the Apache License had previously struck a balance between commercialization and customer lock-in. The Cloud gorillas (AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba) have disrupted this balance but they too are delivering customer value.

I'm not sure if OSS vendors like Elastic need to modify their business models, Apache needs to address the suboptimal situation, or if the Cloud gorillas need to change their business tactics but something has to give.