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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#151

Post by parasubvert »

floatingatoll wrote: post #69
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is absolutely possible that something legal can still be ethically unacceptable. This is an instance where people believe that it is ethically unacceptable for Amazon to do what they've been doing, so strongly that they are relicensing open source software to prohibit Amazon from continuing to benefit from their work on it. Ethics are not as simple as law, especially in technology, and very especially in open sour…

This is about a for profit corporation making more money, not ethics.

If there’s been any breach of ethics, it’s Elastic’s license change in the first place which was completely contrary to the spirit and intent of open source.

Perhaps you don’t agree. That’s fine, but let’s not assume this is consensus and that Elasic, Inc. is all about having the highest of ideals. From my POV, They’re panicked about a business model.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#152

Post by MattGaiser »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #116
MattGaiser wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 patentl…

Indeed. I would have a hard time using something with a custom licence in my company, so there are definite advantages to Apache licencing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#153

Post by perrygeo »

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.

The problem is that "their cut" of the profits was defined as precisely 0%, as per their original license terms.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#154

Post by __blockcipher__ »

worldsayshi wrote: post #118
MisterPea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ga…

Yeah let's talk about greed for a second.

Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.

So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.

Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.

And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.

Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or ?

So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.

They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.

They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:

> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming

Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#155

Post by paxys »

blibble wrote: post #79
juanbyrge wrote: post #32

The audacity of these AWS folks patronizing elastic about open source despite AWS making millions of dollars off of their open source project just reeks of entitlement. Glad I am never going to use AWS.

I suspect the era just before the cloud was the peak of open source software these days you'd have to be a fool to start a company offering an open source server based product under a liberal license Amazon is a parasite, plain and simple

Large companies have monetized open source for decades, ever since open source has existed. Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon..the list is endless. I can't imagine why people will quit the open source movement now because they realize they can't make money from it – that has always been true. Writing FOSS to get rich has always been an oxymoron.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#156

Post by worldsayshi »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #116
MattGaiser wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 patentl…

I don't quite understand your logic here. Does he deserve to be a trillionaire? Maybe? Does Jeff Bezos deserve his whole net worth just because he acquired it legally?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#157

Post by kbenson »

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…

> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor

Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)?

One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental.

I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#158

Post by Roybot »

paxys wrote: post #107
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.

It really is. “Open source” good, “closed source” bad. This is embarrassing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#159

Post by rdsubhas »

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…

Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package.

Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance.

AWS taking advantage of this — yeah sure it may be legal, like how business lobbying senators for obvious policy hacks is legal — but doesn't mean it's fair or acceptable. It's totally OK to call them out here and not reward them for it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#160

Post by jrochkind1 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #113
majormajor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> that is simple for other people to host

Literally one of the selling points of ES amongst my peers was that it was easier to set up to host in a multi-node cloud than the earlier Solr.

Which is great, good for them! But... yeah.

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