AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#161

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

cphoover wrote: post #146

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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…

Next time, go commercial from get go.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#162

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:06 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?

The announcement claims:

> All changes to Elasticsearch were sent as upstream pull requests (#42066, #42658, #43284, #43839, #53643, #57271, #59563, #61400, #64513), and we then included the “oss” builds offered by Elastic in our distribution. This ensured that we were collaborating with the upstream developers and maintainers, and not creating a “fork” of the software.

With links on the issue numbers. Why should we not understand this as contributing back?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#163

Post by chc » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

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…

Amazon's forks will still be Apache-licensed, so if there's a tit-for-tat element here, it appears to be Amazon responding to Elastic's abandonment of open-source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#164

Post by wayneftw » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:06 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.

Amazon is doing all of the work of buying servers and hiring skilled professionals and setting up instances of Elastic and automating it so that you can easily rent a server to run it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#165

Post by snikolaev » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

motiejus wrote: post #125

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

> what are the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo search?

Manticore Search is an actively developed GPLv2 fork of Sphinxsearch since 2017 - https://manticoresearch.com/

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#166

Post by xenadu02 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

The time-tested model for a situation like this that benefits everyone is big company offering X as a service hires/funds N developers in proportion to the popularity of that service on their platform. That helps ensure the project is sustainable, gives back to the community the big service obviously benefits from, and is certainly a form of "good karma".

I think a lot of people are upset due to the perceived violation of that social contract, though it obviously isn't a legal issue and may not even be a moral one depending on where you draw the line. AWS has the appearance of benefitting enormously from many OSS projects but rarely funds contributions - funding that would be a rounding error to the AWS budget.

The ball is entirely in Amazon's court. They've earned this reputation (fair or not). They can make the problem go away at any time if they want to spend a little money.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#167

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

Chyzwar wrote: post #134

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Elastic and not Lucene or OpenJDK ?

They already have fork of OpenJDK (Amazon Corretto)

Which is perfectly alright, there are plenty of Java implementations, including full commercial ones, just like with ISO languages.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#168

Post by parasubvert » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

cphoover wrote: post #146

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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…

Last I checked, sustaining a for profit business wasn’t a guaranteed right. It’s called competition, and plenty of companies fail.

If you can’t sustain a business around open sources, then don’t be open source.

Elastic chose to close their source but are now lying about it to make it look better than it is. AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#169

Post by dahdum » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

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 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.

Elastic isn't the saint here, they aren't doing this to "Double Down On Open Source" as they claim. They're simply doing it so they can squeeze the hell out of the SAAS market by betraying their promises to the community and contributors.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#170

Post by ryanisnan » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

RocketSyntax wrote: post #127

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?

I mean, if you're a contributor to Elasticsearch or Kibana, you now have a choice on which project you are going to make contributions to. Apart from dislike of AWS, I can't see why anyone would choose the version with the more restrictive license, which is SSPL.