This is why I like GPL.
AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
171–180 of 969 posts
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#172I 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…
>>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.
Something being legal does not make it ethical, many people see what AWS did, including profiting off the TradeMark of Elastic Search with zero compensation to the project is unethical
AWS is clearly in the wrong here, I am surpised by the number of people that defend AWS, this is why FOSS continues to struggle
AWS is a leech on Open Source, like many other large companies. I will be SHOCKED if AWS fork has any actual feature improvements, my guess is it will be a pure maintenance fork with security updates (maybe)
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#173AWS 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 a good point. Imagine if one of those open source projects that Elastic uses licensed there own little bit of code under the SSL. Elastic would flip out.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#174So... if Amazon's fork is still Apache 2.0 license, which is a permissive license... Elasticsearch is welcome to take any code they want from it and port it into their copy, no? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, we all know this is a lot of work, and will be a manual process if it wasn't coordinated, increasingly manual as the codebases diverge. But, anything especially valuable Amazon does, ElasticSearch can copy if they want. The same is not true in the opposite direction of course.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wr…
Of course Amazon will contribute to the new fork. They have many thousands of paying customers who have little incentive to switch, for better or worse. The only thing that might actually call for a migration is a significant decline in feature development.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#176>>> "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software." So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid OSS license? What a pirate logic here. EDIT: I think I made a mistake here. SSPL is really a weird license here, not really friendly.
The SSPL is not an open source license. This is quite clear. The Open Source Initiative, stewards of the term "open source", have said so at https://opensource.org/node/1099 . While AWS may be disingenuous, the statement you quoted is 100% correct.
Read the link. I think you are right here. SSPL is definitely a weird one.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#177Earlier 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.
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…
A lot of engineers I’ve observed are increasingly far removed from sales, marketing, and ultimately, their customers.
I also think the world (particularly technology and laws) is a complicated place with a lot of history. The old timers tend to appreciate this a bit more. There’s a book out there about the “Death of Expertise”. People think they can learn a complex domain from some questionable YouTube videos and maybe blog posts or a book. They decry the experts. In fairness there are also a lot of charlatan experts out there.
Combine the two problems, and it is an opening for “outrage bandwagons” to form that claim to simplify the matter without actually understanding it. And companies try to exploit this comprehension gap to fulfill their agenda.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#178Earlier 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.
> This is the whole point of open source.
What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#179Earlier 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…
> 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. Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so…
This is where the Free Software, ideology, and the "open Source" ideology really show its difference
I view SSPL as a Copy Left style License for the SaaS age.
They picked the wrong license in the first place with Apache, they should have used GPL, AGPL, or some other copy left anyway
I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off the work for their own commercial offers while giving nothing back
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#180I 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…
Then Elastic should've come up with a non-Apache-2.0 license at inception.
Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes morality is in any way objective).