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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#191

Post by jeswin »

weego wrote: post #58
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…

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…

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors.

The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original team. Instead, AWS takes all their customers, keeps 100% of the revenue, and passes on nothing.

Terrible.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#192

Post by CapriciousCptl »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #129
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 Go…

I may be wrong. I'm reading into this that was on HN the other day--

"We collaborate with cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud, and others. We have shown we can find a way to do it. We even work with other parts of Amazon. We are always open to doing that; it just needs to be OK." https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#193

Post by brasetvik »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #126
tw04 wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

> Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to.

Looking at the various projects at https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/, the most prominent ones seem to only have a handful of somewhat active developers, almost two years after launch.

If AWS hires a lot of people to work full time on their ASL2-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks, then ... that's not necessarily _just_ bad for Elastic? I doubt Elastic execs thought AWS would just fall over and discontinue something that's probably billions in revenue at this point. If AWS actually starts contributing code beyond trivial bug fixes, code Elastic can legally fold into their own Elasticsearch (via the ASL2-licensed fork) if it's good enough, then ... good for both?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#194

Post by __blockcipher__ »

parasubvert wrote: post #168
cphoover wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 unet…

> AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unethical? The mind reels.

Yup. This mentality drives me absolutely insane. People seem to regurgitate whatever propaganda fake-open-source-company-X tells them.

Sorry, I'm not going to feel bad that the $15B company that built their business off the backs of open source - which is totally fine - is upset that another company is competing with them. And the biggest irony is, Amazon's not eating Elastic's lunch, they're both eating respectable lunches. Elastic's built a great business, which they are now doing their best to ruin as quickly as possible.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#195

Post by gnfargbl »

Chyzwar wrote: post #41

They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs of total 41000 in elastic repo. They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.

AWS's model seems to be to take a popular OSS product, do _just_ enough to make it work with AWS, make tons of money out of it, contribute a minimal amount back... and then act all surprised when they're painted as the bad guys.

Take postgres. RDS is a core AWS product. They absolutely rely on it. But if you take a look at https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/, are any of the current major contributors at AWS? If they are, I can't see them.

It's okay to behave like that when you're a small or even medium sized tech company. But when you're the world's number one cloud service, by quite some margin? Hmmn.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#196

Post by tannhaeuser »

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

The whole point of "The Cloud" is to profit from F/OSS. And Elastic, Redis, Mongo, and also RedHat have indeed already adapted their licenses or offerings accordingly.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#197

Post by pbz »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #126
tw04 wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

"Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to"

That may be true for a few OSS projects, but if they were forced to do that for ALL the projects they're profiting from the math would probably not look as simple.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#199

Post by redisman »

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…

> I think Bezos feels the same about literally everything.

That sounds weird. Comparing the "productization" of ES+Kibana to any AWS database stack is night and day. And not in AWS'es favor. ES and Kibana are much more of a product.

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