AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#201

Post by mcintyre1994 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #192

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

I actually commented on that exact quote in the article to the same effect. I was kind of worried reading it that they plan to ditch the AWS integration tbh.. but at least for now I’m pretty sure it’s the same as the others.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#202

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #155

blibble wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#203

Post by fastball » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #53

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…

Interpreting your point to be "If it's legal, it's automatically acceptable", I can offer you clarity on why some people are coming down on AWS here: They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.

I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge.

It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose. This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it".

Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!" and now they are mad because... someone did X with their software?

If the Apache license allows morally unacceptable behavior... why did they choose that license?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#204

Post by danShumway » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

caconym_ wrote: post #178

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.

> 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 pr…

I think GP meant that allowing for forks is the point of Open Source. Which I would argue is kind of a big point of Open Source -- the point isn't who's doing the forking or who's profiting -- but the point is that forks like this are intentionally allowed.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#205

Post by hospadar » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #108

mminer237 wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug:

Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining).

It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, and it's not really clear to me who would (for business reasons, not philosophy) switch to solr/other just because of the license switch.

It also makes perfect sense that AWS would release an apache-licensed fork - they have serious monopoly power - they con offer this service cheaper inside AWS, and the integrations can be smoother/better.

So really why be mad at either party? They both made good business choices it seems to me, maybe elastic will end up loosing out, but if that happens, I can't imagine that staying on the apache license would have saved their bacon.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#206

Post by paxys » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

Going to start the first actual tech discussion here – the codebases can be naturally expected to diverge, but will AWS keep the APIs the same? I can't imagine the fork will be successful without leveraging the massive Elasticsearch ecosystem. And what bearing does Oracle v Google have if they do "steal" APIs from future SSPL-licensed code?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#207

Post by weeks » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:20 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?

Apache Spark and Apache Kafka? It doesn't seem likely that the Apache Software Foundation would consider implementing the SSPL instead of the Apache License.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#208

Post by __blockcipher__ » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #180

rdsubhas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

And frankly, I don't even buy the morality argument. It is a moral good to provide value to customers such that they voluntarily choose to give you money in exchange for that value.

These people have this bizarre fusion of capitalist and communist reasoning, I really can't reconcile it. On the one hand they seem to think profit is fundamentally evil, but on the other hand they seem to think the problem is that Elastic isn't being allowed to monopolize all the profit.

Well, which is it? Did Elastic release non-restrictively-licensed free software out of the goodness of their hearts, giving it away with no expectation of a return? Or did they create this codebase purely for profit, and thus have no claim to moral highground? It's all so silly and childish.

And the biggest irony is, Elastic is already a successful business. They're trying to pretend their business model is not viable as long as Amazon keeps operating, which is just gaslighting.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#209

Post by stonemetal12 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:20 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

I see this as similar to Corretto. AFAIK they have done a good job supporting Java 8 well past what Oracle is willing to do.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#210

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

afandian wrote: post #40

uncledave wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll second that. Complete pile of excrement. Edit: See my comment further down for an extrapolation. This one lacks merit which was a bad call on my part.

What exactly is wrong? And did you switch to something else?

Part of the issue is lack of visibility into what is going on, you don't get a lot of ability to debug.

Company I was at switched from AWS's ElasticSearch to hosting it ourselves on top of EC2 instances so that we could control the memory/CPU/disks and see logging/understand more about the internals to help understand why it was slow for our use case.