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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#211

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…

So one reason I choose open source is precisely because of the legal guarantee that there will be comptetition in providing services based on it.

If I become dependent on it, one company can't control the pricing of people offering hosted services, because it's open source, nobody needs their permission to host it. "vendor lock-in" does not exist with open source.

If that was incompatible with ES's business model for a main stream of revenue, as the project IP holder they are welcome to change their license terms.

But what they're saying is that open source was incompatible with their business model.

It is what it is, but users clamoring for the ethical superiority of vendor lock-in and thinking that's somehow open source values is... weird to me.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#212
post #191
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…

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 te…

I generally agree, but isn’t the ability to do unforeseen things one of the powers and major wins of being a user of open source ecosystem?

I don’t disagree about, what I would say charitable, instead of decent thing to do is.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#213

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…

Pretty sure that >95% of Elastic's code is created by the company and not external contributors.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#214
I am so delighted to hear this. Open source wins again. Open source is the right for you to do whatever you want with the software, AND YES, that includes monetize it. I've been sitting on the sidelines reading the different perspectives, but I just cannot see how you can be on the side of Elasticsearch. How can they take all the work from the OSS community and add a clause that THEY only can monetize it? I will tell you right now, I have NO desire to ever contribute to the closed version of Elasticsearch and I will gladly jump on board and contribute to the AWS version. We are watching in real time the OSS community being degraded by these ridiculous licenses.

The greed here is on Elasticsearch and not on AWS. If you wanted to have a closed source piece of software that you have the only rights to monetize, then you should have closed it off from the beginning instead of taking all the work from the OSS community and giving the rights for ONLY you to monetize it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#215
post #137

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…

People get upset about the GPL but this is exactly why it was created.

Precisely why GPL is the way it is. If a company released Apache or BSD code they must understand that the code can be used and extended for commercial purposes and they don't have to offer those extensions back to the community. If you want to ensure those who derive benefits from it also contribute back, you choose GPL.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#216
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They breached trademark in a press release lying that they were in partnership.

Maybe I watched too much of suits, but is that not illegal for publicly traded companies?

And that's why there's a lawsuit. Who knows when that will be resolved though. In the meantime Amazon could keep doing what they're doing and just ignore whatever Elastic is asking of them. So Elastic drew the consequence and have stopped extending goodwill to Amazon.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#217

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?

Outages during scale out, weird insurmountable restrictions on cross region replication, cost, backup and restore doesn’t work properly, cluster irrecoverable corruption and it is 100% opaque whenever something goes wrong. This results in escalation to AWS support who barely understand it.

The big sell was easy deployment and cost management but the negatives outweighed that.

We tried Elastic themselves but the sales and technical process was a nightmare. It was virtually impossible to work out what we were going to have to spend. We needed X-Pack (RBAC and SSO) but the enterprise licensing is all over the place for it.

Ergo we didn’t bother and stuck with our DBMS FTE stuff. It’s crap but the ROI is better.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#218
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub.

Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to. It seems like a lot of us perhaps rushed to discussion before reading this article, which is about Amazon forking ElasticSearch so that an OSS version would remain available. Honestly, this is a shitty move by Elastic and I’ll be advocating again…

> Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to.

Actually, you can totally use Apache 2.0 code as your kernel and then make the whole thing a restrictive license. In fact, that's why we're having this discussion right now. Elastic just made their Elasticsearch/Kibana codebases entirely proprietary, even though they rely on Apache 2.0 Lucene as their kernel. Which to be clear is totally fine, I'm just pointing out the obvious.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#219
post #161

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…

Next time, go commercial from get go.

do you think that would have hurt adoption from the get-go? How about ability to get unpaid community code contribution?
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