Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#221

Post by jrochkind1 »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #188
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…

> As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself. You very profoundly and deeply misunderstand what the SSPL actually says, which is understandable because Elastic have helped promulgate this misinformation. Please go read the license. It is not straightforward, it's very vague and exposes an organization to enormous uncertainty. If you don…

> but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable.

Ironically, it is exactly Amazon that seems to be demonstrating a way to develop an open source ElasticSearch fork and be financially viable, right?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#222

Post by __blockcipher__ »

fastball wrote: post #203
floatingatoll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!…

Fundamentally, these people do not believe in the core principles of capitalism, such as the notion that free trade makes both parties richer and that profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon. Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. They've also basically been brainwashed to think that the word "monopoly" means "any time a large company competes in the same market as a smaller one".

Which is ironic because, they also at the same time believe that Elastic is entitled to all the profits, and wax philosophical about "but how will any company be built around open source if we don't carry Elastic's water for them?"

It's just all so farcical.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#223

Post by caconym_ »

danShumway wrote: post #204
caconym_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point, either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#224

Post by manigandham »

jeswin wrote: post #191
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…

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…

AWS didn't undercut anyone. They offered their customers exactly what they wanted. Many of these software vendors have delayed offering their own cloud-hosted versions, often years after AWS, even when these vendors should be better equipped at running them.

Elastic is also infamous for data loss and still has consensus problems so maybe proper priorities are the real problem.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#225

Post by mcintyre1994 »

tinco wrote: post #185
halbritt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I send about 100GB a day to Amazon ES This is why you haven't noticed any issues.

Are you insinuating that's a small amount of data? You've got to be kidding.

It is, relative to the scale AWS ES is apparently built to support.

> Amazon Elasticsearch Service lets you store up to 3 PB of data in a single cluster, enabling you to run large log analytics workloads via a single Kibana interface.

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#226

Post by bigiain »

majormajor wrote: post #81
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…

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…

> 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.

Maybe. I can no longer tick the "does it use an approved open source license" compliance checkbox any more. Sadly, for me, there's now a very strong incentive to move forward with an Apache2.0 licensed Amazon fork instead of the Elastic one.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#227

Post by jrochkind1 »

majormajor wrote: post #149
__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…

Were you an ES contributor who feels betrayed, or are you speaking more hypothetically? I was just a free ES user, and feel fine with all of this. I don't see a bait and switch, I see a fundamentally changed market compared to 10 years ago where a business model that was perfectly reasonable is now very precarious in the face of the major cloud vendors, and a desperation move to protect their business, not some grand…

> If I needed to submit a patch I'm not gonna care about the project being "truly" open source vs just source-available.

Really? Everyone's cares are different, but I don't like contributing my time and programming output for free to proprietary software, for it's owner to make money off my work.

I don't mind contributing to open source, where anyone can make money off of it with no special privileges to some. It feels like contributing to a commons.

But contributing to proprietary software without getting compensated feels like getting taken advantage of to me.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#228

Post by parasubvert »

syshum wrote: post #179
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I suspect the Free Software foundation would strongly disagree.

Copyleft licenses such as AGPL are open source licenses, because they preserve user freedom.

The SSPL is not an open source license (and likely not even Copyleft) because it restricts user freedom that have usually been guaranteed by FLOSS.

https://opensource.org/node/1099

Open source isn’t about guaranteeing a for-profit company a business model. “Leeching” is irrelevant (and also just Elastic marketing propaganda).

User freedom is the whole point.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#229

Post by implr »

tw04 wrote: post #80
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…

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…

Elastic isn't an open source project after the license change.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#230

Post by danShumway »

rdsubhas wrote: post #159
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…

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…

> Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing

I'm not old enough or experienced enough with computer history to seriously argue about this, but this statement sets off some alarm bells for me.

My understanding is that extremely early on in computing history, especially early in the Internet era, people were thinking about SaaS. We had shared terminals, Sun was even trying to turn remote VMs into a feasible business model. I am very skeptical of the idea that Open Source developers never considered that someone might want to sell computer hosting or provide API access to a virtual environment.

I mean, doesn't the whole problem with modern Linux security stem from the fact that it's user-specific; that it was designed around this idea that it would be running on a server and accessed by a bunch of different user accounts & terminals? It was personal computers that were the surprise, not shared hosting and remote terminals/APIs.

Am I off base here? This doesn't square with how I understand computing history.

Post reply on HN