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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#291

Post by hehehaha »

stefan_ wrote: post #47
m00dy wrote: post #5

If you are Elastic, how could you compete against AWS even if it is your own software ?

The AWS model isn't that they actually do novel development on this software, it's that they grab the code, add a bunch of crufty hacks to it to make it work better in their environment then sell it as a hosted version. Think of it like the Amazon marketplace equivalent: watch for products doing well, then get the cheapest possible clone made and sell it as Amazon Basic, while harassing the original vendors of these…

Why is that bad?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#292

Post by parasubvert »

bigiain wrote: post #281
parasubvert wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. “Leech…

I _mostly_ agree here. But... I do note that the original "open source definitions" were drafted back in the late 90s (and from memory, built on older pre existing Debian docs of similar nature). The world was different back then, I wonder what the authors of those docs would have considered "user freedom" to be in the age of AWS/GAE/Azure? (I guess Stallman, for all his flaws, is a reasonable guide to what the free…

I think they’d ask: In what way is AWS, GAE or Azure restricting your freedom to use free software?

If those companies customize your code and don’t recontribute it, that’s what the AGPL is for.

The SSPL doesn’t actually help with this problem. It removes your freedom to use the software in certain ways. It is a pecuniary license designed to sell you a more permissive license.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#293

Post by ROARosen »

caymanjim wrote: post #63

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…

FROM ORIGINAL POST: >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.

You might disagree but to me this sounds like hyperbole; a veiled threat should any other OSS dev decide to change their licensing just to disadvantage AWS.

I think it's juvenile to think that even AWS has the resources necessary to for every OSS product they offer. Think Linux (the kernel) etc. drivers, frameworks, as well as every dependency these projects contain.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#294

Post by z77dj3kl »

tschellenbach wrote: post #213
caymanjim wrote: post #63

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.

Yes, but open-source software adoption and growth is about more than just those who build it, it's about those who use it. Elastic wouldn't exist without the users either.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#295

Post by __blockcipher__ »

hospadar wrote: post #205
__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…

> 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…

> It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses

It actually makes incredibly bad business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, because they won't get any more revenue as a result and have now forced a high-quality Apache 2.0 fork.

> 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:

Well, they explicitly promised that they would stay Apache 2.0 licensed, which was a lie. And they're no longer open source software. So yeah that's a big deal in my book.

> 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).

I wasn't referring to Amazon, I was referring to the community overall. And don't get me wrong, the community will be fine because we'll have high-quality forks. I'm just pointing out the scumminess of what Elastic did for the company that claims to be the little guy getting exploited.

But they absolutely did pull the rug. Or as a better analogy, they shut the door behind themselves.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#296

Post by fastball »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #222
fastball wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon

I'm actually going to disagree slightly here. Making profit is not necessarily healthy, generating value and capturing a fraction of that value as profit is though.

Our system is complex enough at this point where you definitely can and do have entities that are capturing more value than they are delivering, and that is immoral (imo). In that light, profit definitely can be evil.

However it is certainly not always evil, and I don't think AWS' actions qualify in this case. They are delivering value to their customers, and they are capturing a fraction thereof.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#297

Post by catmanjan »

t0mas88 wrote: post #184
brasetvik wrote: post #117

While it's great that AWS has indeed contributed fixes to upstream Elasticsearch, they link to 9 PRs that are generally on the trivial end of the scale. (Though I don't doubt the PR that adds a missing synchronized keyword might have been gnarly and time consuming to debug, and that diff size does not necessarily correlate to importance) For a project AWS was making hundreds of millions in revenue on four years ago (…

A lot can be said about AWS and open source, but it is clear they have created some "secret sauce" on the networking, storage and virtualization side of things which is their core business. Unlike Elastic they never promised open source and never used it as marketing. So it completely fair for them to keep those things closed as they provide a big part of the competitive advantage to their cloud. Those components und…

The way I see it is the secret sauce is just black boxing it so you don't have to/can't worry about those things...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#298

Post by xorcist »

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…

If Linus had hindered AWS' use of Linux early on, would that have been better for Linux? What would "the cloud" look like?

They don't seem to have any revenue sharing scheme with Linus, yet all the Linux companies seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#299

Post by geerlingguy »

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.

I've seen devs toss crud into infra with debug logs enabled, with millions of lines of deprecated log messages, etc., and the infra budget eats their costs.

It's insane. Unless you're literally Facebook, or ingesting data from CERN's LHC... what possible use case requires 100GB of text data ingest per day?

Maybe it's a case of someone throwing a Service Mesh into a Microservices K8s cluster and logging all the things?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#300

Post by bigiain »

sparc24 wrote: post #239
jeswin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. First release of elastic was Feb 2010. AWS launched in March, 2006. The folks at 10gen used the AGPL for MongoDB since Feb, 2009. Yeah nobody could've seen this coming.

Not sure Mongo is the right example to use here, given the've gone down exactly the same "non OSI approved license" change themselves...
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