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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#381
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Except What Elastic is doing is fundamentally opposed to open source, and what Amazon is doing is fundamentally aligned. At least according to the OSI, who last I checked, really care about open source ideals. https://opensource.org/node/1099

It's not like the OSI and the FSF haven't got at least a few major differences about "ideals" though.

Pretty sure rms is 100% convinced _both_ sides of this disagreement are morally wrong.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#382

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…

That’s not what they’re saying, they offer virtualization services, not Linux as a service.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#383

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…

Is it not consistent with a dislike of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Entinguish approach? While what AWS is doing is (probably, IANAL) within their legal rights, it's arguably immoral because it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." Which, given AWS's widespread adoption, puts the OS version in peril. Edit: Thanks…

It's not. Sure, Amazon is continuing to charge for their existing ES managed services. But they're open sourcing the project behind it. So quite the opposite of what you've said. You can access this open source version of ES free of charge (once it's release on GitHub."

From the article:

"Our forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10. We will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic. We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices—including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors."

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#384

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…

I don't really get how people get this twisted.

ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. From the ES perspective, their FOSS contributions were done in good faith which basically boil down to, "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free".

AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.

You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate.

Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#385

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…

Users is not just end users. AWS and others are users too and Stallman wants them to have the same freedom to use and modify software as I do. We have the same rights and responsibilities. Even Elastic is a user of the software.

I respect anyone who follows a license, I respect anyone who want to relicense a software and I respect someone who forks a project. I don't see any fault anywhere here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"?

Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#388
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…

Source? I'm only seeing a single digit number of commits from Amazon emails out of ~57k total commits: elasticsearch $ git shortlog -nes | grep -i 'amazon'

I believe I was incorrect, one of the contributors I thought was an Amazon employee that I was attributing commits to isn't.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#389
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm clever editing I can see we are not discussing in good faith. You built a nice strawman to tear down around my “They are simply wrong” quote using it out of context How about you address what I actually said OSI is wrong about, they are wrong about the fact that there is no gap in Open Source licensing when it comes to SaaS Sevices. SSPL may not be the best solution to it, but completely rejecting the clear probl…

I am trying to argue in good faith. I’m not editing anything, I just don’t understand your argument. I don’t see what the clear problem is with open source licensing. AGPL solves the problem of SaaS providers modifying your software without freeing their modifications, if that’s what you want. AGPL is also an OSI approved license. What more is missing?

Well sorry but it's actually stated right here:

https://opensource.org/node/1099

If you want to have a business model like Elastic, then open source is simple not right for you. This is what the OSI Board of Directors says.

It's a different discussion whether this is a good business model, but it's not like op has no point here:

What's missing is an open-source license for products whose profits accrue due to being run as SaaS. If you're just going to say: "This is not possible with open-source licenses", then that's the gap.

What people actually want to do is exclude about 10 or less companies from selling their software at no own cost, while keeping it open-source for everyone else.

And OSI says this is not a use-case for any of their open-source licenses. Maybe there should be a license for that. I don't know.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#390
I had meetings lately with AWS regarding the license and was told about the fork. They mentioned something to the effect that Elastic was being greedy with open-source software.

I am an early contributor to Elasticsearch. I probably have more commits to the core product than most employees. It is now incredibly difficult for a non-employee to have any PR looked at unless it is a bug. I stopped contributing after their last "we are open" debacle but did have one outstanding feature PR open. Over two years later, still not merged. You will have others commenting that they would like the feature, but Elastic sits on it. Not blaming them, but at this point, it really is being driven by them. I give up trying to contribute.

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