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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#391

Post by treesknees »

hanniabu wrote: post #360
hyperion2010 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…

> The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are writing open source software So what you're saying is people shouldn't work on open source projects. That's essentially what your statement boils down to.

No, it's a fair thing to consider when you're creating a business based on a project that can be forked, that someone with more money and resources than you can fork it and run you out of business.

That doesn't mean people shouldn't contribute to open source projects.

I should point out too, most companies actually can't afford to fork and take over projects. At $PreviousJob we wrote proprietary software but used open source software (for example Intel DPDK). If DPDK were to suddenly switch their licensing, we would never have the resources to maintain something like that long term. So just because it _can_ be forked and "taken over" by another company doesn't mean will. It most likely won't.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#392

Post by __blockcipher__ »

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…

So, let's pretend I'm Amazon and I'm offering a SAAS Elasticsearch product. You need someone to manage your Elasticsearch for me, so you pay me. Internally, I'm running vanilla, unmodified Elasticsearch, which talks to a management layer of proprietary code that interfaces with the rest of AWS.

What right is being violated here? You as a user can run your own Elasticsearch software; I haven't modified it and thus I don't need to publish anything specific. What the SSPL says is I must publicize my entire SAAS product - but the user isn't paying me to run their own Elasticsearch SAAS product, they're paying me to run Elasticsearch.

So to call SSPL copyleft is totally absurd.

Now, there's a broader discussion that you raised of whether the open source definitions are out-of-date or not. Personally, I don't believe so. I don't see how any of the newer developments in the space (public clouds, managed offerings, etc) materially change anything; indeed the whole point of OSS is it's based off of deep principles.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#393

Post by ilikehurdles »

This is Node.js and IO.js. vi and vim. vim and neovim. In other words, it’s just another perfectly fine software fork. If Elastic can’t sustain a valuable product they created, someone else will. If it it’s not valuable enough to invest in, something better will replace it. I don’t see why quarreling over software licensing is a valuable use of their time, especially when the foundation of their software is more open source software.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#394

Post by vmception »

weego wrote: post #58
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…

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…

I always get a laugh out of these for-profit companies trying to cater to a tech community open source ethos, and discovering there was a reason why companies weren’t doing this

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#395

Post by dodobirdlord »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #126
tw04 wrote: 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…

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…

> Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork.

Elastic loses nothing by pissing off AWS, this was clearly the right move. AWS has contributed very little to the project so far, so if they took their toys home in a huff it makes no difference to Elastic. And if AWS does contribute significant development to their new fork, Elastic is free to copy any worthwhile commits into the official repo under the terms of the license Amazon has released their fork under. The only thing Elastic is going to suffer for this is some people whinging on HN about whether or not it’s “really open source” anymore.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#396

Post by myroon5 »

_msw_ wrote: post #367
sg47 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 9 PRs vs, as someone pointed out below, roughly 41000 commits in the project.

Disclosure: I work at Amazon on cloud infrastructure, but not directly on the codebase being discussed here. Someone pointed out elsewhere: *Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable r…

The other comment claiming 600 Amazon PRs was mistaken:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866527

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#397

Post by dodobirdlord »

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…

They made a mistake with their original licensing, and now they have corrected it. The comments on this post seem strangely invested in Elastic not fixing their mistake.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#398

Post by toast0 »

jlawer wrote: post #144

I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch v(FORKED_VERSION). Their continued trying to associate it to ES is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well. I am actually quite surprised they haven't just hired a small team o…

They could just call it Elastic Search? Because they have Elastic Compute and Elastic Load Balancers and I'm sure some more elastic bits, so Elastic Noun fits in their stable.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#399

Post by _msw_ »

alpb wrote: post #112
Chyzwar wrote: post #41

They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs of total 41000 in elastic repo. They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.

From my personal exchanges with people on Twitter on various contributions to projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, I have frequently seen that some AWS employees (and sometimes the companies they partner with) want to make it seem like AWS is _really_ doing open source with real contributions. Every time I pointed my finger and asked, I got a response from such people "you should know not all contributions to the op…

Disclosure: I work at Amazon on AWS infrastructure. And sometimes I have exchanges with ahmetb on Twitter.

I cannot dispute the fact that Google has more developers working on k8s than AWS does. And that AWS developers have been focused more on making sure that k8s works great on AWS, rather than the core code. I've heard folks say that they think that k8s works better on Google because of all the Google developers using it. And that might have been true at some point. But, in any case, that means that you're probably going to see more activity making k8s work well on AWS than work in other areas.

But it doesn't mean that other "3rd party" packages don't see more general activity that goes beyond "it works fine on AWS". Like the work in the upstream Linux kernel to apply the retpoline approach (invented by folks at Google, but not applied to upstream Linux) to mitigate Spectre. [1]

It is meme when people pick it up and propagate it.

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2018-mitiga...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#400

Post by __blockcipher__ »

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…

I've made very small contributions, irrelevant in the scheme of things. I've also run decent-sized Elasticsearch clusters (~10-20TB total store).

When I speak of betrayal I'm more speaking in the general sense that under my value structure, it is immoral to lie to someone or to break promises, which is what Elastic did. They told people they would never make the Apache 2.0 code proprietary, and then they did it anyway. For a shitty reason at that.

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