AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#451

Post by dastbe » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

myroon5 wrote: post #343

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…

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'

disclosure: I work at AWS

You're not required to contribute with your amazon e-mail address, and I see a lot of people who don't due to inertia or because they want to avoid tying their identity their employer.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#452

Post by throwarayes » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

alexchantavy wrote: post #442

kotxig wrote: post #435

Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed…

Are you saying that most software engineering jobs in your experience are about integrating existing projects rather than building anything interesting?

I mean I was an embedded C dev, I "integrated" a compiler, an x86 chip, and a bunch of proprietary hardware. All software can be described as a kind of glue (luckily glue can be interesting lol)...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#453

Post by IgorPartola » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

MoOmer wrote: post #430

IgorPartola wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Amazon forking ES is then ensuring that if Elastic dies, ElasticSearch doesn’t go away, right? Part of the problem here really is that if I am using AWS for the rest of my stack, why would I run my search elsewhere, introducing latency, etc? Elastic’s opportunity was to approach AWS and try to get bought. But their business model really isn’t as good as it seems.

Elastic's Cloud offering runs in the major cloud providers [0]. https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud

Is it better than AWS’s implementation?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#454

Post by reissbaker » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

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…

SSPL is marketed as copyleft, but it really isn't. AGPL is. SSPL requires not only that you open source modifications to the software, but also that you open source "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software" that you use to operate the licensed software.

If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a service, you have to open-source your entire hosting stack including UI. God help you if you pay for any proprietary software — you literally can't satisfy these terms. Notably, Elastic itself doesn't have to do this for its own hosting service, because of course it can't satisfy the terms: no hosting company I know of can.

The point of the license isn't to get contributions back. The point is to prevent competition to Elastic's hosting business. Elastic's new version of ElasticSearch is source-available software, not open-source, by pretty much any reasonable definition.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#455

Post by loteck » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

alexchantavy wrote: post #442

kotxig wrote: post #435

Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed…

Are you saying that most software engineering jobs in your experience are about integrating existing projects rather than building anything interesting?

Integrating existing projects and building something interesting are not mutually exclusive.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#456

Post by nojvek » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

This reminds of now node was forked into iojs. Somehow they found middleground and joined back.

Elastic seems to have shaken the AWS beast and they forked (which is legal).

I wonder what will eventually win with the community.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#457

Post by throwarayes » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

kotxig wrote: post #435

Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed…

I think nothing makes this point better that their current business model (cloud hosting) is based on an acquisition. They had to acquire a business model...

I have a lot of empathy for Elastic here, it really sucks to see something you build being eaten by the 800 lb ruthless Amazon gorilla. But you can't have a company that starts with a bunch of OSS devs saying "open source lols" and somehow VCs throw money at it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#458

Post by JarlUlvi » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:52 AM UTC

markphip wrote: post #121

mminer237 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.

Elastic forced the fork. AWS was contributing and complying with the license. Why should AWS not be allowed to make insane profits off open source?

With as much profit as AWS was making on ELK they should have commits up the wazoo.

Instead, crickets.

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

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#459

Post by pdpi » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

loteck wrote: post #455

alexchantavy wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that most software engineering jobs in your experience are about integrating existing projects rather than building anything interesting?

Integrating existing projects and building something interesting are not mutually exclusive.

Some of us are systems/infra people for whom foundational stuff is where the interest lies. Some of us are product people who thrive on more direct user-facing value. It’s a lot easier for the latter group to find interest in integrating preexisting open-source building blocks, while the former wish they could be making the building blocks themselves.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#460

Post by arp242 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

soheil wrote: post #115

To Elastic: if you're a $15B [0] company you don't get to be a victim by appealing to your customer base to whine about how your competitor is profiting "unjustly" from a decision you made that led to your growth in the first place. Choosing Apache2 license ensures your OSS gets traction, but then you'll have to live with its consequences when Amazon comes knocking on the door. [0] https://google.com/search?q=estc

That's just a valuation, based on expectations, hype, and chicken entrail readings, and not really all that useful. It's not like they have anywhere near $15 billion lying around. They made a net loss of $75 million last year.