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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#461

Post by jopsen »

throwarayes wrote: post #457
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.

> 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

It did work for them, didn't it?

The flip side of story is that ES or mongodb probably wouldn't have grown popular if they weren't open source.

Maybe going closed source once people know your name, is a viable path.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#462

Post by arp242 »

paxys wrote: post #155
blibble wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the era just before the cloud was the peak of open source software these days you'd have to be a fool to start a company offering an open source server based product under a liberal license Amazon is a parasite, plain and simple

Large companies have monetized open source for decades, ever since open source has existed. Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon..the list is endless. I can't imagine why people will quit the open source movement now because they realize they can't make money from it – that has always been true. Writing FOSS to get rich has always been an oxymoron.

It's not about "getting rich"; it's about being able to make a living. Those are not the same things.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#463

Post by crazysim »

I'm very curious how trademark stuff with work with this and if the whole " for " naming scheme will continue to hold. E.g. Windows Subsystem for Linux.

What if someone searches for Elasticsearch and finds Elastic's docs and there's confusion as to why something is different from AWS's Opendistro for Elasticsearch? How would that relate to trademark dilution?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#464

Post by _msw_ »

myroon5 wrote: post #396
_msw_ wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's counting emails. Unlike other Git-based projects like the Linux kernel, it seems a lot of commits are made with users.noreply.github.com email addresses. For example.

  commit 8e413f85e8978da83db107aae51e5543d4779dba
  Author: paulward24 
  Date:   Wed Jul 3 04:37:07 2019 -0700
  
      Ensure to access RecoveryState#fileDetails under lock
    
      Closes #43840

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#465

Post by mekster »

I'm afraid there may be less open source projects in the future as if you become successful by being community driven open source, you get run over by AWS once you get big enough and the project will end up being more closed to only offer highly priced corporate targeted SaaS to survive and one might just start off as closed to begin with.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#466

Post by zbobet2012 »

z77dj3kl wrote: post #350
zbobet2012 wrote: post #253

I'm not sure I understand Amazon's game theory on this one. Anything they contribute to their Apache License branch can be used by Elastic, but not vice versa. This means Elastic can continue to differentiate from Amazon without worry. Amazon however can keep the code they've not contributed back internally, but they could always do that. Perhaps this is simply an image move they don't plan to actually enhance or mai…

It guarantees a future for open-source Elasticsearch. If there are contributors that want to use ES under an open-source license, now there is a steward for that code that will guarantee the code's long term support and open-sourceness. And no, SSPL is nothing like the GPL. The purpose of GPL is to keep the code open-source. The purpose of SSPL is to others from using the software in certain ways (to make money), and…

Anyone may, and many people do, have open source forks of Elastic on github. 18.9k of them on github alone. There was no need for "another" other than PR.

I feel compelled to note that your summary of SSPL is wholly inaccurate. SSPL is very clearly a GPL derivative. It's language though leaves a lot to be desired, but the intent was clear. It does NOT prohibit making money offering the software as a service. It does require to contribute your changes back to the software if you are doing so.

The real failure is that companies have danced well enough around the edges of GPLv3 for so long that Amazon running a service which is basically just the software with modifications, but without the source code being contributed to open source, is feasible. This is even becoming a problem for Linux.

The reality is that Amazon Elasticsearch is clearly a derivative work under copyright law, and under GPL should be re-contributed. But major companies have "danced" the line so it does not have to be. SSPL is an attempt to bridge that gap, a poor one, but an attempt. The OSI appears more interested in defending their license than helping resolve this egregious situation. The SSPL sucks, but not having a solution for it sucks more.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#467

Post by ben509 »

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…

> Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to.

Disclaimer: worked at AWS.

Yes, Amazon has a vast number of engineers. They also have a vast need for engineers.

So they have to make a business case to continue to fund engineers, and I don't think one exists for the type of development we're wanting.

To be clear, there is some development they could justify.

If they are replicating new features that Elastic releases, so they're not falling behind the market, the business case is retaining customers. But that's playing catch up.

If new features optimize the service, the business case is being able to advertise lower TCO, which attracts customers. That could be quite beneficial, but there's usually not a ton of optimization you can do.

There is a business case for new features that increase integration with other AWS services. That increases customer usage of AWS. But AWS is so proprietary this would likely be useless outside AWS.

So none of that, I think, is the development people are looking for.

What we'd want are features a software business develops to differentiate their product in the market. If the features go into the open source version, however, then by definition they aren't differentiating.

This is the key business contradiction in AWS trying to fund open source development.

Maybe I'm missing something and they can make the business case for continued differentiating feature development. So, I'd say I'm wrong if after two years we're seeing such features being released to the commnuity.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#468

Post by myroon5 »

dastbe wrote: post #451
myroon5 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed it's not perfect, and that's why I included my methodology and asked if anyone has a better source since less substantiated claims are being quoted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866653

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#469

Post by ergocoder »

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…

I feel people don't actually read the accusation from Elastic.

They made multiple accusations. One of them is AWS announced Elastic search in partnership with Elastic when there was no partnership at all.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#470

Post by RMPR »

nine_k wrote: post #449
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…

Here comes the difference between GPL / AGPL and dual licensing, and the easy BSD / MIT licenses. Linux is GPL2, and there can't be a closed-source fork. FreeBSD is BSD, and see how widespread it is, in comparison.

> Linux is GPL2, and there can't be a closed-source fork. FreeBSD is BSD, and see how widespread it is, in comparison.

Is it really because of the license? I am more inclined to think it was just a matter of timing.

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