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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#471

Post by aaron42net »

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…

Not much value at all, from my experience.

Having given Elastic's support two tries at different companies, it doesn't surprise me that their business model is failing. Their support was _terrible_ both times; at no point were we ever in touch with anyone who seemed like they understood the product, cared about our issues, or were in any hurry to fix them. We were locked in year long, 6-figure support contracts in both cases, and issues dragged on for months until we basically gave up. We got better answers out of random Google searches and a 20 minute conversation with a friend of a friend.

AWS's hosted ElasticSearch only recently is able to handle the data set sizes we were dealing with, and their enterprise support on this (and other products) is vastly better than anything we ever got out of Elastic.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#472

Post by teruakohatu »

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…

> 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 a billion dollar business. I don't think they have made any mistakes, until now at least. They are very successful.

They are portraying themselves as a small indie dev up against a titan, but with over $400 million in revenue last year they are no small fish.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#473

Post by reissbaker »

kodah wrote: post #384
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 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 th…

I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back.

The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service. So Elastic switched the license to the non-open-source SSPL, which makes offering a hosting service essentially impossible (to satisfy the terms, Amazon would need to open-source effectively all of AWS).

This license switch is more antithetical to the spirit of open source — that is, user freedom — than what AWS was doing, which was offering a hosted version of open-source software that competed with Elastic's hosting business.

Ultimately I think selling hosting of a single piece of open-source software as a funding model for developing a single piece of open-source software (e.g. Mongo, Elastic) has proven to not be a very sustainable funding model; at least, not if you're hoping for VC-backed company sized returns. And... I can see why that doesn't feel great. At one point, hosting was believed to be the silver bullet model as compared to consulting. But ultimately I think it's just not worked out: hosting as a model makes sense for proprietary software, but for OSS, either:

* You pay developers to build the software and also pay more developers to build the hosting stack — but then your competition only pays for the latter and can beat you on price, or

* You only pay to build the hosting stack, but then — what's the point? You haven't solved funding the software development.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#474

Post by swuecho »

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…

> relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion.

I feel elastic stack work against developer too. Not a good sign for open source product.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#475

Post by patmorgan23 »

pdpi wrote: post #459
loteck wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But is that dynamic being driven by open source or does it just exist naturally? Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years or write a brand new implementation of a web server. Code reuse is encourages by open source but it happens a lot with out it as well. And I'd argue it makes technology a lot more valuable because we have a suit of existing well built software that's been tunned over the years.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#476

Post by throwaway17_17 »

dialamac wrote: post #412
kodah wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> I don't really get how people get this twisted. Quite condescending this attitude. I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple. And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are somet…

I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software licenses and, it seems to be implied, that it should be seen to supersede the bare terms of a license. This reasoning is then used as the basis of ethical usage of open source software. So, when Amazon takes a piece of software and uses it not in the ‘spirit’ of open source, their compliance with licensing is irrelevant. I don’t particularly agree with this point of view, but I get the impression many people do.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#477

Post by toyg »

RMPR wrote: post #470
nine_k wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linux had many reasons for its success, but overall governance was definitely one of them. People felt free to contribute meaningful code in the knowledge that the GPL would “defend it” against a future as free fodder for corporations. Corporations treated it with kid gloves because they were scared of the GPL, and this left the ecosystem free to breathe; and Microsoft’s all-out war on the “communist” licence effectively solidified a front of motivated contributors in a way that the existing BSD efforts had never managed to.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#478

Post by caconym_ »

bigiain wrote: post #386
caconym_ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I was thinking more the former. I understand the latter as more of an ethical position, and it's one I'm not really familiar enough with to talk intelligently about...

Conversations like this are just sort of pointless, where one side says it's supposed to be this and the other replies no, it should be that, when really open source software is just a thing that happened. It's up to us to define an ethics around it and to decide how we interact with other actors in the ecosystem who might not have the same principles and goals.

To have a discussion about how it should work, to make subjective value judgments like the ones these comments are full of, we need better arguments than 'the license says it's fine, so on what basis can you criticize Amazon's and/or Elastic's conduct here?' or 'but that's not nice!' or 'Amazon/Elastic has $XXXM revenue so they are bad'.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#479

Post by vrtx0 »

Wow. Amazon is blatantly misleading people here. They know the SSPL was created specifically because MongoDB had the same issues with Amazon’s service. I worked for MongoDB. Nobody wanted the SSPL, but Amazon was relentless.

MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing nothing to the project. They even linked entirely to MongoDB’s comprehensive documentation. “Anticompetitive” is the kindest description I can offer of Amazon’s behavior.

Just remember —- the SSPL and similar licenses are still completely open source. Amazon knows they’re forcing companies to change licenses, but shaming them as being “unacceptable to many in the open source community”.

This is political rhetoric, and I’m shocked anybody outside of Amazon would support this. The people who started these projects and surrounding businesses are generally very good people — I’ve been disabled with a neurological condition for 6 years now, but live can afford to live relatively comfortably thanks to the people at MongoDB. And I contributed code to the project before I started working for them (10gen at the time). So I’m admittedly biased, but it really seems like Amazon has become the Trump of Silicon Valley. I’m done with political rhetoric like this.

All opinions are my own.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#480

Post by jehb »

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 can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code.

Could you put some more color around this part? I don't understand the argument you're making here. It sounds like you're arguing that there's not market demand for the thing you'd like to be paid to make because it already exists and that the version that exists is open source. How is that any different than if the thing you'd like to make is under a proprietary license but at a price point you are unable to compete with?

Disclosure: My entire career in the software industry has been at companies who pay people to write software that is made available under open source licenses. Whether or not there is demand for a new thing to be created has proven independent of the license on that thing. We create and support software that meets our customer's needs, give them a path to easily extending functionality with hiring a whole development team, and indemnify them from the risk of consuming potentially insecure, unsupported software in critical production environments. Open source is a software development model, not a business model. Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

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