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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#481

Post by dathinab »

mixedCase wrote: post #436
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…

What makes you think this is a "gap in Open Source licensing"? Is it not more easily explained as Elastic's business plan having a gaping hole instead? Don't put the cart before the horse. They built on top of a license that gave the user a set of freedoms they don't want the user to have. End of story. Now they've patched this hole, but they want to keep the goodwill that comes from Open Source licensing instead of…

> Plan having a gaping hole instead?

A hole which didn't exist in this way 10 years ago. But well you could have seen it coming tbh.

> all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition

So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited?

If so then why do GPL and similar exist, which are normally considered as Open Source?

It's just that the landscape changed and with this the problems around it changed.

While in the past bundling it into non free programs (+some committed aspects) was seen as a problem and as such GPL was created today the problem are similar but instead of distributing that bundles they are provided as managed services.

In this context the Server Side Public License is as much in line with the core values of Open Source as GPL is.

It's just that Amazon cares to some degree more about free software being free as in not costing them then they care about it being freely inspectable and modifiable. But cost free-ness was never a core value of Open Source, just a side effect.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#482

Post by jrochkind1 »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #448
bigiain wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I think there's many many shades of grey here. Elastic (and Mongo and RadisLabs) are trying to do something new. Linux, without doubt, "reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community," to the point where although the original release was 100% Linus's own code and arguably "Linus's software", these days to a first approximation _none_ of the code is "his". The percentage of the…

Great comment. Just to add a bit more nuance, I think we tend to focus a lot on community contributions, but IMO the biggest benefit of FOSS is not that; it's adoption. Even if Elastic writes 100% of the code, by making it open source, they are promoting the widespread adoption of their software. A project with a non-free license or a custom license is a non-starter at many (most?) companies, or at a minimum requires…

That is in fact exactly the trap door of open source -- you are QUITE WELCOME to switch to a non-opensource model once you've reaped the benefits, but guess what, anyone else is also QUITE WELCOME to make a still-open-source fork at the point you do that.

This isn't an accident, it's in fact the whole point of open source that people can make open source forks when the original authors decide to no longer do open source.

I don't think there's much 'amicable' about it though in this case at the moment.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#483

Post by fctorial »

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…

If open source weren't a thing, software development would be much bigger pain than it is now. If something goes wrong in the code you're using, you can look into the source and at the very least implement a hack if you can't change the base. All that goes out the window with open source if you throw it away.

Also, software developers would be much more rare since the cost of learning would've been much higher.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#484

Post by r-w »

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…

Then how do you explain how it literally worked just fine until Amazon came along?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#485

Post by mhh__ »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #372
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…

By your reasoning Linus Torvalds should be getting a cut of any money made on a linux host.

Ignoring that Linus himself isn't particularly software freedom-y (I think he, entirely and provably correctly in my view, firmly believes in open source as a way to achieve good software, but the freedom angle isn't as important as for someone like Stallman), Linux being GPL is arguably the reason why it dominates - any changes worth talking about to Linux get propagated publicly and openly, as opposed to if it were under a permissive licence.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#486

Post by toyg »

stefan_ wrote: post #364
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…

> The first version of the Affero General Public License (AGPLv1), was published by Affero, Inc. in March 2002 Stallman strikes again!

Stallman will break all sorts of records for being “the most annoyingly correct forecaster of computer trends with the less affable personality ever”.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#488

Post by sullivanmatt »

basilgohar wrote: post #373
lscotte wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. ElasticSearch might have OpenOffice'd or Hudson'd themselves.

I would call this MongoDB'd themselves. Except that also would imply that people are still interested in MongoDB. I think their license move probably just accelerated the decline in interest in their product.

Mongo adoption has risen at a rapid rate, and cloud services now make up nearly 40% of their revenue (which, in turn, allows the company to push those $$$ into the core product). Your statement, while a common view on HN, is not correct. Just because tech bros have moved on towards other interests has not meant that adoption of Mongo has faltered. (I am not affiliated with, nor own stock in, MongoDB, Inc in any way)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#489

Post by r-w »

2bitencryption wrote: post #402
mylons wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the correct take. AWS and Elastic are both acting out of self interest with varying levels of gains for the customer in each.

I'm about to make a really petty and possibly off topic comment, so sorry for this -- "this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."

I think it comes from a desperation for clarity in a messy conversation.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#490

Post by myroon5 »

_msw_ wrote: post #464
myroon5 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not claiming every git commit uses work emails

Referring to the fact that the original 600 Amazon PR claim was rescinded in that thread

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