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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#491

Post by mrskitch »

> This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software.

This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be. It’s not free for AWS going forward, however. Why is it that Amazon has such a hard time paying for stuff they use and commercialize? There’s no issues here with other providers (GCP, Azure, etc.), so clearly the problem lies with them. While they’re at it, they should also get off this “open and free” high horse they seem to be on. A few patches here and there don’t qualify as big time contributor status. If they want to show that they’re committed, how about the release their infrastructure code that runs all their services? That’d definitely go a lot further than “big bad Elastic changed their license and we’re defending users.” Get outta here with that nonsense, history shows otherwise with all the other tech that’s been ripped off.

I also don’t get all the criticism for Elastic doing this. They own the software, and they can do whatever they want. Should they have done this license from the start? Maybe, but it’s not exactly easy getting a project off the ground without some way to gain attention. If you’ve got no users, you’ve got to show at least what your code is doing, and picking software licenses is not exactly a straightforward task. They changed their license to fight back, and it’s entirely within their right to do so.

Hate to feel like I’m venting, but AWS is being the bully here and feigning that they’re pro-user, which is frustrating to witness.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#492

Post by vrtx0 »

autarch wrote: post #70
azurezyq wrote: post #35

>>> "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software." So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid OSS license? What a pirate logic here. EDIT: I think I made a mistake here. SSPL is really a weird license here, not really friendly.

The SSPL is not an open source license. This is quite clear. The Open Source Initiative, stewards of the term "open source", have said so at https://opensource.org/node/1099 . While AWS may be disingenuous, the statement you quoted is 100% correct.

Nobody wants the SSPL (not even MongoDB), but Amazon is forcing companies to do this while contributing nothing. These projects are still open source, and actually contribute to the libraries they depend upon. As a former developer of MongoDB who watched this happen, I’ve contributed to a variety of open source projects. MongoDB also couldn’t just lay everybody off and let Amazon grow their monopolies (much like Oracle’s behavior). But please don’t suggest I’m any less a part of the open source community than I was 20 years ago.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#493

Post by Macha »

hanniabu wrote: post #352
weego wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the major difference between Apache and MIT license?

MIT license is super simple, short way of saying "You must give me credit if you use this in the form of including this license and my copyright statement in software you distribute"

Apache license is a longer and more complicated version that is the same in spirit but also includes the agreement that the licensor does not sue the licensee over patent infringement for use of their contributions to the software or the cumalative software, unless the licensee makes a patent claim against the licensor in which case the license terminates

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#494

Post by rdsubhas »

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.

Not exactly the same. As I mentioned in the comment, you have direct access to the Linux OS when you host. Open as in access to the underlying OS is open. You can configure it, install packages that you want, etc.

When you run AWS Elasticsearch, you have no access to ES instance. You can't configure it, you can't add your own plugins. You are no longer a user, you are just a consumer of the UI/API, even when the primary product is still called Elasticsearch.

Big difference.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#495

Post by sa46 »

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.

GPL2 doesn't prevent a closed fork of Linux. It requires that if you distribute your closed fork outside of your organization, you must also distribute the modified source under the GPL2 license. Large tech companies run their own forks of Linux without providing the source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#496

Post by jakelazaroff »

dathinab wrote: post #481
mixedCase wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The hole did exist ten years ago, though. The AGPL was released in 2007, three years before Elasticsearch was created, to fix this exact problem.

…except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies. Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the wide adoption of open source software, while also preventing people from competing with them. That's not how open source works.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#497

Post by oneplane »

mrskitch wrote: post #491

> This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be. It’s not free for AWS going forward, however. Why is it that Amazon has such a hard time paying for stuff they use and commercialize? There’s no issues here with other providers (GCP, Azure, etc.), so clearly the problem lies with them. While they’re at…

Just because AWS is being an asshole doesn't mean they are also completely wrong. SSPL isn't Open Source per that old definition AWS themselves points to, or the one Fedora seems to take. On the other hand, if you mean to say "I want to be able to read the source code" then yes, we can still do that. But from a legal perspective that is not even close to the same thing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#498

Post by azernik »

mrskitch wrote: post #491

> This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be. It’s not free for AWS going forward, however. Why is it that Amazon has such a hard time paying for stuff they use and commercialize? There’s no issues here with other providers (GCP, Azure, etc.), so clearly the problem lies with them. While they’re at…

The source is available to look at, but the OSI certainly doesn't consider it "open".

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#499

Post by Lazare »

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 would say that all software engineering jobs are about integrating existing projects, although ideally that would be accomplished by building something interesting.

Often we draw some artificial line and ignore everything below that. If you draw the line right below where you're working, then you can "I'm building a system from scratch! Just using [Excel|a web browser|AWS services|NPM libraries|C standard lib|an assembler]."

I'm not sure there's any obviously "right" place to draw the line. The people working on better compilers are building on a stack of technology so vast they can't see the bottom, even if they're clearly many, many levels below where I am tinkering with some payment code talking to Stripe's APIs.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#500

Post by somethingwitty1 »

sg47 wrote: post #288
bigiain wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Maybe. I can no longer tick the "does it use an approved open source license" compliance checkbox any more. Sadly, for me, there's now a very strong incentive to move forward with an Apache2.0 licensed Amazon fork instead of the Elastic one.

How many developers does AWS have contributing to ES vs Elastic? Besides those 9 PRs, what has AWS contributed back to ES?

The article does say they made 230+ contributions last year to the OSS Elastic is (was?) built on. Not sure how one counts those, but perhaps it helped Elastic as well?
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