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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#501

Post by andrewmutz »

cwyers wrote: post #422
ryukafalz wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. Gaps in open source licensing? The license Elastic chose explicitly allows anyone to take the code, run it as they wish, and not contribute anything back. There are other FOSS licenses that are slightly more strict about this; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone…

> they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close? EDIT: I do think it's fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is wors…

Elastic wants to get the benefits of permissive licenses without the drawbacks.

Having a permissive license is a massive asset for getting people to adopt your software, but it means you will have no control over what they do with it.

They want the goodwill and other benefits of a permissive license without loss of control that these licenses bring.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#502

Post by lmm »

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…

> This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be.

The source is available but not open. Open source is a specific thing with a specific meaning, and Elastic no longer qualifies.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#503

Post by mrskitch »

oneplane wrote: post #497
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.

> But from a legal perspective that is not even close to the same thing.

Very true. However, my rebuttal would be that the majority of folks reading this are of an engineering background, and seeing the words “no longer open source” can land quite differently.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#504

Post by azernik »

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…

GPL would not solve the problem Elastic has - it's perfectly legal (and in the spirit of the definition!) to take GPL software, host it yourself, sell the hosted service, and not pay the creator a cent.

It's also perfectly legal to run GPL software on a Windows machine without open-sourcing Windows.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#505

Post by reducesuffering »

arusahni wrote: post #340

I'm extremely skeptical of AWS's ability to deliver a compelling, featured ES fork up against Elastic. Unless they actively hire contributors, they're going to get lapped functionality-wise.

They are already drowning trying to support the ops load of their managed ES that is far behind Elastic's. Without a major shift in poaching Elastic employees and adding many more devs, I agree AWS doesn't currently have the ability to do this.

Disclaimer: Amazon employee

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#506

Post by azernik »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #476
dialamac wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 license…

When it comes to the "spirit", the people criticizing it seem to be talking about the "spirit" of Stallman and Free Software; the term Open Source and the OSI as an institution were explicitly built on friendliness to running side by side with proprietary software and to third-party commercial use.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#507

Post by unilynx »

fctorial wrote: post #483
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.

That doesn’t require open source, just the source. (Some?) Borland compilers used to come with the source of their standard library, which allowed us to hack around bugs in their time() implementation, but it wasn’t open source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#508

Post by tybit »

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…

If you believe that just because you can exploit a license doesn’t mean you should, do you believe Elastic have wronged ElasticSearch and Lucene’s contributors by not compensating them(other than those that are employees)?

I don’t understand the argument that a company should get to “own” all the profits for a particular FOSS project.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#509

Post by lolive »

How can people honestly think that big innovations will come out of the Amazon’s Elastic fork? There is not fundamental technical reasons for that fork. Call me hippie, but a project is all about love and dedication. And I hardly think Amazon is that much in love with the Elastic codebase and roadmap. Time will tell...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#510

Post by lmm »

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…

> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.

Or Amazon (or a third party) may take over maintenance of ES if it's worth it to them. That's the whole point of open source.

> You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate.

There's no exploitation here. ES are grownups and responsible for their own business decisions. Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients.

> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.

The whole point of "open source" as distinct from "free software" was to get away from all the ideological baggage and focus on pragmatic licensing that would appeal to businesses. Guess what: it worked.

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