Elastic has more than 1000 employee, I don't see AWS investing enough human resources to outcompete them on their own software.
AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
541–550 of 969 posts
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#542I 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…
Yeah, Elastic is a 'smaller' company than Amazon, but they still are a $15 billion company. They aren't exactly a mom and pop shop.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#543I 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…
From where i am sitting, it looks like a bait and switch: use the permissive open source license to get popular, once you are popular, switch to closed source license.
Which is not to say what they are doing is wrong, they are just as much within their rights as amazon is.
> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together"
I think that's BS if you are talking about bsd-style licenses. Maybe i could see an argument about spirit violations if it was a GPL-family license, but the entire point of bsd style licenses is so that businesses can take the code and adapt it to their business needs.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS didn't undercut anyone. They offered their customers exactly what they wanted. Many of these software vendors have delayed offering their own cloud-hosted versions, often years after AWS, even when these vendors should be better equipped at running them. Elastic is also infamous for data loss and still has consensus problems so maybe proper priorities are the real problem.
There is no meaningful way for an independent vendor to compete with a Cloud Provider offering the same service. It gets bundled in the initial sales pitch, promoted in their documentation and at events, and gets heavily discounted. It simply becomes the default - and (if on AWS) nobody will even think of Elastic after a couple of years.
The big three may have some advantages, but there are numerous smaller competitors.
The biggest advantage the big three have is that some people don’t even bother looking for alternatives.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#545Excellent reflection business changes in opensource here:
Death of an Open Source Business Model [1]
[1] https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-busin...
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#546I 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…
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…
An open source product with a market cap of $15B.
Neither party is going to come out of this smelling like roses, but ES is hardly a tiny upstart barely able to get by.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#547Elastic 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…
Yes they have been successful and continue to be. I still think they have made a mistake, I don't see why success would invalidate that. If amazon are eating into their profits their mistake was to not protect their business against that threat from the beginning. The mistake cost them whichever rewards amazon are reaping. That doesn't mean they have failed entirely, and clearly far from it.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Open source is not about the license but the philosophy
"Free Software" is not about the license but the philosiphy.
"Open source" on the other hand...
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#549I 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…
> 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.
I don't actually agree AWS violates the spirit of the license. The spirit of the Apache license is explicitly - "I don't care if you succeed with my code wildly beyond what i achieve, more power to you, just credit me in the byline". I license my own code in Apache usually because that's precisely my position.
There are other licenses implying a different spirit if you want to take a different position - but complaining about AWS because they chose Apache is not a great look. They're certain to lose community developers.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 als…
Slightly off topic but... > …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. They wouldn't have to. This is a common misconception about AGPL.
Is the AGPL not a copyleft license? What are the derivative works you're required to distribute as AGPL?