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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#561

Post by teruakohatu »

kotxig wrote: post #547
teruakohatu wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The mistake cost them whichever rewards amazon are reaping

I disagree because if they had had it closed or non-free open source from the start, they would not have a $15 billion business. Partly because people wouldn't have adopted it, and partly because it is build on other open source projects (Lucene).

I don't think there is a scenario where they get their cake (an open source project and a vastly successful business) and get to eat it too (they have no competition).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#562

Post by theamk »

eins1234 wrote: post #557
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 want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective. But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term: I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good…

Have you considered BSL [0]? The fresh versions are source-available, but older versions convert to open source (GPL, Apache or something) after a few years.

You can still build a business on your software -- as long as you keep developing, no competitor will be able to use up to date version. And people who want to rely on open source can do so, knowing that the software will get open-sourced eventually, no matter what the company decides.

[0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#563

Post by freeqaz »

reissbaker wrote: post #473
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 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 acqu…

Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#564

Post by gogopuppygogo »

eins1234 wrote: post #557
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 want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective. But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term: I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good…

It’s not a chilling effect. It’s how value is exchanged in a free market.

Open source makes sense when many companies benefit economically from sharing resources to develop common software/tooling.

Open sourcing code from inception can lead to adoption and create profits.

At some point that code may be more valuable to another company in some way and they profit from it.

I don’t see Linus Torvalds complaining about companies that profit from Linux but then again Elastic Search has shareholders to answer to and their trademark has been violated.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#565

Post by systemvoltage »

It seems like a lot of companies want to open source their software which would otherwise be a key secret sauce in order to get popularity, recognition, and traction. Once they're well known, in this case, Elastic; they are complaining about how others are taking advantage of their position. It's shooting themselves in the foot.

It's kind of like an Uber model - offer taxi services while bleeding cash to wipe out the entire Taxi industry (Short term success) to get fame and popularity, get AOUs and ARPUs going; and then have a difficult time monetizing their mistakes.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#566

Post by ryukafalz »

reissbaker wrote: post #454
syshum wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the Free Software, ideology, and the "open Source" ideology really show its difference I view SSPL as a Copy Left style License for the SaaS age. They picked the wrong license in the first place with Apache, they should have used GPL, AGPL, or some other copy left anyway I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off…

SSPL is marketed as copyleft, but it really isn't. AGPL is. SSPL requires not only that you open source modifications to the software, but also that you open source "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software" that you use to operate the licensed software. If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a…

>If you want to offer ElasticSearch as a service, you have to open-source your entire hosting stack including UI.

It's worse than that: you need to release your entire hosting stack under the SSPL. It's extremely unlikely that you're able to do this. Hope your servers aren't running Linux! (Or bash or the GNU coreutils or...)

If it were acceptable for the rest of the stack to be under another free software license, I'm not actually sure I'd be opposed to it. But yeah, as-is it sure looks like they've just written the license such that it's impossible for a hosting provider to comply.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#567

Post by skywhopper »

freeqaz wrote: post #560
jefftk wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is nearly 2 decades old, and its tradeoffs are well known among people working in open source. If Elastic had wanted its protections (and restrictions) they easily could have chosen it.

AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague for the legal team to confidently understand the "bounds" of the copyleft license. Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like…

None of this is new. GNU was founded and developed its licenses to address this issue. But there’s a tradeoff. One that GNU happily accepts. But there has never been a “code of honor” in this space. Give me a break. Companies have been offering Apache- and GPL- licensed software as a service for longer than Elastic has been a company. Elastic wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They overplayed their hand here and now they’re paying the price. They’ll likely soon lose control of the code base. But that’s the whole point of open source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#568

Post by theamk »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #487
IgorPartola wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better than AWS’s implementation?

And/or cost competitive.

Looking at a single machine (i3.large, 15GB ram, 470GB SD):

Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month

AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month

Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#569

Post by Rudisimo »

mathnode wrote: post #287
caymanjim wrote: post #63

AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source. Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money…

MariaDB came out with the BSL license for projects like maxcale to help protect against AWS nonsense (and the like). The mysql -> mariadb response is completely different, but no less terrible. This is history repeating itself as Amazon, once again, attempt to gut open source efforts. For a short while Amazon did contribute to some MariaDB projects. MongoDB now have similar license and AWS offers compatible API's.

Yet, MongoDB seems to maintain a healthy, symbiotic relationship with AWS [1][2][3].

[1]: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/lp/try2 [2]: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/aws-mongodb [3]: https://www.mongodb.com/mongodb-on-aws

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