Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#581

Post by bww »

I have no affection for Elastic Co, but why should they sit there and let Amazon eat their lunch?

Maybe I’m forgetting something but I can’t think of a single significant open source project created by Amazon. As far as I can tell they prefer to keep their differentiating services proprietary to their platform. That’s about as far from open source as you can get.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I do think it’s pretty rich that they’re going to try to claim the high road in a dispute with a company that actually has created something as useful as Elasticsearch and released it as open source (with caveats, yes). It’s pretty easy to be high and mighty about open source when you’re on the taking side.

It seems to me that if companies like Elastic can’t defend their ability to make a profit from companies like Amazon there’s a good chance we’re all going to miss out. I think it’s pretty obvious that Amazon’s not going to create the next Elasticsearch and release it as open source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#582

Post by [deleted] »

azernik wrote: post #504
dathinab wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#583

Post by jknoepfler »

skywhopper wrote: post #567
freeqaz wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People getting mad about a code of honor in a decades old, brutal business environment is truly bizarre to me. This isn't a playground pickup game, it's business.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#584

Post by Phrodo_00 »

hanniabu wrote: post #356
fastball wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Elastic should've come up with a non-Apache-2.0 license at inception. Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes m…

What open source license would prevent someone from capitalizing on your project?

No open source license prevents people from capitalizing your project. Adding a non-commercial clause to an OSS license makes it not comply with OSS anymore.

Preventing companies from hosting the software with propietary changes can be done with licenses like the AGPL, but again, the objective is not to disallow commercial use, but rather to force the source code to be available for the users of the software.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#585

Post by kemitchell »

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 guess "I believe this is correct." would be more polite. But on a social media site where everything is about prompting the next comment, and no one can unilaterally end any conversation, it's obviously toothless. In that context, the "polite" alternative could come off as tentative.

I hadn't heard "twitterism" before. Is there a list of these? I unplugged from Twitter more than a year ago, and have benefited immensely. But I'm sure I'm missing references because of it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#586

Post by ohazi »

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…

If there is a "spirit" to open source, it's a lot closer to "I can take software that you released and use it however I please, while also possibly releasing my changes so that you can do the same" than "Because I wrote this open source software, I am entitled to some arbitrarily defined 'fair' level of financial rewards, despite not giving my business model much thought."

Share and share alike. That's it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#587

Post by moocowtruck »

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…

>This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search.

FY20 Revenue of $427.6 million,Up 57% year-over-year (60% in constant currency)

?! they can't sustain developers on this?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#588

Post by jsoh »

bigiain wrote: post #413
seneca wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment and the one you're replying to actually just changed my mind on this topic. Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wan…

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…

> Elastic is a company paying 500-1000 employees who I suspect (but haven't checked) contributed the majority of the code rather than it being "free work from the community".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867682

Do they want to have their cake and eat it too?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#589

Post by monkeydreams »

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…

> that gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that.

You both articulate the problem and dismiss it in the same sentence. AWS have a right to offer the service - they do not have a right to tell people that they built ES, or to say that they work hand-in-hand with ES, etc. But there is nothing that a small open source group can do without tackling the shit-ton of lawyers that Jeff Bezos can bring to bear on the problem. No matter the points of law, he can just outspend them in every capacity to get the outcome he wants.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#590

Post by kemitchell »

rcconf wrote: post #214

I am so delighted to hear this. Open source wins again. Open source is the right for you to do whatever you want with the software, AND YES, that includes monetize it. I've been sitting on the sidelines reading the different perspectives, but I just cannot see how you can be on the side of Elasticsearch. How can they take all the work from the OSS community and add a clause that THEY only can monetize it? I will tell…

If all you want is Apache 2.0 Elasticsearch, period, there isn't really much good news here. Amazon declared an intention to compete with Elastic NV. But the race hasn't even started yet. It remains to be seen whether Amazon's fork will keep up, whether the forks will remain compatible, whether they'll both last, long-term.

Whatever happened to that pure-AGPL fork of MongoDB?

Post reply on HN