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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#631

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #610
jakelazaroff wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the AGPL not a copyleft license? What are the derivative works you're required to distribute as AGPL?

AGPL is meant to address the situation where someone takes GPL code, such as a database server, runs it on their systems (possibly with proprietary modifications), and provides network access to it to users, and does not provide those users with the source code. That is perfectly acceptable under GPL, GPL doesn't trigger if you aren't distributing the program. What AGPL changed is that they made it trigger on distrib…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#632

Post by klintcho »

sokoloff wrote: post #431
cwyers wrote: post #422

Earlier 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…

I see it as “there are a variety of licenses from which to choose, depending on your goals”. BSD, Apache, and MIT all represent different points in space, as do GPL and AGPL. When I choose Apache or MIT, I do so for a reason and if you or Amazon use code in compliance with that license, I’m happy and you’re not “exploiting a gap” but rather “complying with the terms I offered”.

Fully agree with this. Free is free, you could always argue that there is "a spirit to open source"; but as with everything there's always going to be people exploiting and using it, that comes with the free.

To me it boils down to if you think that it's worth it: whenever I put MIT or Apache 2.0 on my public Github projects, I don't mind anyone going out making millions on them. Other side of the coin; if I make millions on some obscure library I found on Github with an MIT license, I do not expect them to be outraged about it.

If you do not think it's worth it, as you said there are a range of other licenses out there. I love the notion of human knowledge being free and available to all to the fullest extent, I think it will drive (and has driven) immense value for humankind.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#633

Post by nkellenicki »

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…

> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product.

Therein lies the flaw in the argument. If a company decides to develop something and open source it, it's not a product. If the company chooses to assign their time and resources to help develop it, great, but the moment it no longer becomes beneficial for them to keep supporting it, they'll drop it and leave it to the community.

Many companies invest time and resources into furthering open source projects without being the owner/creator of it. This is no different, whether they created it in the first place or not - they chose to open source it.

Building your business around something that you give away for free will always be a terrible business model.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#634

Post by thayne »

Hopefully they change the names. Even if keeping the old names isn't legally trademark infringement (IANAL, so I don't know), using those names without Elastic's consent is a low blow.

That said, being able to make a fork if you disagree with the direction of an open source project is one of the great things about open source. AWS clearly has the resources, and the motivation to maintain a fork of Elasticsearch, at least they are making their fork open source instead of keeping it proprietary. It probably would have been a better situation if AWS had created some kind of reciprocal partnership with Elastic and Elastic hadn't felt the need to change the license, but it is likely too late for that now.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#635

Post by sandGorgon »

boulos wrote: post #620
pradn wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's not a way to remove the egress pricing moat because it's so natural. Of course it costs less money to move data within a datacenter than outside of it. So, why wouldn't it cost less to do everything inside AWS? Egress pricing is probably multiples of this actual discrepancy to erect the moat even deeper. It really does feel hopeless to run an open-source service that isn't running on an existing crowd. Pe…

See my sibling comment. Snowflake actually has historically run as a multinenant service with access to say your S3 bucket, so the majority of data transfer is VM S3 in the same Region (so included/free). As a snowflake customer, you would submit queries (and data ingestion) as Egress pricing (roughly $.01/GB though assuming it was using the private link or similar) and then the smallish results come back as Ingress…

no this is not free. Because what you would do is setup a "peering" between Snowflake cluster and your own. Even if it is the same region, there is a cost - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/peering/vpc-peering-b...

That cost acts as a barrier if AWS launches its own Snowflake competitor. Basically AWS taxes you for not using other AWS services, once you are inside AWS.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#636

Post by sandGorgon »

hodgesrm wrote: post #622
sandGorgon wrote: post #591

The issue here is that it's quite impossible to compete with AWS if it offers even an inferior version of a service. Because of network egress pricing. You are most likely on AWS already. And even if elastic offers a 2x better product at 1/2 the price, your cost of traffic for an external service will easily 4x versus using AWS services. And that's really the frustration for these service providers. You can NEVER com…

What's the basis of your statement? For data warehouse/data lake type applications, data typically goes in and aggregates come out. The point of these systems is to fish out only the data you actually need to make decisions, which is usually much smaller than the source dataset. Compute and storage therefore tend to dwarf other costs.

we are talking elasticsearch here. This is not aggregate computation. you are constantly pushing data to ES and retrieving queries.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#637

Post by kapilvt »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #347
riquito wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We proposed to give back jointly at a significant level and were turned down." Adrian Cockcroft (VP AWS) https://twitter.com/adrianco/status/1105178074499375106?s=20

We have no idea what “significant level” means here.

~1k lines (per enumerated prs in blog post) against millions of lines, aka less than a fraction of a percent.. plus ignoring code review, issue triaged etc. insignificant level might be more apt.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#639

Post by kapilvt »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #283
wyaeld wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ES had a business model. It was open-core, but with critical features like Security and Access-Control hidden behind their paid support. The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working. Enough blame for the current situation on all side…

Yeah, I simplified things for the sake of argument, but just to be clear, the whole open core business model was a huge conflict of interest and has convinced me that open core is a way worse conflict of interest than other ways to monetize (enterprise support, operating cloud service etc). So, to call Elastic a successful open-source business model isn't quite accurate, and you're correct to point that out.

please add disclaimers if you work at amz

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#640

Post by pjmlp »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #219
pjmlp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time, go commercial from get go.

do you think that would have hurt adoption from the get-go? How about ability to get unpaid community code contribution?

Sure it would be harder, but that is life, hard and made of options.

I have been there during the first .com wave, so I know how hard it was, including what happens when the money stops flooding in.

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