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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#641

Post by kodah »

random5634 wrote: post #601
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…

Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES. In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license. https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...

Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends.

The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos.

Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea.

The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#643

Post by __blockcipher__ »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #362
xorcist wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Linus had hindered AWS' use of Linux early on, would that have been better for Linux? What would "the cloud" look like? They don't seem to have any revenue sharing scheme with Linus, yet all the Linux companies seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

Linux is not project developed as a product mostly by a single company. Substituting Linux into this situation doesn’t really provide any insight.

Actually, your argument that there’s any relevance to Elastic being the primary developer lacks insight. It changes nothing about the licensing situation nor about the ethics. You’re also not factoring in the fact that the nonrestrictive license is why Elasticsearch became the standard.

You also haven’t resolved the logical contradiction that Elastic is equally “guilty” of profiting off of Lucene.

I honestly don’t think a nuanced understanding of these licenses and open source business models can lead to any conclusion except this one: Amazon is not in the wrong here, Elastic is being entitled, misleading and duplicitous. Elastic is free to use Lucene as its kernel and monetize it, and Amazon is free to offer a managed Elasticsearch service.

If you write Apache 2.0 software, you have no right to bitch about competition. That’s the short of it. And remember - Elastic is doing fine. They’re worth $15B. The founder has hundreds of millions of dollars now, and rightly so.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#644

Post by __blockcipher__ »

kapilvt wrote: post #637
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon is literally under no obligation to contribute any code back. Yet they do because most people prefer to merge upstream if they can, and Amazon is no exception.

Frankly Elastic has been very hostile at accepting PRs if they seem like they’d compete with Elastic’s proprietary offerings. Glaring conflict of interest. So I’m glad Elastic forced a full fork.

BTW, in case you didn’t realize this license change will not prevent Amazon from running their own fork. So even from a greedy business perspective Elastic made a horrible decision, even ignoring the ethics of lying to the community as they have done repeatedly and without showing any remorse.

edit: Fixed typo where I wrote "Elastic" instead of "Amazon" when talking about Amazon being no exception to preferring to merge upstream where possible

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#645

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Spirit is for those aiming for rainbows and music, this is a business.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#646

Post by [deleted] »

bccdee wrote: post #629
skywhopper wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. Suppose Elastic does lose control of their codebase, and it winds up getting maintained entirely by AWS. Then what's to stop AWS from taking their forked Apache2 code closed-source? Bam, no more ElasticSearch. Without professional maintainers, CVEs will pile up and it will gradually become abandonware. Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Am…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#647

Post by __blockcipher__ »

kapilvt wrote: post #639
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t, I work for a non-profit that refuses to run proprietary software such as Elasticsearch 7.1.1 in prod. Not sure why you made that blind assumption. Very bizarre.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#648

Post by antpls »

aaron42net wrote: post #471
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…

Not much value at all, from my experience. Having given Elastic's support two tries at different companies, it doesn't surprise me that their business model is failing. Their support was _terrible_ both times; at no point were we ever in touch with anyone who seemed like they understood the product, cared about our issues, or were in any hurry to fix them. We were locked in year long, 6-figure support contracts in bo…

> We got better answers out of random Google searches and a 20 minute conversation with a friend of a friend.

On the other hand, if you were asking support to train you on "how to do A, B, C" while you didn't even check the documentation nor made a basic google search, I can understand why you were disappointed. Paying more for support doesn't change the nature of it, it doesn't magically become a google bot for you.

Could you maybe give an example on the issues you reported to support ?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#649

Post by tim-- »

temikus wrote: post #414
Roybot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributor efforts are remaining open source. The change in license goes into effect in the 7.11 release. Code contributed under Apache stays that way. Typically open source projects have only a handful of core developers - with a large majority being pass-by contributors interested in fixing their problems/use case. Characterizing it to sound like all these developers are being slighted is strange. Not being able t…

> Code contributed under Apache stays that way. IANAL but I think code doesn’t really belong to contributors if they agreed to sign their rights over with a CLA, no? Which is why I always feel iffy about CLA’s. I get why they’re needed but I don’t like what they enable.

But the code licensed as Apache 2.0 stays that way. The open code doesn't magically become closed source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#650

Post by sandGorgon »

boulos wrote: post #618
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…

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Just to clarify, AWS has a feature called PrivateLink [1] that charges $.01/GB transferred between a Service provider and the end customer (I thought there was a free variant for same AZ, but I seem to be wrong about that). We offer a similar feature called VPC Peering, and in particular Private Service Access [2]. Because we can be sure that the traffic is in the same Zone (or not…

Generally a VM external pricing. Its tricky to setup Privatelink with a service provider. For example Elastic cloud will have its own kubernetes setup. It could be behind a HW loadbalancer - how do you set up Privatelink there ?

Super tricky and not applicable in all circumstances. GCP and AWS must move towards sane traffic pricing (or risk anti-monopoly lawsuits). The licensing changes are just a first step.

P.S. : offtopic... can i use privatelink between AWS and Google Cloud ? do you have an idea on how much it would cost on either side ?

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