AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#651

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #641

random5634 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

What? It was always known.

Why do you think UNIX companies agreed on MIT license for the basic X Windows infrastructure, but then Motif was commercial on top?

Or how UNIX clones and Windows have used parts of BSD.

40 years now, more than known.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#652

Post by cesaref » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #481

mixedCase wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this is a "gap in Open Source licensing"? Is it not more easily explained as Elastic's business plan having a gaping hole instead? Don't put the cart before the horse. They built on top of a license that gave the user a set of freedoms they don't want the user to have. End of story. Now they've patched this hole, but they want to keep the goodwill that comes from Open Source licensing instead of…

> 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…

`So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited?`

And how is a company using open source software exploitative? I mean, isn't that the point of releasing open source software, that companies use it? And aren't companies in the business of making money, so at some level, they are profiting from your work?

Actually the opposite of open sourcing a system like this would be a massive fragmentation of the market with multiple competing proprietary systems emerging and total headaches for users with obsolescence a part of their daily lives. That is the grim alternative, not companies profiting from selling services based on open source software

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#653

Post by turbinerneiter » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:39 AM UTC

parasubvert wrote: post #119

turbinerneiter wrote: post #21

Wow, just wow. They think they are the good guys. Incredible.

Because, they are are the good guys? At least if you believe in open source, not the fake stuff that Elastic is peddling.

AWS is ruining one of the few working business models we had to support Open Source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#654

Post by floatingatoll » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:44 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #203

floatingatoll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interpreting your point to be "If it's legal, it's automatically acceptable", I can offer you clarity on why some people are coming down on AWS here: They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.

I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge. It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose . This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it". Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!…

Morality is not enforceable through software licensing, nor necessarily enforceable at all.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#655

Post by tim-- » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:44 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #536

toyg wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux had many reasons for its success, but overall governance was definitely one of them. People felt free to contribute meaningful code in the knowledge that the GPL would “defend it” against a future as free fodder for corporations. Corporations treated it with kid gloves because they were scared of the GPL, and this left the ecosystem free to breathe; and Microsoft’s all-out war on the “communist” licence effecti…

Exactly. For corporations, it was like the guaranteed mutual destruction which keeps peace stable. They felt safe to contribute because their competition could not steal the contribution from the communal pot. A similar setup is needed for the SaaS age. AGPL is a good step but is problematic for corporations because of the patent grant clauses, the way GPL2 is not.

Why not just use AGPL v2, then?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#656

Post by liuliu » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

brasetvik wrote: post #193

hyperion2010 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…

> Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Looking at the various projects at https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/ , the most prominent ones seem to only have a handful of somewhat active developers, almost two years after launch. If AWS hires a lot of people to work full time on their ASL2-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks, then ... that's not necessarily _ju…

Apache 2 license doesn’t allow you to relicense. So absorbing changes from AWS’ fork won’t be clear or easy as many in this thread suggest.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#657

Post by geofft » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #437

geofft wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's possible to take an existing Apache 2.0 codebase, release some new Apache 2.0 code, build a $15B business, and then stop offering your code under Apache 2.0. Great! Shareholder value! That's literally what you set out to do! How could it have possibly failed? What I'm actually saying is that when people think that outcome is a bad thing , their beef is with our particular breed of capitalism. When they say…

The reason I'm happy with Capitalism is because Elastic backstabbed the community and in a manner of weeks we'll have community-driven Apache 2.0 forks. So I think the market is responding as it should and am happy to see it. > This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones Well, I disagree with the (I think?) implication that…

It is the state that recognizes Amazon and Elastic in the first place, though. Without the state's involvement, a developer at Elastic could choose to continue releasing their work product to the world under an open-source license - and a developer at AWS could choose to release the secret sauce that makes AWS's Elasticsearch such a threat to Elastic.

We're having this whole conversation about whether big companies might subvert and coerce the state without recognizing that they already do coerce it by making the state recognize their very existence. They would have no power without that (what is a lobbyist without anything to lobby on behalf of?), but they've been so successful at hawking their narrative that all of us think it's perfectly normal and inevitable that they exist.

Take that red-and-black pill (either because it's half-doomer or because it's ancom, either way) and chew on it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#658

Post by liuliu » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #410

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, have you ever operated Elasticsearch at scale? I haven't operated at the petabyte level but I have at the terabyte level, and everything I've seen tells me that this move is going to hurt Elastic immensely. They've forced Amazon to create the Elastic equivalent of postgressql/mariadb/jenkins ci.

What downside exists for Elastic from making this change? If AWS makes valuable contributions on their fork, Elastic will absorb them, but the converse is no longer true. If the downside is that the AWS hosted ElasticSearch service will become successful, well, that was happening anyway before the relicensing.

I don’t see a path for absorbing and relicense. Especially if the core code method signature diverges in the future. It is going to be a lot of trouble for Elastic to absorb non-trivial contributions from the fork.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#659

Post by stickfigure » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:51 AM UTC

wahern wrote: post #332

jeswin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original te…

> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The Affero General Public License (AGPL) was published in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License Plenty of people saw this coming. It was completely predictable. The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught o…

> The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught on are complex.

They are not complex. Permissive licenses encourage adoption but hinder monetization; restrictive licenses do the opposite. Pick your poison.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#660

Post by cactus2093 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:53 AM UTC

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 comment kind of highlights how pointless this debate is.

If you go off of what the law says, how this open source license works, and the understanding that all businesses are competing to make money, what AWS did here seems pretty reasonable and perfectly legal.

If you come at it from the perspective that AWS is always evil and the little guy is always good, you’ll view this as a terrible injustice. There’s not much substance to the justifications here, seems like you had your mind made up and then half heartedly tried to backfill some sort of reasoning. Just assert that everyone else has it twisted, of course AWS always exploits, try to evoke the spirit of open source as if that’s a single, easily defined quality.