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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#691

Post by pastacacioepepe »

parasubvert wrote: post #302
pastacacioepepe wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criticizing capitalism doesn't require being stalinists, so please stop with this cliche, it's old and extremely boring by now.

What’s even more boring is critiquing capitalism when that has actually nothing to do with the problem at hand. I brought up socialism as a counter example of how there is very little practical way to solve this issue with a different economic system. You’re free to bring up a different example of how an economic system will help the conundrum of preserving economic exchange and user freedom. A Potlatch gift economy…

Capitalism is the elephant in the room, the economic (and cultural) system we have now.

Any change we want to do within this framework requires changing its rules. The real problem we have to face now is the perpetual growth model, which is a natural consequence of capitalism.

I don't know how and if we can fix this system to prevent perpetual growth without killing its essence. That's the real conversation we should do.

So don't act like someone is offending your religion.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#692

Post by jiofih »

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…

Elastic is a public company worth 15B dollars now. Not the underdog.

> at what threshold should someone ... stop caring

You’re not caring about OSS, but about keeping your turf and “ownership” of a product that is not yours. There really is no question here that Elastic is the one doing the “corporation” move and not the other way around.

> to undermine the business that was setup to sustain it

Successful OSS don’t need one business to sustain them, they rely on the combined efforts of their users - including Amazon. They have no reason to undermine a project that makes them money.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#693

Post by t0mas88 »

catmanjan wrote: post #297
t0mas88 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot can be said about AWS and open source, but it is clear they have created some "secret sauce" on the networking, storage and virtualization side of things which is their core business. Unlike Elastic they never promised open source and never used it as marketing. So it completely fair for them to keep those things closed as they provide a big part of the competitive advantage to their cloud. Those components und…

The way I see it is the secret sauce is just black boxing it so you don't have to/can't worry about those things...

There is a slideshare about their networking approach for VPC somewhere it's quite clever. But I can't find anything for EBS and what features it might have that make Aurora replicate the way it does.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#694

Post by pastacacioepepe »

parasubvert wrote: post #353
geofft wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I don't know the answer here. I just want people to start thinking seriously about the problem, because neither the regulatorily-captured free market nor the Politburo sound like great options. And I'm mostly agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, because it is concretely thinking seriously about alternative models. "Capitalism, but your company can't get too big" seems fairly compelling tbh.

Regulated capitalism is certainly a start. Would be nice.

We already have regulated capitalism. The core issues are still there.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#695

Post by meowface »

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…

If every legal agreement were interpreted by internet commenters' impression of its "spirit", what's the point of all that fancy language anyway? There is no universal definition of "open source/FOSS" or what its spirit might be, which is why everyone uses concrete licenses.

It's Elastic's fault. I support their new license and wish they had picked it from the start; but they didn't. If you explicitly grant someone permission to use your hard work in a certain clearly defined way, you can't be surprised when someone uses it in that way.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#696

Post by arkh »

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…

> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together"

No. Opensource was started to avoid vendor lock-ins.

Maybe it's time to launch a free (as in freedom) infrastructure movement.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#697

Post by fastball »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #406
fastball wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon I'm actually going to disagree slightly here. Making profit is not necessarily healthy, generating value and capturing a fraction of that value as profit is though. Our system is complex enough at this point where you definitely can and do have entities that are capturing more value than they are delivering, and that is immoral (imo). In that light, profi…

There's nothing unethical about "capturing more value than you deliver" (well, assuming I understand you right; I'm interpreting that to mean side A gets say +10EV and side B gets +100EV). In free trade, both sides benefit; that's why they freely chose to trade with each other. It is a myth that one side can unilaterally benefit at the expense of the other side. So if you actually meant "it's unethical if the consume…

> It is a myth that one side can unilaterally benefit at the expense of the other side

While true in a simplistic sense, this is generally not true when you have a society / economy as complex as ours.

Partly this is due to perceived value vs "actual value", and to me a business is only moral (obviously businesses can't really be moral, so what I'm really saying is "the only businesses that should exist") if you actually believe that what you are delivering to the other party is more valuable than what you are costing them, so that it is actually a win-win. Generally this is hard to measure, but I can provide some examples of when this is pretty clearly not the case.

1. Get rich quick schemes. Things like online courses that tell you how to make boatloads of cash by doing X. Except they don't actually work, so the value to the purchaser is effectively $0, while what they paid for it is certainly not.

2. A larger scale example: the collapse of the housing market in 2008. This is a better example of effects from the complexity I mentioned earlier. A significant part of the crash can be attributed to CDOs/MBSes. Long story short, banks were doing some repackaging shenanigans to make something that was shit look less shit. Any honest accounting will realize that this provided zero real value. Yet the bank's were getting rich off it. That certainly sounds like capturing (>0) more value than you are delivering (0) to me.

That is the kind of behavior I'm talking about.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#698

Post by markvdb »

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…

Staunch free software proponent here.

Clearly, as you say, there's nothing wrong here legally. By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now.

Ethically, I can't find anything wrong about this either. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a "spirit of open source". Open source is a way of doing business. Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live with the consequences.

One could certainly argue far too much power is getting concentrated with Amazon and other web giants, but that's an entirely different subject...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#699

Post by NicoJuicy »

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…

Allowed by the law does not mean it's considered ethical.

AWS has changed the "new low" what an open-source project can expect if a cloud company earning billions on top of open-source can just change their project and fork it.

Cloud companies taking your source are a "new thing" to consider in the world of open-source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#700

Post by mytherin »

temikus wrote: post #678
tim-- wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So AFAIK it’s not exactly so. One can actually change project license granted they have agreement of every single contributor to do so. Which they do since they had the CLA system from the start. So theoretically they can even unpublish all the code if they want. It’s just probably not worth the reputation as damage. IANAL though so I’d be very interested to hear a patent lawyer take on this.

IANAL either but I believe that if you release code under license A you can relicense it to license B, but anyone that obtained the code under license A will be able to keep on using it under that license.

A license is like a contract, and you can’t change a contract out of the blue without the permission of both sides. Otherwise licenses would be useless, as at any point someone could go “aha, I changed my license to the give-me-all-your-money license and you’re using my code, so pay up!”.

Since the license A in this case is an open source license, anyone that has a copy of the software with license A (such as amazon) will be able to share it again under license A. So effectively the old code base will always remain under license A, and only new changes will be fully protected by license B.

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