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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#701

Post by jabl »

owenmarshall wrote: post #522
azernik wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to the "spirit", the people criticizing it seem to be talking about the "spirit" of Stallman and Free Software; the term Open Source and the OSI as an institution were explicitly built on friendliness to running side by side with proprietary software and to third-party commercial use.

Stallman has no problems dual licensing software and selling proprietary licenses to companies. His goal is freedom zero, the freedom of a user to use the software as they want.

> Stallman has no problems dual licensing software and selling proprietary licenses to companies.

RMS doesn't, but others also in the copyleft camp certainly have. E.g. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#702

Post by jiofih »

sg47 wrote: post #75
weego wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…

Amazon has not been contributing back to the open source projects when they offer a service based on it. E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/performance-updates-to... Amazon EMR release 5.24.0 includes several optimizations in Spark that improve query performance. Why have these optimizations not been contributed back to the community?

There is nothing unfair about being able to make optimizations of your own on top of the software. That freedom is in fact one of the core values of OSS. Any “fairness” judgements you make are irrelevant for as long as the license satisfies its goal and the software is freely available to everyone.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#703

Post by pessimizer »

freeqaz wrote: post #560
jefftk wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is nearly 2 decades old, and its tradeoffs are well known among people working in open source. If Elastic had wanted its protections (and restrictions) they easily could have chosen it.

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…

In these specific contexts, it's important to stop using the term "FOSS." It just clouds the issue. FOSS is Free Software and software so permissively licensed that it could be relicensed and extended as Free Software. Open Source is simply giving up your ownership of the code one wrote, and this Spirit of Open Source is when one pretends that people won't actually take advantage of explicit grant of rights for reasons.

Open Source is for getting popular, and all of the arguments that Open Source people make against Free Software are about the ability to get popular (corporate usage and corporate contributors.) The reason companies use Open Source is because when you license something that way, it's theirs now. They're investing in their own property.

Free Software doesn't intend to have this problem, and if it sees a problem, it fixes the bug. You don't own Free Software, you own the devices that you install it on. You still might end up competing with someone, but you'll never fall behind.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#704

Post by Illniyar »

alexchantavy wrote: post #442
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…

Are you saying that most software engineering jobs in your experience are about integrating existing projects rather than building anything interesting?

Not sure what the parent meant, but that sentence is most definitely true for the vast vast majority of software development of products - websites, apps (desktop, mobile etc..), IOT etc...

Making products is, as far as I know, also the vast majority of software engineering jobs.

I'm sure there are some software development work that is writing code that isn't integrating third party code- especially in library maintenance, low-level embedded stuff and some core business code of products. Even if your products are novel and their core require specialized code, only a small number of the developers in the organization will work on that, the vast majority will work on things around the core.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#706

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons.

If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#707

Post by bergstromm466 »

What a joke. Unfortunately capitalist firms privatizing tech, exploiting working class labor, and locking up/monopolizing humanity's shared inheritance, is nothing new. The original developers will shortly be completely replaced by Amazon developers, and Amazon's Elasticsearch fork will be repurposed for Amazon-specific use cases only. Goodbye any use cases beyond what Amazon approves.

Amazon say: "Thanks original developers, farewell! We will take over from here."

I think this can act as an important reminder to license your (group) project as GPLv3 or AGLPv3, it's a trojan horse and helps the open source/free software revolution.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#708

Post by schrijver »

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, but AFAIK while Amazon could ‘unpublish’ the code by removing it from their Github or something like that, there is no way to ‘unlicense’ it.

On a project without a CLA, you’ll have to ask permission to every contributor for a use that goes beyond the initially agreed to license. On a project with a CLA, the organisation to which the code has been licensed no longer needs to do that. The situation becomes similar to a project that only has one author and no outside contributors. So they can release a commercial version in parallel, or they can decide to change the license for new versions. But none of this magically changes the licence for old code: code once released stays under the license it was released under. Otherwise the whole system of Free and Open Source licences would be extremely brittle, if authors could just revoke their licences as they saw fit.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#709

Post by Closi »

markvdb wrote: post #698
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…

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…

I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though.

Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.

Take an example what Amazon did with Mongo - First they launch a closed-source competitor (totally fine) but then they also take Mongo's source and rebadge it as their own fully-managed DocumentDB (Mongo 1.6 but with closed source additions). It's having your cake and eating it too. There's nothing legally wrong with this, but I do think this is market abuse (because they can only do this because of AWS market penetration) just to make the worlds richest man richer.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#710

Post by alphager »

ywei3410 wrote: post #517
jrochkind1 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Ironically, it is exactly Amazon that seems to be demonstrating a way to develop an open source ElasticSearch fork and be financially viable, right?

If becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world in an adjacent field and using that to fund an open source SaaS is a demonstration of a financially viable open source business; we're in trouble.

Going from the frankly insane pricing for managed ES on AWS (we tried it, were happy with the service and massively disappointed in the pprice, now manage our own on AWS), Amazon makes enough money from the SaaS to fund it.
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