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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#721

Post by xorcist »

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.

Right. So what would Linux look like if it was developed by a single company?

One of the reasons to choose open source is to avoid lock in by having multiple suppliers, and at least in theory have some healthy competition between them.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#722

Post by BillinghamJ »

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…

AWS PrivateLink is just one option. AWS also offers free VPC peering too, but PrivateLink works better.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#723

Post by rohittidke »

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…

If this continues the motivation for open sourcing your work will be lost.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#724

Post by nix23 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #419
mminer237 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.

Are Google and OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks? Google, Apple, and Microsoft paying for WebKit?

>OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks

Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL?

But also

LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL)

OpenBGPD

OpenOSPFD

OpenNTPD

OpenSMTPD

OpenSSH

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#725

Post by BillinghamJ »

sandGorgon wrote: post #650
boulos wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :…

I don't think it would be hard to offer PrivateLink to tenants via Kubernetes. You'd just make a K8s LoadBalancer, set the annotations to back it with an NLB, then expose that with PrivateLink.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#726

Post by lmm »

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…

> Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich.

On the contrary, the commons gets the version of ElasticSearch that is most useful to end users. If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#727

Post by rightbyte »

jabl wrote: post #685
ryukafalz wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, of course. They're still both free software, they're still both used by companies who aren't paying for Red Hat subscriptions, there's no shortage of consulting companies who will provide support for CentOS or Fedora like Red Hat would for RHEL, etc. That's the point: Red Hat has plenty of competition, including from others using their own software, and that's fine! EDIT: And honestly the fact that Red Hat owns…

Yes, but, while RH is the 900lb gorilla in the "pure OSS" business (and yes, we should be thankful for their contributions all over the OSS ecosystem even if we aren't RH customers), from a business perspective they are not that spectacular. Looking at wikipedia, the company was formed in 1993, has a revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular. Partly d…

> revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular.

That revenue is the budget of the police force in my country. Why would being bigger then that necessarily be a good thing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#728

Post by dinglejungle »

jrockway wrote: post #143

This is an embarrassing anecdote, but I thought I'd share. I started using Elasticsearch because it showed up in the AWS console along with all the other "Elastic" things ("Elastic Compute Cloud") and I figured it was a thing they made themselves. Only later on in the process did I realize that there was a company called Elastic that named it. Very unfortunate. Probably a lesson about naming your company after a comm…

The company Elastic was created 2 years after the release of ElasticSearch.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#729

Post by xorcist »

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 model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing.

That's not really accurate, is it?

Few if any open source companies has survived on a monopoly on hosting the product. MySQL doesn't do it at all, netiher does Red Hat, and many others. Those who do bundle it with support services for added value. They have to compete in the open market after all. They don't claim to have a monopoly.

Wordpress makes most of their money from hosting, but they don't go after AWS or any of the thousands of smaller companies all over the world that host it. Their exploding market share has been more than enough to sustain their own hosting business. And it does seem like Elastic is in a similar situation, with their hosting business still rapidly expanding.

Forget Amazon for a second. I know many people in the web hosting business and pretty much everything they host is open source software. If this is a precedent, if the opinion that hosting is morally wrong gets widespread, then that would affect a whole industry.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#730

Post by LockAndLol »

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…

To add a voice in support of your comment, I agree with you. Amazon and others is why we can't have nice things.

I'll quote Bill Burr here:

> Just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's right.

And just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Because of this shitty behavior, we will need to write new licenses to restrict who can do what with our software. Society moves at the pace of its slowest members. I guess for opensource, that's "at the pace of our most exploitive and cut throat business".

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