741–750 of 969 posts
Don't believe me, just go ahead say something negative and see it get removed within 30 minutes.
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Are you insinuating that's a small amount of data? You've got to be kidding.
I've seen devs toss crud into infra with debug logs enabled, with millions of lines of deprecated log messages, etc., and the infra budget eats their costs. It's insane. Unless you're literally Facebook, or ingesting data from CERN's LHC... what possible use case requires 100GB of text data ingest per day ? Maybe it's a case of someone throwing a Service Mesh into a Microservices K8s cluster and logging all the thing…
I think that would be valuable and the right choice for many projects.
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> I don't really get how people get this twisted. Quite condescending this attitude. I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple. And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are somet…
I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software license…
For people who believe in this, please study your history — look up the claims and counter claims around Emacs, specifically how it was created, commercialised, and then liberated (then forked and merged again).
“Good intenshuns” (my somewhat humorous term for “spirit”) is no way to settle even moderately complex commercial disputes — say for a text editor which in those early days of late 70s/early 80s, had very niche appeal and a small user base.
In the 21st century, with bigger markets and more money at stake, “good intenshuns” matters even less and this is why we have a bevy of F/OSS licenses to suit every need.
It’s very telling that RMS needed to create a license to support his vision of Free software. Perhaps from his experience he realised that legal code was the best way to enforce desired behaviour.
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…
Open source software was about empowering people in particular, not corporations. It has however made it very, very difficult for individuals to make money from their software whilst the corporations reap the rewards from countless man hours of this free work across the a myriad of domains.
I still think it's something we can get better at as an industry. Just choosing different licenses doesn't really solve the problem, people regularly shun paid software licenses, feeling entitled to all software for free, and I think that's an issue for the ecosystem as a whole.
If I were working at ElasticSearch/Kibana, I would be filling a DMCA takedown on GitHub against all the offending repos.
This is how to defend your copyright and trademark.
And yes, it's getting into aggressive territory and not everybody might agree with that strategy, but that's how the game is played. It's a full on conflict and the result might very well kill elastic in the long term if no action is taken now.
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Your comment and the one you're replying to actually just changed my mind on this topic. Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wan…
I agree, but I think there's many many shades of grey here. Elastic (and Mongo and RadisLabs) are trying to do something new. Linux, without doubt, "reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community," to the point where although the original release was 100% Linus's own code and arguably "Linus's software", these days to a first approximation _none_ of the code is "his". The percentage of the…
I don't think that's true, at least for software such as Elastic, Mongo and RedisLabs.
There are a lot of big companies that benefit from those, and might want to invest it, despite not being their direct revenue driver.
See for example the Cassandra database released by Facebook. Or how Amazon is going to invest in their Elastic fork now. Or how Linux is funded by dozens of companies (IBM, RedHat, Oracle...)
Or pretty much any programming language: I haven't seen a programming language that's not truly Open Source (as in the compiler/interpreter + API) for decades.
The kind of software where it's not going to work is where it's solving a business need for companies that are not software companies: but Open Source isn't common in those fields anyway.
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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 reaso…
Basically, their problem is that it's impossible to compete with Amazon on delivering a managed SaaS, and most of their money was coming from that.
In terms of the software itself and user freedoms, the licenses used have achieved their goals - ES is free, people using it can control exactly what they are running, can patch it and redistribute etc. No one owns ES itself, so it is Free Software in your sense.
The people who are having a problem though are the project behind most of the work on this. Now, whether this is a real problem (the company is struggling to remain profitable because of Amazon) or just a fake problem (the company is profitable but it's not growing as expected in some 5 year plan) I don't know, but this is the reason for this type of change.
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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…
I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back. The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acqu…