AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#751

Post by pydry » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #726

bccdee wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ES has to provide a much better service to win. Amazon can use their market power and vendor lock in to drive adoption of a worse service and squeeze out a better ES.

Network effects are great for behemoths but not so good for consumers.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#752

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:35 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #403

sjwright wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the "fair share" payment for ElasticSearch under its Apache license? I'm not a lawyer but it appears to be $0. Meanwhile, how come everyone showing sympathy for Elastic's position doesn't seem to be showing equal sympathy for Apache Lucene? Surely Lucene is deserving of at least as much credit as Elastic.

If I recall correctly, the creator, chief maintainers, and primary contributors to Lucene are also at Elastic. The ElasticSearch/Lucene distinction is one primarily brought up by AWS advocates to muddy the waters.

The lead developer on Lucene, Mike McCandless, has long been at A9, an Amazon subsidiary in Palo Alto.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#753

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #726

bccdee wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Not really, because Elastic doesn't get money from people using their free product. So, Elastic could theoretically go bankrupt even while providing an arbitrarily more popular ElasticSearch version.

AWS on the other hand is charging money for using their service, so they only need to compete with Elastic on the hosted version of ES. If their fork of ES is very hard to host on your own, that's a net benefit to AWS, regardless of how easy Elastic's fork is in the same scenarios - neither company is making money off the non-hosted version.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#754

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #747

Hint for ElasticSearch: The AWS fork is hosted on github https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch 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 fu…

https://aws.amazon.com/codeartifact/

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#755

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #548

germansm wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is not about the license but the philosophy

"Free Software" is not about the license but the philosiphy. "Open source" on the other hand...

Regardless, neither helps with Elastic's problem (if we accept it as a problem).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#756

Post by pydry » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #623

freeqaz wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?

I think this is the key. My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is: 1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES 2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES 3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software proj…

>AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.

With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.

That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#757

Post by PunchTornado » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #242

floatingatoll wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely possible that something legal can still be ethically unacceptable. This is an instance where people believe that it is ethically unacceptable for Amazon to do what they've been doing, so strongly that they are relicensing open source software to prohibit Amazon from continuing to benefit from their work on it. Ethics are not as simple as law, especially in technology, and very especially in open sour…

> It is absolutely possible that something legal can still be ethically unacceptable. I didn't say that wasn't the case. I specifically made this claim: It is not just legal for Amazon to do this, but it is also ethical. They are contributing value, not just to their paying customers but to the whole FOSS community. That's a moral good under my framework. You may have a different ethical framework; that's fine.

what value did they contribute? the 9 shitty PRs? A rich person going to the British Museum and leaving a 1£ donation is ethically unacceptable in my book.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#758

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #166

The time-tested model for a situation like this that benefits everyone is big company offering X as a service hires/funds N developers in proportion to the popularity of that service on their platform. That helps ensure the project is sustainable, gives back to the community the big service obviously benefits from, and is certainly a form of "good karma". I think a lot of people are upset due to the perceived violati…

> The time-tested model for a situation like this that benefits everyone is big company offering X as a service hires/funds N developers in proportion to the popularity of that service on their platform

That model would have worked nicely if Elastic.co had created a Foundation (like Google with k8s) and/or donated their core to a Foundation (like Hortonworks and Cloudera with many projects). They couldn't let go off their iron grip on it, even though they commoditized the core themselves by F/OSSing it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#759

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #559

This may sound heretical but the idea of open sourcing commercial offerings always seemed like bad business to me. We are seeing it come to roost now with cloud providers selling a more desirable version of an open source platform that the makers of the platform. If you strip everything down to first principles, you get paid because you have a valuable asset. That asset may be your skill, your time, a piece of land,…

Yes, F/OSS works great for your core product's complements, and not necessarily for the core product itself.

https://www.gwern.net/Complement

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#760

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:45 AM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #496

dathinab wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The hole did exist ten years ago, though. The AGPL was released in 2007, three years before Elasticsearch was created, to fix this exact problem. …except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies. Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the wide adoption of open source software, while als…

Amazon is in compliance with the terms of the AGPL already for their managed ES. Switching ES to from Apache to AGPL would only affect other users of ES, not Amazon.