Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

781–790 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#781

Post by popcorncowboy »

mathnode wrote: post #287
caymanjim wrote: post #63

AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source. Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money…

MariaDB came out with the BSL license for projects like maxcale to help protect against AWS nonsense (and the like). The mysql -> mariadb response is completely different, but no less terrible. This is history repeating itself as Amazon, once again, attempt to gut open source efforts. For a short while Amazon did contribute to some MariaDB projects. MongoDB now have similar license and AWS offers compatible API's.

> help protect against AWS nonsense

Not gaslighting, legit questions follow:

It's not clear to me how taking open source software and providing commercial managed services is "nonsense"? Or is it specifically when AWS does it that it's not okay?

Either way, is there something specific at play that makes it fundamentally different from say WPEngine running hosted Wordpress? Is it purely a function of scale?

If a startup decides that Kubernetes is worth providing a managed service for at what point does providing that managed service become "AWS nonsense"? Is there a revenue watermark beyond which what they're doing becomes unfair? Or is k8s ok because it's backed by a mega-corp already?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#782

Post by markphip »

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…

I have been involved with open source since 2000. I have been a member of the ASF for many of those years and worked with Apache licensed projects throughout. I have been in the position Elastic is in where I managed the employer-sponsored team working on an employer-sponsored Apache licensed project, though thankfully not against a behemoth like AWS.

I have some sympathy for Elastic, but I just do not agree that AWS is doing anything wrong or against the spirit of open source. When they run into things that need to be fixed or improved in the projects they upstream them. The majority of work AWS does is in "operationalizing" the project for their cloud. It might be cool and interesting if they let us see how they do this but it is not like that work directly translates back to the open source project. Anyone that has worked with Google open-source stuff has run into the same issues where there is some behind the scenes magic that Google has internally that the projects can leverage to make them scale better etc.

It is Elastic's right to change the license if they so choose. If they own trademarks that they believe are violated it is up to them to take those challenges to a court and seek damages. Elastic is trying to have it all ways though. They want you to believe the new license is open source .. sort of true but not really. They want you to believe AWS has done something wrong. This I do not buy at all. What is special about Elasticsearch? The entire Internet and the Cloud is running on all kinds of open source software up and down the stack. It is in the interests of the behemoths that run these stacks to upstream fixes and improvements and generally they do. That does not mean they have to contribute the proprietary wrappers they have put in place around them as part of building their business model.

AWS needs to be focused on its customers, not companies like Elastic and Mongo. If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#783

Post by nulbyte »

antpls wrote: post #648
aaron42net wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much value at all, from my experience. Having given Elastic's support two tries at different companies, it doesn't surprise me that their business model is failing. Their support was _terrible_ both times; at no point were we ever in touch with anyone who seemed like they understood the product, cared about our issues, or were in any hurry to fix them. We were locked in year long, 6-figure support contracts in bo…

> We got better answers out of random Google searches and a 20 minute conversation with a friend of a friend. On the other hand, if you were asking support to train you on "how to do A, B, C" while you didn't even check the documentation nor made a basic google search, I can understand why you were disappointed. Paying more for support doesn't change the nature of it, it doesn't magically become a google bot for you.…

If I have a six figure support contract and ask you how to do a simple thing with your product, you better have an answer. If it's so simple, why are you worried about it, when I'm paying for it?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#784

Post by nulbyte »

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…

> This is how to defend your copyright and trademark.

The DMCA will not help you with trademark enforcement, and the license under which Amazon received ElasticSearch allows distribution of both the original and derivative works.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#786

Post by vnakL »

pjmlp wrote: post #651
kodah wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? It was always known. Why do you think UNIX companies agreed on MIT license for the basic X Windows infrastructure, but then Motif was commercial on top? Or how UNIX clones and Windows have used parts of BSD. 40 years now, more than known.

Indeed, BSD projects have always provided corporations with free labor.

The BSD operating systems themselves have been largely spared from hostile forks because they are too large and no corporation wants to maintain a fork, macOS being the obvious counterexample. But even macOS cannot eclipse FreeBSD.

Smaller projects should be wary. The should start with AGPL and resist efforts coming from corporations or other open source projects to strongarm them into downgrading the license to BSD or MIT.

Especially when such other projects have convoluted licenses themselves that are only declared open source by fiat due to their historical importance at some point.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#787

Post by merb »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #263
merb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what aws does is more oss than that what elastic does. elastic also did it because of $$. so neither of them wins.

Elastic say they want to make money of the product they've spent money developing and literally point at the company who basically announced they were using it in partnership with them and turns out isn't and isn't paying their fair share - AWS. AWS say they want elasticsearch and kibana to be open source. What they really mean is they want to use elasticsearch without paying their fair share.

well their license does not only target aws. the license text basically restricts so many use cases and their faq just lies about it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#788

Post by growse »

pydry wrote: post #756
fastball wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> >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.

There's a lot of businesses with a lot of budget who want to use ES and don't want to go near AWS. Let's not pretend there's not an enormous opportunity out there for a good hosted ES platform not on AWS.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#789

Post by arendtio »

It seems a bit unfaithful, not mentioning that the behavior of AWS played a key part in the decision of elastic[1]. They didn't even link to the announcement. Instead they act as if they are the saviors, upholding the open source status of elaticsearch and kibana: NOT OK

[1] https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/why-license-change-AWS

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#790

Post by IgorPartola »

theamk wrote: post #568
patmorgan23 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And/or cost competitive.

Looking at a single machine (i3.large, 15GB ram, 470GB SD): Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)

So if we assume the level of service is not much better, AWS is the more prudent choice, no? So trademark issues aside, AWS does ES better than Elastic?
Post reply on HN