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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#791

Post by speeder »

bigiain wrote: post #300
sparc24 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. First release of elastic was Feb 2010. AWS launched in March, 2006. The folks at 10gen used the AGPL for MongoDB since Feb, 2009. Yeah nobody could've seen this coming.

Not sure Mongo is the right example to use here, given the've gone down exactly the same "non OSI approved license" change themselves...

In fact, Elastic new license was created by Mongo.

It wouldn't surprise me if that license in a few years don't get nicknamed "Mongo's license"

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#792

Post by perlgeek »

I'm a bit disappointed by all the good guy/bad guy judgement going on here on HN, when both players are working with the market forces to get the best result.

From AWS' perspective, taking an OSS Project and offering it as a hosted solution is legally fine.

Elastic isn't happy about the fact that AWS make more profit from their OSS product than themselves, so they recognize that OSS isn't their best approach anymore, and do it differently.

AWS decides that forking and maintaining the their own OSS version is more profitable in the long run than paying license fees.

What changed since Elastic's original license choice? Hosting an SaaS version was possible back then, but it didn't happen at the scale that it is, so it was more of a theoretical problem. Now it's a very practical problem.

This is a bit of a simplistic take, and there seem to be a lot of side shows (like trademarks), so more details lurk in the shadows.

If I were to try to make a value judgement, my premise would be the flourishing OSS is a good thing. AWS's actions have have driven Elastic to make their product no longer OSS, which is not good. OTOH they maintain an OSS fork, which is good.

But the interesting broader question is: would it have been beneficial for OSS if Amazon were paying some license fees to Elastic, for an OSS product? I think we need to find some model whereby OSS shops are not forced to rely on the whim of a giant to make their money. Whether this can be done sustainably without restricting usage rights remains to be seen, IMHO.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#793

Post by jiofih »

youngtaff wrote: post #719
jiofih wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic is a public company worth 15B dollars now. Not the underdog. > at what threshold should someone ... stop caring You’re not caring about OSS, but about keeping your turf and “ownership” of a product that is not yours. There really is no question here that Elastic is the one doing the “corporation” move and not the other way around. > to undermine the business that was setup to sustain it Successful OSS don’t n…

They're an underdog when compared to Amazon…

If you’re simply thinking of size, consider Amazon is a 500x more diversified business. I doubt they pull anywhere near as much revenue as Elastic does (half a billion/year) from their Elasticsearch hosting alone. Apples and oranges.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#794

Post by RocketSyntax »

weeks wrote: post #207
RocketSyntax wrote: post #127

This feels like a spin? Isn't AWS biting hand that feeds them? They need a win-win strategy for open source devs. It's hard enough to compete with their version of your service (spark, kafka) without them forking your project. what's next, are they going to fork spark and kafka?

Apache Spark and Apache Kafka? It doesn't seem likely that the Apache Software Foundation would consider implementing the SSPL instead of the Apache License.

I'm saying AWS offers EMR and MSK. Which puts Databricks and Confluent in a weird spot.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#795

Post by jiofih »

pas wrote: post #774
jiofih wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Fairness (ethics, moral judgement, justice) is inherently a different layer of our civilization than license (law, contracts). I'd say fairness is more important than any and all licenses ever. Also, I think through history every law was made in the name of making law more just, bringing the legal system closer to an ideal of justice. We also know that simply throwing out law and bringing back case by case judgments…

Your point being? You care more about fairness in the dealings of two billion dollar businesses, than the open in open-source?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#796

Post by literallycancer »

rdsubhas wrote: post #494
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your reasoning Linus Torvalds should be getting a cut of any money made on a linux host.

Not exactly the same. As I mentioned in the comment, you have direct access to the Linux OS when you host. Open as in access to the underlying OS is open. You can configure it, install packages that you want, etc. When you run AWS Elasticsearch, you have no access to ES instance. You can't configure it, you can't add your own plugins. You are no longer a user, you are just a consumer of the UI/API, even when the prim…

When you run code on a lambda or a serverless VM you never see the OS either.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#797

Post by virgilp »

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…

> "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free"

Except that's not how it works with Elastic. I know at least one company (Acme Inc) that doesn't offer anything like Amazon, but does have clients who can access their "own" (client-specific) data hosted in Acme Inc's Elasticsearch cluster; it's a somewhat marginal (but still important) feature in the product, yet still, due to it, Elastic maintains that Acme Inc resells Elasticsearch and thus needs the "Enterprise" license to be in compliance.

So, Elastic are not only going for AWS and people who cannot host their own Elasticsearch, they are going a bit wider than you imply here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#798

Post by antpls »

nulbyte wrote: post #783
antpls wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I do not work at Elastic Search, which is why I asked the parent for a concrete example.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#799

Post by pjmlp »

vnakL wrote: post #786
pjmlp wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ope…

There another obvious counterexample, PS 4 OS, not sure if PS 5 still uses it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#800

Post by sciurus »

markphip wrote: post #782
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…

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…

> 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.

How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?

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