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

841–850 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#841

Post by ujwaltrivedi »

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…

We use ES and Kibana open source. Our entire infrastructure is on AWS and if AWS is managing the installation and maintenance efforts thats a great help.

ES was never going to make a penny from us anyways and AWS is not making any money from the ES software itself. What they are making money is from our usage of their core services. Same goes for all the other open softwares, Kafka, Airflow, EMR to name some. Plus it would be dumb to have your infrastructure on AWS and buying ES cloud service where you'd require to send your data out of AWS as you'd have to pay for the data out.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#842

Post by Chris2048 »

bane wrote: post #434

This is really clearly a case of Elastic wanting to have its cake and eat it too but also of the existential challenge that faces the open source community -- how do developers of open source software pay to keep the lights on? There's a bit of a myth that OSS is lots and lots of volunteers spending their free-time to contribute bits of code here and there. But the reality is that most of the current major open sourc…

> How do developers of open source software pay to keep the lights on

How about a non-commercial-use licence (or one that applies to smaller businesses only), and then offer commercial licenses for payment?

Ok, it's complex b/c some large biz might not get a lot of revenue out of it, but seems like a good system to me.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#843

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #43
PunchTornado wrote: post #11

There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally. A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to the project.

There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically. They're creating value for their customers, and releasing open source software while doing so. Indeed it's Elastic who tried to get all the positives of open source with none of the negatives (as evidenced by them making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source) BTW, not that it's super relevant but the narrative that Amazon is driving Elastic bankrupt is…

>> There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally.

> There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically.

You're responding to something he didn't say, and it's telling. He was referring to morals; you're talking about ethics. There's a difference, and it matters. MOST of the discussion on this issue seems to miss this distinction, and what the difference implies, and that's telling too.

As someone else pointed out above, Amazon owes the entirety of it's BAZILLION-dollar AWS business to open source. You'd think they could find it in their hearts to acquiesce to a simple request that they not muddy the waters around Elastic's registered trademark. That was immoral. Everything else that has now followed, whether legal or ethical, is based on an immorality.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#844

Post by Chris2048 »

geofft wrote: post #68
izolate wrote: post #49

We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but par for the course for Bezos's company.

The fundamental "open source sustainability" problem is capitalism, or at least our incarnation of it, and everyone dances around it. You can't license your way out of this problem. You can't services-company your way out of this problem. The fundamental issue is that it is good for the world for skilled developers to spend all day writing software and giving it away, but they can make much more money writing softwar…

> You can't license your way out of this problem

Why not? The government already distinguishes between a corp and a person - why can't licences do the same?

As an aside, the flip-side of not being payed is less liability. Charging people for your library could make you liable for security issues? Since security is important, maybe there is room for improvement on both sides of the aisle.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#845

Post by Xylakant »

cestith wrote: post #832
indeed30 wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and find that caveat baffling. "The ability to search a store of information for user-supplied input" is fairly clearly elasticsearch functionality, but it seems that is allowed? They have to be more specific on what this means.

IANAL and I am pretty sure they will need to be involved in a serious way to iron all this out. I have my understanding of the intent, which I would not invest money in at this point trying to prove, and that's as much as I can offer. It seems that you can have users search your data in your Elastic+Kibana instance. What they're precluding is you offering an Elastic instance for your customers to load their data into…

I understand the intent, but elastic has proven to create legal confusion despite being warned against it and then sue over it in the past when they mixed the APL source and the x-pack source under two different licenses in the same repo and then sued floragunn over copyright violations. They might be technically correct on that lawsuit, but IMHO they knowingly created that situation.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#846

Post by kotxig »

jehb wrote: post #480
kotxig wrote: post #435

Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed…

> I can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code. Could you put some more color around this part? I don't understand the argument you're making here. It sounds like you're arguing that there's not market demand for the thing you'd like to be paid to make because it already exists and that the version that exist…

> Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

===

To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#847

Post by coredog64 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #749
pessimizer wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No FOSS license would have protected ES from the problem they have with Amazon. Amazon is in full compliance with the AGPL for example, so if ES had changed the license from Apache to AGPL, nothing would have changed - that is why they had to move to a non-free license instead. 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…

As someone who has used OSS Elasticsearch, the Amazon managed offering, and the licensed and supported product, I don’t think that’s true.

Amazon has a small team for developing their version and at the end of the day, it has to fit into the operating constraints that they have. There are plenty of huge gaps in managed ES that the vendor can (and does) exploit.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#848

Post by Chris2048 »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #437
geofft wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's possible to take an existing Apache 2.0 codebase, release some new Apache 2.0 code, build a $15B business, and then stop offering your code under Apache 2.0. Great! Shareholder value! That's literally what you set out to do! How could it have possibly failed? What I'm actually saying is that when people think that outcome is a bad thing , their beef is with our particular breed of capitalism. When they say…

The reason I'm happy with Capitalism is because Elastic backstabbed the community and in a manner of weeks we'll have community-driven Apache 2.0 forks. So I think the market is responding as it should and am happy to see it. > This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones Well, I disagree with the (I think?) implication that…

> Elastic backstabbed the community

I seem to recall something like this. I also recall working with ES and having a negative impression on it based on some technical detail - but I can't recall what that was :-/

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#849

Post by vinay_ys »

sciurus wrote: post #800
markphip wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here's one way to look at it:

AWS has a lot of closed source components behind the scene that makes Elasticsearch scale and run reliably in their cloud environment.

Elastic can develop similar closed source components to make things scale – in non-aws environments – in private clouds – in on-prem deployments.

Why does this matter?

There are a lot of those customers – banks etc – who will stay on-prem and medium size cloud customer for whom public cloud is more expensive than private cloud. These are the ideal customers for Elastic.

Among them, there will also be some who will do hybrid – onprem + AWS. Elastic can price their product to compete with AWS's and use their service in both on-prem and in aws seamlessly.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#850

Post by markphip »

sciurus wrote: post #800
markphip wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It might be too late, I am not sure really. If the customer wants the service provided by AWS then it is hard to change that. That said, the AWS Elasticsearch service is not that great and it is expensive so there is room to do it better and maybe just offer better support and plugins etc.

I realize that the cloud took off after Elasticsearch existed, so it is hard to fault Elastic for not having a crystal ball, but the time to get the business model right was at the beginning.

When my company chose an Apache License for the product we sponsored it was because we knew we could not do it all ourselves and so we wanted to build and foster a community. So while that means competitors could and did emerge that could take the product and do a better job monetizing, that was the only way for us to get the product we needed. The community was important.

Elasticsearch would be an also-ran without the Apache License and the community around it. Changing the license now because AWS is able to monetize just stinks, IMO.

Post reply on HN