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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#861

Post by mrharrison »

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…

Sounds like there needs to be an Apache 3.0 license with an AWS exception in it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#862

Post by noAnswer »

markvdb wrote: post #698
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…

Staunch free software proponent here. Clearly, as you say, there's nothing wrong here legally. By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now. Ethically, I can't find anything wrong about this either. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a "spirit of open source". Open source is a way of doing business. Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live…

> By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now. > Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live with the consequences.

Everybody should be allowed to change its mind when presented with new data or circumstances.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#863

Post by Xylakant »

kevincox wrote: post #802
hrktb wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it need to be a binary thing ? Elastic made a strategic mistake, and Amazon made the jerk move that was open to them.

What about Elastic making the "jerk move" by switching the license under Amazon? Amazon built the product with the hope that it would continue to be developed with that license. What are they supposed to do with the license change? Just accept whatever Elastic said? I don't think you can blame them for taking the last version where they agreed with the license and continue to use and develop it. Sure, maybe making it…

> What about Elastic making the "jerk move" by switching the license under Amazon?

They’re also switching out the license under everyone else. It’s maybe notable that elastics cloud offering was acquired at some point (it used to be found.io). I used to do elasticsearch consulting and I could name a few customers that will now have to reevaluate their product.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#864

Post by swat535 »

jasonkester wrote: post #667
eins1234 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective. But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term: I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good…

It's frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no reason for you to feel the need to justify building a business off of your software product, but I can completely understand why you do. Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad…

The OP is isn't ashamed but more frustrated because he wanted to do good for the world and is disappointed by the fact that he may not be able to now because gree corporations like Amazon will take all the hard earned work of contributors and profit from it, thus breaking the spirit of open source. At least that's how I interpreted his comment..

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#865

Post by Tostino »

sjwright wrote: post #324
gnfargbl wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS's model seems to be to take a popular OSS product, do _just_ enough to make it work with AWS, make tons of money out of it, contribute a minimal amount back... and then act all surprised when they're painted as the bad guys. Take postgres. RDS is a core AWS product. They absolutely rely on it. But if you take a look at https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ , are any of the current major contributors…

Other people have chosen to license their own work with the license of their choice. The license is being complied with by AWS in fact and in spirit. If you don't agree with the spirit of the Apache license terms, that's fine. You can draft an Apache-for-everyone-except-AWS license and lobby for its use by others.

You are missing the forest for the trees. I don't see many (really any) people saying that AWS went against the license terms. Simply that their actions do not benefit these projects in any proportional way which they rely on heavily. I'm sure many of these projects would much rather just have more collaboration and support from AWS than to have to think about and deal with a major player being a bad actor.

Edit: I am much more talking about projects like Postgres than companies like Elastic.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#866

Post by cosmiccatnap »

csunbird wrote: post #831
klintcho wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree with this. Free is free, you could always argue that there is "a spirit to open source"; but as with everything there's always going to be people exploiting and using it, that comes with the free. To me it boils down to if you think that it's worth it: whenever I put MIT or Apache 2.0 on my public Github projects, I don't mind anyone going out making millions on them. Other side of the coin; if I make mil…

People also seem to miss a point when trying to invoke the "Spirit of the Open Source License": The only reason why Elastic is changing their license is because they want to profit from it. So, isn't that exactly against the "Spirit of Open Source License"? If they truly cared about that, they should be angry about it at all. Choosing sides here seems to be choosing between two profit seeking companies. Why, as a dev…

Profit is a strong word. You can't continue to improve the project without paying people so what you are really saying here is that people should build aws products for free as non-amazon employees. There is a big difference in paying to keep the lights on and making millions a day on someone else's product. It's likely amazon has more employees working on Amazon's flavor of elastic cache than elaaticache has. The difference is that aws doesn't commit it's improvements or work back into the elaaticache project meaning the relationship is parasitic. I can't blame elaaticache for what they did anymore than I can blame aws for trying to make money but if you want products in the future to be with people's time to make and built like elaaticache from the ground up to fill a need for free you have to find ways to protect them from predatory practices and if that isn't in the current licencing model then we need a GPLv4 to address those concerns.

The argument people are making is a simple one. Yes they can do this but it's clearly not what the intention of these licenses are and therefore we need to chance the licenses to address scenarios where the code is used to harm the individuals who produced it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#867

Post by dragosdev »

I believe no party is in the wrong here.

Elastic has the right to take the code private. Basically they are making a fork.

AWS also has the right to create their fork and contribute to it.

If we're playing the game of "who's the bigger dickhead" I would say it's Elastic. Before these 2 forks, many companies benefitted from hosting Elasticsearch for their customers. From their reasoning, it seems that only they should benefit from the code. Which is not Elastic's by the way. It belongs to the world.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#868

Post by liuliu »

brasetvik wrote: post #858
liuliu wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache 2 license doesn’t allow you to relicense. So absorbing changes from AWS’ fork won’t be clear or easy as many in this thread suggest.

Apache 2 license explicitly does grant the right to sublicense. See §2.

Honestly I don't know how that works. My understanding is that you cannot move existing ASL code under a different terms other than ASL unless you are the copyright holder. All modifications you done can be subject to whatever terms you liked. This seems to match what they said http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute...

I think this important bit is sublicense v.s. relicense, where in sublicense case, you have to retain the original terms carried for the original code.

Now, Elastic relicensed the whole software stack under SSDL. So to integrate any parts AWS done, they need to license Elasticsearch back to some mixture of SSDL and ASL, which would be weird.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#869

Post by sandGorgon »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #857
sandGorgon wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPC peering is not free.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/peering/vpc-peering-b... > If the VPCs in the VPC peering connection are within the same region, the charges for transferring data within the VPC peering connection are the same as the charges for transferring data across Availability Zones. If the VPCs are in different regions, inter-region data transfer costs apply. There is no additional cost

Im a bit confused - could you disambiguate here.

I checked with a couple of people and they read the above to mean that any peering data transfer costs the SAME as if you were transferring data across availability zones. This is not free.

Inter region transfer is a different tier

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#870

Post by jusonchan81 »

paxys wrote: post #107
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…

It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight. They are both multi-billion dollar corporations looking out for their shareholders' interests. "Open source" is being thrown around by both sides as a marketing/goodwill tool, nothing more.

I personally feel AWS should have collaborated with Elastic long before this. AWS is likely making a ton on the elasticsearch offering.

What’s interesting is a few people working at AWS has decided to be a bully and then now trying to kill a company. There is zero goodwill to the community here. Both parties working off their egos.

I hope they can keep it up and make their solution a MariaDB and not a subpar version of ES.

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