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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#871

Post by spion »

zerocrates wrote: post #860
cmiles74 wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree, I see no reason to think that Elasticsearch is seeking to avoid "the drawbacks" of a permissive license. I believe the project has been using a permissive license since it's first release in 2010. What they are objecting to is having their project co-opted by Amazon, one of the largest and wealthiest technology companies in the world. Elasticsearch and Amazon have been battling this out for a coup…

That Amazon can do this is "the drawback" here.

They could also collaborate with Elastic as a customer. In fact, the model where a company develops a managed service and offers it on cloud providers infrastructure (i.e. "app store") would have everyone benefit:

* Amazon, from the wealth of innovative managed services they could offer without fully maintaining them themselves

* OSS companies, for the ability to financially sustain their projects and still offer it for free for those that want to self host without offering a managed version of the same software

* End users, who can both use the software however they wish and also choose to get a nice managed version of it.

Instead what will happen due to AWS behavior here is that there will be a lot less incentive to develop innovative new services, at least in a non-proprietary way => therefore there will be fewer services in general for AWS to offer without doing all the product work from scratch, fewer tools in general for engineers and fewer OSS tools in particular and more Firebase-like offerings. So everybody loses here in the long run.

I'm going to go on a limb and say that whichever of the cloud providers figures out the "app store" equivalent for managed services is going to be able to take over from AWS.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#872

Post by kenturamon »

sandGorgon wrote: post #591

The issue here is that it's quite impossible to compete with AWS if it offers even an inferior version of a service. Because of network egress pricing. You are most likely on AWS already. And even if elastic offers a 2x better product at 1/2 the price, your cost of traffic for an external service will easily 4x versus using AWS services. And that's really the frustration for these service providers. You can NEVER com…

Elastic Cloud offers VPC endpoint connections if your deployment is in AWS. You don't end up paying the usual NAT gateway egress costs.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#873

Post by softwaredoug »

donretag wrote: post #390

I had meetings lately with AWS regarding the license and was told about the fork. They mentioned something to the effect that Elastic was being greedy with open-source software. I am an early contributor to Elasticsearch. I probably have more commits to the core product than most employees. It is now incredibly difficult for a non-employee to have any PR looked at unless it is a bug. I stopped contributing after thei…

Both companies are doing things in their self-interest and "greed"

For Amazon, they are "being greedy" because large scale cloud vendors primarily benefit from commoditized open source as they can provide the cheapest offering at scale...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#874

Post by somethingwitty1 »

hvdijk wrote: post #718
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so…

> (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0 Where did they make this claim?

It is covered in the blog post if you read it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200120104750/https:/www.elasti...

"We did not change the license of any of the Apache 2.0 code of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — and we never will."

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#875

Post by nix23 »

irishsultan wrote: post #856
nix23 wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL? But also LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL) OpenBGPD OpenOSPFD OpenNTPD OpenSMTPD OpenSSH

OpenBSD did not initially make OpenSSL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL , https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html )

And Google did not initially made Blink.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#876

Post by sojsurf »

cmiles74 wrote: post #826
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…

Given that Amazon's customers are inside Amazon's proprietary AWS environment, I think it's unreasonable to expect that an outside company can meaningfully compete inside that environment. In terms of customer preference, AWS customers will _always_ prefer a product offered by Amazon to a similar offering from an outside company. Amazon will always be less expensive and better integrated with other AWS services.

Amazon customer here. We use Elastic's offering because it has a fairly good management layer. That said, there's a lot of room for either player to improve things. One example is user/access management. Kibana tries to be all things to all people and ends up doing very few of them well. If I never had to log into Kibana again it would be a good day.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#877

Post by pradn »

boulos wrote: post #620
pradn wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's not a way to remove the egress pricing moat because it's so natural. Of course it costs less money to move data within a datacenter than outside of it. So, why wouldn't it cost less to do everything inside AWS? Egress pricing is probably multiples of this actual discrepancy to erect the moat even deeper. It really does feel hopeless to run an open-source service that isn't running on an existing crowd. Pe…

See my sibling comment. Snowflake actually has historically run as a multinenant service with access to say your S3 bucket, so the majority of data transfer is VM S3 in the same Region (so included/free). As a snowflake customer, you would submit queries (and data ingestion) as Egress pricing (roughly $.01/GB though assuming it was using the private link or similar) and then the smallish results come back as Ingress…

This doesn't get around the egress pricing for sending data from AWS to another company's data center, yes?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#878

Post by [deleted] »

cmiles74 wrote: post #823
andrewmutz wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic wants to get the benefits of permissive licenses without the drawbacks. Having a permissive license is a massive asset for getting people to adopt your software, but it means you will have no control over what they do with it. They want the goodwill and other benefits of a permissive license without loss of control that these licenses bring.

I have to disagree, I see no reason to think that Elasticsearch is seeking to avoid "the drawbacks" of a permissive license. I believe the project has been using a permissive license since it's first release in 2010. What they are objecting to is having their project co-opted by Amazon, one of the largest and wealthiest technology companies in the world. Elasticsearch and Amazon have been battling this out for a coup…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#879

Post by thisoneworks »

jabl wrote: post #685
ryukafalz wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, of course. They're still both free software, they're still both used by companies who aren't paying for Red Hat subscriptions, there's no shortage of consulting companies who will provide support for CentOS or Fedora like Red Hat would for RHEL, etc. That's the point: Red Hat has plenty of competition, including from others using their own software, and that's fine! EDIT: And honestly the fact that Red Hat owns…

Yes, but, while RH is the 900lb gorilla in the "pure OSS" business (and yes, we should be thankful for their contributions all over the OSS ecosystem even if we aren't RH customers), from a business perspective they are not that spectacular. Looking at wikipedia, the company was formed in 1993, has a revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular. Partly d…

RedHat is not a "product" company but a "service" company, so comparing it to other big tech companies is an apples to oranges comparison. The nature of big tech is scalability (product), whereas Redhat is more of a sustainable business focused on providing support around OSS software, it isn't aiming to do anything new and revolutionary. Not every company has to be gunning towards world domination..
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