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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#911

Post by bccdee »

pessimizer wrote: post #706
bccdee wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. Suppose Elastic does lose control of their codebase, and it winds up getting maintained entirely by AWS. Then what's to stop AWS from taking their forked Apache2 code closed-source? Bam, no more ElasticSearch. Without professional maintainers, CVEs will pile up and it will gradually become abandonware. Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Am…

> The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.

> Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source

Yeah — clearly they're acting in total accordance with their own interests. My point is that they're acting contrary to ours.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#912

Post by random5634 »

xorcist wrote: post #739
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…

Hosting open source software has been a popular business model since day one. My organization uses open source precisely because we can choose between competing providers.

Exactly - I once used a more full stack provider, and we checked to make sure their stack was open source for key areas we spent time on, so if we wanted to switch to another HOSTED provider, all our config files, etc etc would still work - but the other providers also HOSTED this software - that wasn't considered a violation by anyone. This was before the days of the mega providers like AWS - where now I think you just have to accept lock-in - but AWS has never raised rates so it's not as scary as doing an oracle lock-in as an example.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#913

Post by mrtweetyhack »

ryanisnan wrote: post #175
hyperion2010 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…

Of course Amazon will contribute to the new fork. They have many thousands of paying customers who have little incentive to switch, for better or worse. The only thing that might actually call for a migration is a significant decline in feature development.

Of course Amazon will not contribute to the new fork

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#914

Post by darkarmani »

Closi wrote: post #709
markvdb wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though. Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUN…

Part of the reason elasticsearch is popular is because they choose a very permissive license. That was the tradeoff they accepted for getting such high market share.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#916

Post by CRConrad »

bigiain wrote: post #327
sg47 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community did that in good faith. What's the incentive for the community to contribute to the project if Vendor XYZ is going to offer the same project with more optimizations?

The buggy whip community invested in buggy whip manufacturing too. Sometimes step changes happen, and things are just different afterwards. I see two related "changes in the world" here that are contributing to this current drama.'' 1) the rise of SaaS and globally centralised cloud hosting. 2) the emergence of companies solely (or mostly) built on paying salaries to developers writing an open source software project…

~20, not 30.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#917

Post by eins1234 »

swat535 wrote: post #864
jasonkester wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Yeah, I think the fundamental problem we're seeing here is how difficult it is for creators of open source projects to effectively capture the value they create in the world, especially at the higher end of the scale of _extremely_ popular projects that gain widespread adoption and create a mind-blowing amount of value, like Elasticsearch.

I would argue that by releasing a project as open source, we create more value in society than by releasing as proprietary.

An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation.

Our society does a pretty good job of rewarding and incentivizing value creation for proprietary projects, but seems to do a horrible job of incentivizing value creation through open source projects.

I think it's in society's best interest for open source creators to be rewarded every bit as handsomely for creating value in the world as creators of proprietary projects, if not more, so we can incentivize the creation of more open source projects.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#918

Post by retzkek »

acatton wrote: post #808
sciurus wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Some ideas: * Since their license is Apache (most likely because they have an Open Core business model) instead of AGPL, they could offer extra services on Elastic's managed service. Amazon wouldn't able to offer since these parts are proprietary. * They could partner up with other Cloud Providers (Microsoft, Google, ...) to offer a managed Elastic on these clouds, before these cloud providers do it themselves. * The…

They actually do all of these already. Most of their development and marketing for the last couple years has been pushing their add-ons (things like machine learning, threat detection, application tracing), that are only available on their cloud or on-prem with a paid subscription.

Cloud partnerships: https://www.elastic.co/partners/microsoft-azure https://www.elastic.co/partners/google-cloud

So that's what's really puzzling to me, what's really driving this change? Is their considerable revenue from all of that still not enough to justify their valuation and growth? Or is it really just a personal vendetta against AWS?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#919

Post by macksd »

jrh206 wrote: post #338
macksd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it was actually extremely difficult for me to find the license text after Elastic's announcements too. All the announcements and FAQ's etc. seemed to omit a link to the actual text.

For those, like me, who were curious and wanted to take a look: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/license...

Thank you! I had actually tried to find it after posting my comment and couldn't find it through their website. The day of the announcement Github hadn't been updated yet, and I gave up when I saw this didn't say where to look: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE....

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#920

Post by _msw_ »

myroon5 wrote: post #490
_msw_ wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's counting emails. Unlike other Git-based projects like the Linux kernel, it seems a lot of commits are made with users.noreply.github.com email addresses. For example. commit 8e413f85e8978da83db107aae51e5543d4779dba Author: paulward24 Date: Wed Jul 3 04:37:07 2019 -0700 Ensure to access RecoveryState#fileDetails under lock Closes #43840

Not claiming every git commit uses work emails Referring to the fact that the original 600 Amazon PR claim was rescinded in that thread

Got it. Thank you for mentioning it here. Comments are getting a bit unwieldy to stay on top of.
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