AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#931

Post by d1zzy » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

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 taking an open source product that is released under a license that allows you to use in some ways and then using it that way and making money off it somehow is considered to be "exploiting open source" then yes, Amazon is guilty of that.

I for one wouldn't use that word in this use case. They are just one of the many companies that legally use the product to make money with it.

EDIT: While on this subject, does that mean Amazon is "exploiting open source" by building and selling products using their own Android fork off the open source code and not paying Google for it? :)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#932

Post by d1zzy » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #560

jefftk wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is nearly 2 decades old, and its tradeoffs are well known among people working in open source. If Elastic had wanted its protections (and restrictions) they easily could have chosen it.

AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague for the legal team to confidently understand the "bounds" of the copyleft license. Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like…

So, according to some in this thread, as a business owner you are "exploiting open source" by taking more permissively licensed code and making money off it. Shame on you! /s

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#933

Post by d1zzy » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #911

pessimizer wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Who is "ours" here?

They make perfectly legal use of that code. What they're doing seems to be in my interest because if they do it, it means I could also establish a business using permissive code to run it and hopefully make money off it. It's good news for many wannabe startup founders out there.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#934

Post by cmiles74 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

nenolod wrote: post #921

cmiles74 wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth keeping in mind that we don't always know which projects will truly become successful. The precursor to Elasticsearch, Compass, wasn't hugely popular. When I started looking hard at Elasticsearch, with plans to actually use it, I had to spend a lot of time explaining why I didn't want to use Solr, which was much more popular at the time. In my opinion, the bottom line is this: if Amazon's exploitative beha…

Amazon's behavior may feel exploitative, but it isn't. That would be like saying Red Hat is exploitative. Part of the whole concept of free software is that you have freedom of choice with vendors (this is derived from "freedom 0"). Amazon is providing the software and its support as part of the Elasticsearch offering as a managed service. Elastic is a competing vendor, both as a managed service and in a traditional…

I don't think it's fair to say that Elastic wants to be the exclusive vendor of Elasticsearch. They have registered and own the trademark, I believe it is fair to say that they want to be the only vendor who can use that trademark. I don't think this is uncommon or unreasonable.

Other companies have built products on Elasticsearch (I worked one one myself at one time) and they haven't been sued by Elastic. In my experience, Elastic has behaved in the spirit of free software. Now that their license has changed I would expect they will receive fewer submissions of code from outside companies. In my opinion, the difference here is both scale and misrepresentation of the offering by Amazon through unauthorized use of Elastic's trademarks.

This is not the first company to change their license in order to avoid providing free improvements to Amazon's proprietary services, I believe that this is unique to Amazon, perhaps because of the size of their AWS customer base. I can't find any similar stories of companies changing their licenses because their code was being used by RedHat.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#935

Post by d1zzy » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

cycloptic wrote: post #579

reissbaker wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back. The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acqu…

>The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service. I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying o…

Seems sad to be them but this has always been the case with open source. There has been countless successful businesses established that run with on source software (think Linux, glibc, etc) and almost none of them payed back open source developers or contributed anything.

To say that developers/authors of open-source believe that if their projects get picked up by some big company they would also be payed seems silly and childish. This has never been the case, why would they even believe that? It was rare when a company payed open source devs for their work (and it made the news, like when RedHat gifted Torvalds a lot of stock before going public and it's not like Torvalds was the only kernel dev at that time).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#936

Post by cmiles74 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

sojsurf wrote: post #876

cmiles74 wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds fair to me.

Perhaps the issue is that Elastic is getting so little from the Amazon product that they resent, essentially, adding features to the Amazon product for little or no return. Elastic noted that, in their experience, some unspecified number of Amazon customers believed the Amazon product was somehow associated with Elastic. Elastic implied this was a result of Amazon's use of their trademark but all of this is hard to verify or quantify.

RedisLabs fought a similar battle with Amazon, they also ended up making changes to their license. I really do think the issue here is the scale of AWS and the very large pool of customers tied to Amazon's offering: there are so many existing and potential customer using AWS that companies like Elastic or RedisLabs feel they can't write those potential customers off. It seems to me that if Amazon was interested in the well being of those customers, they would figure out a way to continue to receive improvements from these projects instead of forking their own versions.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#937

Post by dialamac » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:57 AM UTC

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #476

dialamac wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really get how people get this twisted. Quite condescending this attitude. I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple. And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are somet…

I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software license…

Nope I get it and I think it’s absolute bunk. And while I grant others are entitled to their opinion I think the implicit dismissal of my (not uncommon) opinion is condescending. As pointed out RMS doesn’t support this idea, and while he’s not some absolute moral authority I’d say it’s a strong counter argument to some absolute consensus on a “spirit” of free or open source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#938

Post by shawnz » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

eins1234 wrote: post #917

swat535 wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Isn't that exactly the point of capitalism and the reason why proprietorship is possible?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#939

Post by vrtx0 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

smokey_circles wrote: post #677

vrtx0 wrote: post #479

Wow. Amazon is blatantly misleading people here. They know the SSPL was created specifically because MongoDB had the same issues with Amazon’s service. I worked for MongoDB. Nobody wanted the SSPL, but Amazon was relentless. MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing nothing to the project. T…

> Amazon is blatantly misleading people here I'm not so sure I agree about that, presuming you're talking about the open source comments. If not, you can ignore the rest of the comment (except the last paragraph, pertinent question for you) The SSPL is not an open source license [0], and that's all there is to it. There must be a better version of it out there somewhere. Something to the tune of "use our software as…

If time permits, please read through thread in the “SSPLv2 being withdrawal by its stewards” section. Specifically, the SaaS grab Eliot mentions.

Unfortunately I wasn’t involved in the discussions with Amazon, so I don’t want to speculate on details or mislead anybody. I can say that MongoDB absolutely had a relationship with Amazon prior the SaaS grab. I believe Amazon was the largest deployment target for MDB’s cloud service (which runs on most major cloud platforms).

That said, the reason I say Amazon is blatantly misleading people is that the authors of the blog post chose a definition of “open source” that fits their argument against Elastic. They state companies that use SSPL software may have to give up their entire source code, which simply isn’t the case. It’s not even as restrictive as the GPL (the FSF has a different definition of open source). Please note that the OSI doesn’t consider any GPL license open source.

Honestly, the only accurate definition of open source is that the source code is available to the public. That means we can modify the software, learn from it, etc. With the SSPL, you can even run a customized Elastic or MongoDB server to support any business needs unless your business is providing said software as a service and making money from it. Even then, all you have to do is release the code that runs said software as a service...

Amazon is claiming that you’d have to release your code even if you’re using the product for your game, social network, analytics app, etc. That’s just not true.

For the record, I wish everything could be under a permissive MIT or BSD-style license. But companies like Oracle, Microsoft (in the 90s) and Amazon felt entitled to destroy open projects that competed with their own. Hence the wide variety of open source licenses that now exist.

My first kernel commit was 2004, and while I don’t think anybody can own the term “open source”, I feel like I’ve been part of the open source community for ~20 years now. IMHO, Amazon is by far the least open source friendly company out there. They never contributed a single commit to MongoDB (at least while I was there), yet made money off their own SaaS, and even directed their users to MongoDB’s documentation.

Hope that clarifies my stance (and frustration) a bit...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#940

Post by vrtx0 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

autarch wrote: post #519

vrtx0 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants the SSPL (not even MongoDB), but Amazon is forcing companies to do this while contributing nothing. These projects are still open source, and actually contribute to the libraries they depend upon. As a former developer of MongoDB who watched this happen, I’ve contributed to a variety of open source projects. MongoDB also couldn’t just lay everybody off and let Amazon grow their monopolies (much like Orac…

I'm not defending Amazon here, just pointing out that they are correct to say that the SSPL is not open source. I _do_ think it was very shifty of Elastic to say that switching to the SSPL was "doubling down on open".

If you don’t believe the SSPL is open source, then you definitely don’t believe the GPL (and related licenses) are open source.

The definition of open source Amazon points everybody to is not the same as what’s defined by the FSF and other organizations. Nobody gets to own the term “open source” — that simply means the source code is available for you to modify, build learn from, etc. The details Amazon mentions only come into play when trying to make money off of an open source project.