And this is how opensource dies; not with a bang, but with a whimper.
AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
941–950 of 969 posts
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#942Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're an underdog when compared to Amazon…
If you’re simply thinking of size, consider Amazon is a 500x more diversified business. I doubt they pull anywhere near as much revenue as Elastic does (half a billion/year) from their Elasticsearch hosting alone. Apples and oranges.
I was thinking in terms of AWS, which while more diversified has lock-in, and someone who's already using AWS is probably never going to use ES own cloud hosting
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#943Hint for ElasticSearch: The AWS fork is hosted on github https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch If I were working at ElasticSearch/Kibana, I would be filling a DMCA takedown on GitHub against all the offending repos. This is how to defend your copyright and trademark. And yes, it's getting into aggressive territory and not everybody might agree with that strategy, but that's how the game is played. It's a fu…
> This is how to defend your copyright and trademark. The DMCA will not help you with trademark enforcement, and the license under which Amazon received ElasticSearch allows distribution of both the original and derivative works.
It can do. The case is more complex than just copying some original work.
Get a lawyer for a week, they will find 7 angles to defend the company. If not the DMCA there are a other simple procedures that big players have to follow.
ElasticSearch is a billion dollar company. It's the least they could do.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#944Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then Elastic should've come up with a non-Apache-2.0 license at inception. Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes m…
They made a mistake with their original licensing, and now they have corrected it. The comments on this post seem strangely invested in Elastic not fixing their mistake.
Did they made a mistake? It looks to me that they took advantage of Splunk being proprietary. Not many people would use closed Splunk alternative. So they have made an open alternative and everyone loved it and this is what created the community and made them popular. Then they started using their position to force people into their proprietary Basic package because there was no security in the OSS version. That caused many data leaks from unsecured Elastic clusters. Can you imagine MariaDB not having any security by default? Or nginx without ACL? I never cared about Machine Learning, APM, SIEM and their other "products". Then they released "basic security" which was not open and was still pretty limited (e.g. not supporting OpenID). Elastic is big now, listed on the stock exchange so I understand they have to listen to their shareholders. While I don't like Amazon business and I am not their customer, I actually welcome this attempt to finally make a basic usable Elastic really open!
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#945Earlier quoted context omitted.
With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source users to pay you is “doing it wrong”. Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.
> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault. Exactly this. Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model. The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they'…
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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#946AWS has known all along what they are doing with this OSS strategy. They are the only provider that doesn't lose by having heavily commoditized, open source backend software - they can support profitable operations at a much lower cost point than these mid-sized companies like Elastic/Mongo Elastic, and the "open source business model" companies certainly should have seen this coming. But the attitude in the early 20…
This comment really sums things up thank you
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#947Amazon are the masters of theivery. The hypocrisy is not going unnoticed. Amazon contributed nothing of value to open source, then they basically stole the hard work of others and again contributed nothing back and now they're going so far as to preach about open source. Please. The sad part is, users won't care and customers won't care because at the end of the day ease of use wins. Elastic are taking drastic measur…
> open source > stolen ??? https://supernotes-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/image-uploads/...
Since open source != free, yes it can be stolen.
Conclusion : have a look on your meme.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#948Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The SSPL is not open source because it does not meet the definition of "open source" per the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/). See https://opensource.org/osd for the definition in question.
And it _also_ doesn't meet the definition of "free software" per the FSF.
If no one gets to own the term "open source" and anyone can define it however they like, then the term is meaningless.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s even more boring is critiquing capitalism when that has actually nothing to do with the problem at hand. I brought up socialism as a counter example of how there is very little practical way to solve this issue with a different economic system. You’re free to bring up a different example of how an economic system will help the conundrum of preserving economic exchange and user freedom. A Potlatch gift economy…
Capitalism is the elephant in the room, the economic (and cultural) system we have now. Any change we want to do within this framework requires changing its rules. The real problem we have to face now is the perpetual growth model, which is a natural consequence of capitalism. I don't know how and if we can fix this system to prevent perpetual growth without killing its essence. That's the real conversation we should…
It's not an elephant in the room if we're actively talking about it.
For someone who claims to want a conversation, you're doing a good job of insulting me repeatedly without actually discussing anything relevant to this post.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#950Earlier 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…
"At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring?" Good lord - the views on HN are wild. I'm aging myself, but open source licensing (used) to not be that complicated. The principles of open source are being violated by Elastic not AWS - just so we are clear. That is not so complicated. If Elastic wants to make it so contributors to the software have FEWER rights than Elastic, that is fine,…
The licensing still isn't that complicated.
This is a live view of a new generation learning about the difficulties of market competition.
We're seeing this pattern in several contexts in the industry: Rather than compete, which requires listening and responding to customers (talking to people is hard), they prefer a magic wand (a new license, or regulation or something perceived to be "easy") to force large successful companies (which they see as immutable fixtures that can never be defeated) to break up or neutered so that smaller entrants can succeed.
"Be careful what you wish for". Smaller entrants aren't necessarily more ethical nor do they offer a better service than large incumbents. It really varies.