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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#951

Post by pas »

deetsb wrote: post #827
pas wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue is meaningless, profitability is the important thing. Amazon was net income 0, but it was always enormously profitable, it immediately spent that money on growth. RedHat wasn't really that profitable. Sure it also spent billions on growth, but Amazon spent hundreds of billions on growth. (Sure, Amazon is a conglomerate, from books to gadgets to groceries to basically everything and the biggest digital infrast…

I'm not quite sure I agree with your words here; generally speaking, net income is profit (accounting profit, to be precise -- there are other profits but we normally talk about accounting profit). Secondly, revenue is super not meaningless! It's the capacity for you to be profitable! Amazon had 0 net income but were able to spend money on growth because they had revenue, and were able to classify their R&D as an exp…

I wrote profitability exactly for this reason. Revenue in itself is just as meaningless as profitability, I agree. (That's what aggregates like NPV [net present value] and other indicators are for.)

RedHat is big, it has a lot of revenue, but it also has a looot of expenses too. Hence it's profitability is low. Whereas Amazon is a lot more profitable (even if it had no accounting profit), and that's exactly how it grew this big.

If RH were this profitable it would have probably also grown bigger too.

Of course some business models, sectors are truly niches, and you can't grow arbitrarily big. RH probably suffered from this to a degree. Selling Linux support is a niche market compared to selling almost everything that can be shipped in boxes. Of course both Amazon and RH are survivors of the early 2000s big boom-bust cycle, so probably there's a big survival bias and chance/luck at play here, so it's probably not right to say that RH should have expanded to bigger markets. (How come "AWS" is not a RH thing? It's likely that Amazon's extreme "black friday" scaling challenge it not unique to them, yet they were the ones able to successfully capitalize on this.)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#952

Post by 0800LUCAS »

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…

> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.

I don't get how you came to this conclusion.

If Elastic goes bust, why would Amazon suddenly drop support for product? They have customers paying millions for the service, why the heck would they drop it?

If anything I would expect Amazon to keep the service and work harder to ensure good service, so they can absorb that portion of the market not being served.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#953

Post by cutemonster »

petejohnson wrote: post #928
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…

> 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. That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll. You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic a…

Personally I'd theoretically be ok with having contributed long ago, and the company now going SSPL. Not that easy to have known, that far back, how things would turn out.

> need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company

They make lots of money, but also have high salary costs, right. I wonder if you looked at the numbers and growth / profitablity, and concluded that they're at risk, or if you're assuming

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#954

Post by cutemonster »

temikus wrote: post #678
tim-- wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the code licensed as Apache 2.0 stays that way. The open code doesn't magically become closed source.

So AFAIK it’s not exactly so. One can actually change project license granted they have agreement of every single contributor to do so. Which they do since they had the CLA system from the start. So theoretically they can even unpublish all the code if they want. It’s just probably not worth the reputation as damage. IANAL though so I’d be very interested to hear a patent lawyer take on this.

You might want to read the Apache2 license text. It's not that complicated, at least not the in your case relevant section(s)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#955

Post by vrtx0 »

autarch wrote: post #948
vrtx0 wrote: post #940

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With all due respect, dictionaries can certainly define the term. They create definitions based on examples of the word's use, and Oxford English defines it as: "Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified."

We can agree to disagree about the details; no use arguing on the internet, and I respect your view. But please keep in mind the OSI's mission is fitting open source into a legal framework. It's not the ASF, FSF, Mozilla Foundation or other organizations who actually support and organize open source projects. Full disclosure; I also worked on Apache Drill, thanks to the ASF.

My primary point is that Amazon is not part of the open source community (AFAIK, they've never claimed to be). So it's hard for me to trust a company overtly focused on monetizing OSS without contributing. IMHO, all of the engineers at Elastic who gave so much time and effort for this project are still part of the open source community. I hate to see Amazon effectively judging which projects/people are "truly" part of the community when their motivation is so clearly corrupt.

I hope this comes across with respect, and please know that I'd much rather not see licenses like the SSPL. But after seeing Amazon's monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior play out repeatedly with various companies, I can't just watch them do this without saying something. Even on a stale HN thread. :)

One last thing to note -- Bruce Perens left the OSI in January of 2020 (shortly after the SSPL stuff went down), and said: "We created a tower of babel of licenses. We did not design-in license compliance and we have a tremendous noncompliance problem that isn't getting better. We did not design a good framework for where proprietary software can go, and where it never should. Our license loopholes are exploited." ESR (who I detest as a human being), was banned from the OSI two months later. I don't mean to suggest this was a direct reaction the SSPL though -- please see the OSI's wikipedia page and cited sources.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#956

Post by GargantuChet »

2bitencryption wrote: post #402
mylons wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the correct take. AWS and Elastic are both acting out of self interest with varying levels of gains for the customer in each.

I'm about to make a really petty and possibly off topic comment, so sorry for this -- "this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."

This post is the gospel truth.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#957

Post by virtue3 »

popcorncowboy wrote: post #781
mathnode wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MariaDB came out with the BSL license for projects like maxcale to help protect against AWS nonsense (and the like). The mysql -> mariadb response is completely different, but no less terrible. This is history repeating itself as Amazon, once again, attempt to gut open source efforts. For a short while Amazon did contribute to some MariaDB projects. MongoDB now have similar license and AWS offers compatible API's.

> help protect against AWS nonsense Not gaslighting, legit questions follow: It's not clear to me how taking open source software and providing commercial managed services is "nonsense"? Or is it specifically when AWS does it that it's not okay? Either way, is there something specific at play that makes it fundamentally different from say WPEngine running hosted Wordpress? Is it purely a function of scale? If a start…

AWS repeatedly said they were "together with elastic" in service offerings. They apparently were not, so they were just running on elastics coat tails, offering nothing to elastic, and saying they were totally together.

It's hilarious that you picked K8. K8 destroyed dockers ability to make money. They were planning on rolling out their own system, but didn't get it out fast enough and got eaten.

Was k8 nonsense? no, they made a product from the ground up.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#958

Post by john4532452 »

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.

> It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight

Without Amazon for this would have end up like Qt software .In this case Amazon clearly are the good guys. Although they do it in their self interest, i am glad it happened.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#959

Post by john4532452 »

annilt wrote: post #345
rcconf wrote: post #214

I am so delighted to hear this. Open source wins again. Open source is the right for you to do whatever you want with the software, AND YES, that includes monetize it. I've been sitting on the sidelines reading the different perspectives, but I just cannot see how you can be on the side of Elasticsearch. How can they take all the work from the OSS community and add a clause that THEY only can monetize it? I will tell…

So after witnessing all these problems, more projects will start closed source or with restrictive licenses(GPLs) instead of OSS or more permissive licenses. This is how OSS community is being degraded. A few tech giants are disrupting entire OSS community. It may be legal/morally ok(or not I dont care) for AWS to do this but it is for sure we’ll have less OSS because of this.

Closed source software will not attract talented developers unless a lot of money is poured in to it. It is okay to have closed source, but its not okay to take the contributions of the open source and then later make it closed source.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#960

Post by fastball »

BizyDev wrote: post #947
fastball wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Open source (by most people's definition) means anyone can use the source... so who exactly would it be stolen by, if it is open for anyone to use?
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