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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#241
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, but was stunned to see DigitalOcean charging $0.10/GB for outbound transfer for their new (quite cool imo) apps service. You do get 40GB-100GB included, but it means it's unusable for bandwidth heavy apps. They include 1TB (which is pooled across all VMs) and 0.01/GB on their standard platform.

Yeah, I think Digital Ocean are really taking the piss there - proven by their existing $0.01/GB pricing, as you mentioned. I reckon DO have seen the big providers getting away with it, and they want a piece. Why wouldn't they, when there is apparently so little pushback?

I suppose you have object storage which is still $0.01/GB (plus includes 1TB to start with), so for most apps your bandwidth will come out of that for most files, so your 0.1/GB price is only for html/api/etc transfer. But still, it's annoying and seems completely arbitatary.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#242
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute claim, aside from being at home in a rant on HN, comes from a cursory glance at https://github.com/amzn , weighted by contributors and popularity, and compared to companies of similar size. Google, Microsoft and Facebook all build and maintain multiple open source projects that are hugely popular with people who use them outside of the company sandboxes. For example, people benefit from React without Fac…

When I think of Google I think of Go, Angular, protobuf, Bazel, Dart, Flutter, Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, etc. When I think of MS I think of C#, TypeScript, VSCode, .NET When I think of Facebook I think of React, Flux, Jest, PyTorch, GraphQL, Haxl When I think of Apple I think of Swift, WebKit When I think of Amazon...I can't really think of anything

I would add Kotlin to Google's credit.

But I think it's important to note that these companies don't contribute to open source out of any moral obligation, do they?

I think they do it to tie more developers and development around their eco-systems and products.

Maybe Amazon should get smart and start doing something similar. Or maybe they don't need that. But in any case I don't hold it morally against them that they don't. I think a bigger issue is it seems they pay and have been paying very little or no taxes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-in...

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#243

I wonder if ES had originally been AGPL licensed would that have helped them? If Amazon adapts AGPL code to integrate it with their own infra=structure doesn't that in fact mean that all of Amazons' software-based infra-structure would become AGPL as well, and thus easily reproduced by Google Cloud, MS Cloud, Oracle Cloud etc.? Or even inhouse? In other words wouldn't it mean it would be easy to replicate the Amazon…

Amazon just wouldn't do that. They would either not offer it as a service, or make a clone from the beginning like they did with MongoDB. In general none of the cloud providers are actually willing to comply with the AGPL license.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#244

It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully? From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / cons…

This is Amazon's playbook. Make a direct competitor and squeeze the originals out. They did that with jewelry early on and then anyone they couldn't buy out they would under cut until they capitulated like diapers.com The Everything Book by Brad Stone goes over this in detail. Clearly anti-competitive monopolistic actions are taken constantly by Amazon. The only reason they aren't trust busted is because the common line of reasoning is that consumers pay less for goods, but this is being looked at because shouldn't competition be lowering prices. IE if Amazon hadn't killed diapers.com, wouldn't diapers be cheaper overall? And the answer is they should be, but the government hasn't caught up. Once they start getting into the weeds, they'll see example after example of monopoly behavior destroying competitors and ultimately raising prices on consumers.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhmmm I’m pretty sure David vs Goliath is talking about scale between competition. Saying that $11B is Goliath just because you’re sitting at $1M doesn’t mean they’re not in a crazy mismatched fight against a $2T company. In the same way you could be in a David vs Goliath situation yourself if you with $1M in wealth tried to sue someone with $25K of wealth. Everything is relative. Doesn’t mean it’s not a crazy unfair…

It may be relative but it isn't proportionate. A 11B market cap company can field a similarly competent legal department as a 2T market cap company can. I, with 25k, absolutely could not afford the same lawyer someone with 1M.

Have you considered that guy with $1M won't be willing to drop like $50k (2x your net worth) on a lawyer just to squash you?

He must have possibility to earn $100k in process to do that. Well unless you really pissed him off.

If you earn $25k a year and he spends $50k in one year to take your cake. Well unless he really is your competitor that can make use of your defeat he still needs 2 years to get even. Then it probably is not easy money because there is always a risk he will not win. Maybe he can find better ways to earn more money than squashing some $25k guys.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But the question here is not about companies value in the market. Why changing the subject? This should be about the ethics behind Amazon's aggressive actions against OSS and its effect on the OSS industry.

The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread. Anyways, like I said, Elastic could've made money with a proprietary product but they chose OSS instead (and used Apache Lucene to build on). AWS is just offering customers what they want and there are many other companies doing the same thing (IBM's Compose, Aiven, Instaclustr, etc). How is this against OSS? This is the OSS industry operating as intended.

> The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread.

As I said, it's a tactic to change the subject. Instead of focusing on actions with bad faith, change the subject by saying they have a lot of money so Amazon is allowed to be competitive and fork the code.

> AWS is just offering customers what they want.

No. it's not AWS improving some services. It's about a multi-billion dollar company launching a campaign against OSS. They did it with MongoDB and it continues. Some see these actions as justifiable. Because OSS should be MIT and maintainers should live with donations. Others, however, disagree. It can be OSS and profitable (without Amazon actions).

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would players in an oligopoly undercut each other when their implicit agreement around pricing makes all of them richer? Also, second tier cloud providers like Oracle give deep discounts and still can't compete with AWAZGO so pricing isn't necessarily a main competitive advantage.

Oracle's problem is that nobody wants to work with Oracle. If I was managing a high-bandwidth service I would avoid Oracle Cloud purely to avoid legal risk to my clients.

While I agree that's why no one uses Oracle, corps not competing for price at the tier 1 provider level still isn't great for the consumer/market, which is what I think the original commenter was getting at.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#248

Is there any good that done by Amazon to support OSS? Like ever. They started with cloning MongoDB and now Elastic with actually zero contribution to the community regardless of their insane profits. This is a clear single. Amazon can always clone and redistribute any open source software then lock it in for AWS. If we've started to witness declining in OSS, well at least we know now who started the wave.

Do people assume that a company as large as AWS would automatically have a lot to contribute to the OSS? Maybe most of Amazon teams have not much to open source yet. Contributing to OSS is a bottom-up effort. An engineer needs to be motivated to generalize her project, to peel the code from Amazon's vast internal infrastructure, and to go through an approval process to open source her project. Given that many teams h…

I don't think it's a bottom up process. I feel often it's a top down process. Most companies with lots open source activity normally have management that have decided that is something they want to encourage and then it comes down to people making their code open sourcable.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asserting that they have forked OSS and then not provided back the source code for their own improvements. I guess we can check their github repos to see if that's the case.

As far as I know DocumentDB is closed source. Btw: I can name zero OSS projects from Amazon and this is not the same for Microsoft (VScode, TS) and FB (React, Jest).

I know several employees contributing to the Linux kernel, and I know they're hiring more Rust contributors. You're right though, I think Amazon lags compared to MSFT, FB, and G. Even Netflix or IBM/RedHat, for that matter.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#250
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhmmm I’m pretty sure David vs Goliath is talking about scale between competition. Saying that $11B is Goliath just because you’re sitting at $1M doesn’t mean they’re not in a crazy mismatched fight against a $2T company. In the same way you could be in a David vs Goliath situation yourself if you with $1M in wealth tried to sue someone with $25K of wealth. Everything is relative. Doesn’t mean it’s not a crazy unfair…

To be realistic and fair I don't believe part of Amazon that is doing fork of Elasticsearch is $2T, they have other stuff to do. Just like the guy that is $1M worth is not going to blow all of his money just to squash some guy. He probably has more powerful friends and maybe some connections but I don't see dumping $0.5m on lawyers just because he can take piece of cake from the other guy that will make him $10k a ye…

just a math correction: 20% of $2T is $400b - or about 40x of Elastic
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