Live data from Hacker News

OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

251–260 of 438 posts

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#251

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…

What ES wants of course is for Amazon to give them a cut of revenue from hosting ES. We already know Amazon isn't interested in doing that (either at all, or at whatever price ES wanted, we don't know that). They had no legal requirement to when ES was open source. So ES changed the licensing to no longer be open source. So, Amazon could... a) decide to give ES a cut after all, b) decide to stop hosting ES, or c) for…

Good interesting points. Now Amazon will be the good guy because they will run open-source version, whereas ElasticSearch is not, if I understand you correctly.

No single capitalist wants competitive markets. They want monopoly, for themselves. It is only when they don't have the monopoly or an easy way to get it that they cry for competitive markets. And that is good of course.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is both a top down process and the culture of the company itself. In the real world, we know how big tech open-sourced some of the most efficient technologies that empowered hundreds, if not millions, of startups.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#253
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you even a customer if you don't pay Elastic any money ? Your a user, sure, but not a customer. These other opinions and negative voices you reference come from actual customers who pay Elastic large sums of money, and they feel they don't get good value and service for that money they're forking over.

You cannot use the cloud systems without paying; how on earth do you figure I’m not a customer from what I wrote?

Because you said you're "self hosted" on 'some cloud'. You don't need to pay Elastic if you're self-hosted and not using the Elastic Cloud - you can just download it and use it for free.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#254

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…

> Amazon is not doing it for any altruistic reason The beauty of OSS is that motives don't matter. If Amazon contributes and it's not detrimental in someway to the code, then it's a plus for anyone else who wants to use it.

Precisely! While their business itself may need to be broken up, a community governed OSS project isn't bad for OSS when the alternative is a proprietary license that gives a single corp the ability to not contribute back or be exposed to virality.

All this being said, progressive corporate taxes seem more enticing year after year.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 campa…

Forking OSS isn't bad faith. If you want to make people pay you, make your software proprietary. In that case, however, you wouldn't get the free ride into the market that being OSS gives you.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#256

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.

Maybe a dual-company like Mozilla would at least make it more clear that the big guy that are just taking advantage of the free lunch is doing more harm than good?

Elastic should have a for-profit and a non-profit company taking donations that would actually control the open source code and hiring the core part of team working on it.

I mean, we know how badly Amazon is behaving here, but at least they should have a option where they could realistically invest.

Asking for a company to invest in a competitor that can grow and eat their lunch with the money being invested by them is not realistic. Even because the company investing the money would want to know if that money is actually being invested back in the open source software and not used by a competing company.

If, giving this choice, they didn't invest back in the foundation, it would be much more clear that they are doing it in bad faith.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Amazon too big and a bully? Is Starbucks too big and a bully? Sure, they force Mom and Pop shops to close by out-competing them, and that sucks. But bullying? I believe that's just Capitalism. Or say you're 6'6 and weigh 230LBS and you join a football team full of people who are 5'9 and 175lbs. Are you a bully just because you're bigger? ES basically handed them a platter with a goose laying golden eggs and a si…

> Is Starbucks too big and a bully? Sure, they force Mom and Pop shops to close by out-competing them, and that sucks. But bullying? I believe that's just Capitalism. I'd say it's more like a mom-and-pop coffee shop giving free coffee to patrons hoping to make money on cookies, and Starbucks coming in, taking the free coffee, opening a nice stand right next to the shop and selling the coffee they got for free. I'm ha…

If they're giving you free coffee, and you sell the coffee you got for free... where's the harm? Starbucks is giving it away. Why would anyone buy your coffee rather than get it for free from the source?

Now, assuming Starbucks charged you for the coffee, and you then re-sold it, this should also be fine. Starbucks is charging you presumably a rate with which they can recoup their costs. But if they are selling it below cost, they are clearly putting themselves at risk. A lot of businesses take this kind of risk as a strategic part of their business, like with making the coffee free. But you have to do it in a way that a competitor can't turn around to their advantage, or you're screwing yourself.

Enter the concept of "not for resale". If a seller enters into a contract with a buyer, that contract can stipulate that the buyer can't resell the goods. Starbucks could theoretically require you to sign a contract saying you will not resell their coffee. That's pretty standard with licenses, even software licenses.

ES must have known that their license did not forbid reselling. Yet they based their business model on this resellable coffee that they were giving away in order to make money on cookies.

Is it Amazon's fault that ES chose a business model where they were selling coffee at a loss? Does Amazon have an ethical responsibility to keep ES's business afloat? Should we find any business unethical that tries to undercut the customer base of a rival, or take advantage of a rival's shaky business model?

I think you have to come up with a whole framework for ethical competition, because one rule at a time isn't gonna capture it. (But I also think Capitalism is inherently unethical)

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#258
post #153

I have mixed feelings about this server side license stuff that mongo db started. Imagine where the internet would be today if the creators of apache and mysql had tried to prevent shared hosting providers in the early days of the web from using their software

Imagine where elastic would be, as the whole success of elastic is based on a apache licensed project (lucene).

In the same place as it would require elastic’s changes to Lucerne to be made open source also?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#260

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…

My favorite "conspiracy theory" is that AWS intentionally creates stupidly verbose and numerous headers in all of their APIs just to up the bandwidth usage a few bytes per request at a time.

You don’t pay for the bandwidth of API calls to AWS
Post reply on HN