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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#301

Post by jrochkind1 »

reflexe wrote: post #135
TechBro8615 wrote: post #9

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…

It it quite funny, elasticsearch is also kind of wrapping an open source library (Apache Lucene) and selling it as their own product.

Very good point.

Could Elastic's business model survive if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic has, saying it's the "spirit" of open source?

That is an interesting question.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#302

Post by jrochkind1 »

manigandham wrote: post #236
jimmy2020 wrote: post #225

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.

Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#303

Post by sdesol »

shawnz wrote: post #292
jillesvangurp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I scrolled back through the commits. It looks like they've been removing traces of x-pack, Elastic branding, licensing checks, etc. since the beginning of March. So far it looks like one person is doing the bulk of all that work. If there are new features, I haven't seen any. The real question is do they have a team for new feature work that they are putting together or is this just a fork that is doomed to fall behi…

They have done extensive work in the Open Distro modules which I assume they will carry over. See: https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/

A lot of the projects looks like they were created to make it easier for Amazon to manage elasticsearch on their infrastructure and/or to overcome license limitations for features that already exists in Elasticsearch.

Are there specific repositories that you know of that would contain functionality that Elasticsearch does not have, that would be a strong differentiating factor? I'd be curious to index these projects to get a better idea of the investment that Amazon is putting into opendistro-for-elasticsearch that could have an impact on OpenSearch.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#304

Post by busterarm »

rabbidruster wrote: post #287
busterarm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, MongoDB is already sort of obsolete and trending towards death by the time that all ended up happening while ElasticSearch is hot and "new".

Where do you get the impression MongoDB is trending towards death? Seems to be growing by some metrics; the stock price has more than doubled in the last year. Not a fan myself, but still seems a long way from death to me and seem to be doing something right in enterprise market.

There's a difference between trending towards death and dead.

IBM has been trending towards death for decades now and it's nowhere near dead.

MongoDB is certainly on the road to death, IMO. As has Oracle DBMS since the 90s.

Most companies tend to make more money as their product's growth stalls out (extracting more money from existing customers).

The fact that Mongo had to create shitty-license underpins huge revenue problems. If you look at the major trends and surveys, the ones targeted at people who actually drive database adoption within companies, MongoDB is sliding YoY for 3 years now.

The place you see Mongo growing is Atlas. Yes, as their competitors can no longer offer MongoDB in their clouds, revenue shifts to MongoDB. That does not mean that use of the database itself is growing.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#305

Post by jimmy2020 »

sokoloff wrote: post #300
jimmy2020 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is how you discourage people from doing OSS. "You can't stop me" argument leads to a slippery slope and if you care about the open-source you see it differently. Not because you can, but because of the consequences of your doing.

Why would open-source advocates want to stop people from doing the very thing that open-source exists to enable? I get that this is inconvenient for Elastic, but it’s good for users.

By people you mean, the big tech who literally did zero effort to support OSS and do everything in their power to fully control the market even if this means pushing the open-source business model out of the market? Or abusing the OSS legal license?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#306

Post by redwood »

busterarm wrote: post #304
rabbidruster wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get the impression MongoDB is trending towards death? Seems to be growing by some metrics; the stock price has more than doubled in the last year. Not a fan myself, but still seems a long way from death to me and seem to be doing something right in enterprise market.

There's a difference between trending towards death and dead. IBM has been trending towards death for decades now and it's nowhere near dead. MongoDB is certainly on the road to death, IMO. As has Oracle DBMS since the 90s. Most companies tend to make more money as their product's growth stalls out (extracting more money from existing customers). The fact that Mongo had to create shitty-license underpins huge revenue…

What surveys are you referring to? Got any sources?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#308

Post by jimmy2020 »

hintymad wrote: post #219
jimmy2020 wrote: post #151

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 wish this long process that's exhausting in Amazon applies when it comes to cloning open source projects to get more profits.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#309

Post by busterarm »

redwood wrote: post #306
busterarm wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between trending towards death and dead. IBM has been trending towards death for decades now and it's nowhere near dead. MongoDB is certainly on the road to death, IMO. As has Oracle DBMS since the 90s. Most companies tend to make more money as their product's growth stalls out (extracting more money from existing customers). The fact that Mongo had to create shitty-license underpins huge revenue…

What surveys are you referring to? Got any sources?

the yearly Stack Overflow survey, for one.

Find me a bunch of developers and infrastructure people who are EXCITED about running MongoDB. I guarantee you're going to find a 7-10+ year old infrastructure if you do.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#310

Post by nzadrozny »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #302
manigandham wrote: post #236

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.

Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?

They would have to triple-quintuple-backflip-down on "open." So, maybe? It depends on how much value is being created besides the code, in squishier parts of the business like service, support, pricing models, marketing, and so on.

But it's moot, since Apache Lucene is part of the Apache Software Foundation and has much stronger promises about its licensing and governance. Which is not a small reason why Lucene is the de facto standard for search technology.

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