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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#311

Post by judge2020 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #258
joking wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on the license, but if it was SSPL then Elastic wouldn't be able to run their hosted service without open-sourcing every bit of it, including all of the security, infrastructure monitoring, and authentication that is the backend of their business model. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26784552

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#312

Post by brutal_chaos_ »

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…

Did the BSDs do it wrong, too? Apple uses a lot of FreeBSD software that they turn around and sell for profit. How about PostgreSQL, didn't Amazon fork that as well? My point is, there's nothing wrong with forks nor companies forking if the license allows for it. It's up to the developers to choose an appropriate license to not be forked/ripped off, if they so desire.

I personally am against modern day corporate America, but I can't blame them for this. The software is given away free/libre/gratis to be forked by whomever.

Perhaps to combat this, one should choose a non "Open Source(TM)" license, but a source availbe license. E.g https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ (not my personal favorite, just an example).

Also, I definitely agree with/do the same:

> Personally I'm doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in. It's great to be able to deploy to any cloud, if you value either robustness or flexibility.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#313

Post by shawnz »

sdesol wrote: post #303
shawnz wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the modules replace modules which Elastic provides, but not in the free distribution. For example, alerting, SAML auth/SSO, field and document filtering by user/role, etc.

However note that the most substantial module, the authentication module, is actually a fork of another product called Search Guard.

The differentiating factor in my case is simply the price. I think Elastic's X-pack modules actually provide a more complete overall experience, it's just not worth the cost. The Open Distro modules provide me with a budget alternative.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#314

Post by lr4444lr »

jimmy2020 wrote: post #176
015a wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing which surprised me: Elastic has a market capitalization of ~$11B. I think that changes some of the more floaty ethical concerns. This is not a David vs Goliath situation. This is Goliath vs Super-Goliath. At this point, I'm much less interested in the drama of which mega-corp is screwing over the other. I'm more interested in: how does it affect me? When the titans are done trampling over the rest of us, wh…

This argument is part of Amazon's PR campaign to tell devs to not feel sorry for Elastic because it's now a big company and they make money in the market. So, if you built a successful OSS and start to make money then it's ethical to clone any OSS and pushes projects out of the market because now it is "Goliath vs Super-Goliath".

If Elastic's own SaaS isn't good enough to generate revenue that its keeps investors happy, and ii didn't survive, that'd be a shame. Making anti-OSS moves to salvage things though is a disgrace.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#315

Post by ocdtrekkie »

busterarm wrote: post #226
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a viral open source license, it literally requires open sourcing code, there's nothing proprietary about it except that we allow a council of elitist snots to decide what is and isn't Open Source(TM), and they have decided Google and Amazon support is more important than viable businesses which are building open source businesses.

The SSPL literally violates Freedom 0. > The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). And though we're talking about open source instead of free software, without Freedom 0, the software still might as well be proprietary. Edit: It also violates Rules 1, 5, 6 & 9 of the OSD. So no, let's not call it "open source"

This is incorrect, you are free to use the program if you wish, it just also, like the GPL, conveys requirements on open sourcing code you use with it. Open sourcing services without the necessary tools to run it isn't much good, so SSPL ensures the freedom to run your own better than GPL based licenses.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#316

Post by jrochkind1 »

nzadrozny wrote: post #310
jrochkind1 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Yeah. It just seems to say something if the license they are insisting is the "spirit of open source" that everyone downstream of them should be okay with... they are counting on not having to deal with upstream...

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#317

Post by sokoloff »

jimmy2020 wrote: post #305
sokoloff wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t see this as abuse, but rather an easily contemplated and straightforward use of the license.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#318

Post by nzadrozny »

bogomipz wrote: post #72
busterarm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longtime ElasticSearch cluster admin/developer and Elastic Cloud customer, I don't feel bad for Elastic in the slightest and I'm psyched about this fork. The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend if you end up wanting to use it for anything demanding in production.

This is really a shame to hear. There was once a an Elastic SaaS company from Norway called found.io that were pretty sharp and customer-centric. They were acquired be Elastic pretty early on[1]. I believe Elastic Cloud was built from this. I guess found.io's culture of delivering a good product didn't survive? https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elastics...

Perhaps telling that none of the Found team are still at Elastic, from what I can tell on LinkedIn. I pay attention to that kind of stuff because (full disclosure) I operate the _other_ small customer-focused managed Elasticsearch company (bonsai.io) that _didn't_ get acquired by Elastic back in 2015.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#319

Post by jimmy2020 »

sokoloff wrote: post #317
jimmy2020 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t see this as abuse, but rather an easily contemplated and straightforward use of the license.

What's straightforward about forking an open source project to get more money?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#320

Post by busterarm »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #315
busterarm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SSPL literally violates Freedom 0. > The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). And though we're talking about open source instead of free software, without Freedom 0, the software still might as well be proprietary. Edit: It also violates Rules 1, 5, 6 & 9 of the OSD. So no, let's not call it "open source"

This is incorrect, you are free to use the program if you wish, it just also, like the GPL, conveys requirements on open sourcing code you use with it. Open sourcing services without the necessary tools to run it isn't much good, so SSPL ensures the freedom to run your own better than GPL based licenses.

no. get it right. if you are not free to run the program without additional stipulations, especially stipulations that dictate how you license _your_ code, then you are not free to use the program as you wish.

Literally, "as you wish". Stipulations is "as we wish".

And you can read it from the OSI themselves: "The SSPL is Not an Open Source License" https://opensource.org/node/1099

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