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Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

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Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#31

Post by truetraveller »

atarian wrote: post #26
josephcsible wrote: post #8

Remember that in this story, as strange as this is to say, Amazon is the good guy. Elastic changed their products from a FOSS license to a proprietary one, and Amazon did exactly what you're supposed to do in that case: fork and continue development of the last FOSS version.

>Amazon is the good guy This is exactly what Amazon wants you to think. That's why they're calling it "OpenSearch" and not "AmazonSearch".

And it's exactly correct. Amazon got burnt by Elastic. Doesn't matter if it's $100 billion company.

And mind you, Elastic is no tiny startup. It has 2000+ employees.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#32

Post by thayne »

echelon wrote: post #12
josephcsible wrote: post #8

Remember that in this story, as strange as this is to say, Amazon is the good guy. Elastic changed their products from a FOSS license to a proprietary one, and Amazon did exactly what you're supposed to do in that case: fork and continue development of the last FOSS version.

> Amazon is the good guy in this story That is so twisted. Elastic did all of the hard work. Amazon came in and took it. Open source is fair when there aren't giants plucking it out of the hands of workers and co-opting it into their massive platform options with god-tier leverage. You can't compete in that world. We need licenses even stronger than the AGPL to require that platforms running the code are open all the…

Amazon did contribute code back.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#33

Post by whateveracct »

josephcsible wrote: post #11
wmf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They changed the license after Amazon took all their revenue.

I don't fault Elastic for choosing to change their license. I fault them for their choice of the new one. They should have moved to the AGPL instead, like Grafana did under basically the exact same circumstances.

yep - not going AGPL is just greed

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#34

Post by echelon »

josephcsible wrote: post #30
echelon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source didn't go far enough in this case. It should have mandated the platform itself - from the billing pieces, to the hardware imaging, user management, and more - was all entirely open source.

Open source can't do that, literally. Any license that tries to impose "copyleft" on the whole platform like that will necessarily fail to meet the Open Source Definition.

You're arguing semantics, not intent.

Just call it something new if definitions matter so much. "Fair Play Source", "Fair and Open", etc.

Fuck open source the way Amazon likes it. Look at how the giants abuse it to crush smaller innovators. It's not rewarding the original authors. It's turning them into labor slaves whose collective work is captured and monetized, with little hope of fair competition or reward.

Might as well call it "open slavery" and imagine Amazon as some Jabba the Hut creature.

The work was intended to be open. They just didn't imagine the giant Jabba slug eating the whole pie and freezing them out. Unintended, yet fatal, consequences.

The DOJ should look very closely at this behavior. It's anticompetitive af and wholly against the spirit and intent of the original authors.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#37

Post by stupendousyappi »

Sebb767 wrote: post #6

As far as I'm aware, this is the first major "hostile" fork AWS has done. In fact, it's probably one of the largest ones overall. It will be really interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.

Google certainly didn't support Amazon forking Android into FireOS. I believe that was just about when Google began migrating tons of APIs from the Android OS to Google Play Services.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#38

Post by bink »

akerl_ wrote: post #20
echelon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is the good guy in this story That is so twisted. Elastic did all of the hard work. Amazon came in and took it. Open source is fair when there aren't giants plucking it out of the hands of workers and co-opting it into their massive platform options with god-tier leverage. You can't compete in that world. We need licenses even stronger than the AGPL to require that platforms running the code are open all the…

Elastic is welcome to license their code how they want. If they want to write a license that says “to use our code, everything down to the billing stack must be open source”, they’re welcome to. But when they license their code and then throw a tantrum when Amazon uses the code in line with the license, I’ve got no sympathy for them.

This is one of those rare situations where I can see both sides and I'm thankful I don't have to make the decisions Elastic.co did. Most open source companies don't have to worry too much about competitors grabbing their code and forking it because they have the expertise needed to improve and support it and there isn't much incentive for customers to leave them. But this is Amazon we're talking about. They can package up the code and charge next to nothing for it (not that they are doing that) and make their money on compute and bandwidth charges.

That said I wish Elastic had chosen a better license and I wish they wouldn't charge for basic security options like SAML, RBAC, and encryption.

edit: And IIRC this all started because Amazon added authentication and RBAC to open source ELK and tried to submit the changes back to Elastic, which rejected them.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#39

Post by Sebb767 »

josephcsible wrote: post #23
Sebb767 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they would have been closed source from the get-go, Amazon would have had a far harder time cloning their product or even creating a service based on it to begin with. So yes, this is a consequence of them starting out open source.

If they would have been closed source from the get-go, they'd have even fewer customers than they do today with Amazon "stealing" all of them.

Possibly, I didn't refute that (and I actually agree). However, the point that this fork would likely not have happened without them being open source is completely valid.
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