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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

#41

Post by jusonchan81 »

tapoxi wrote: post #14
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…

Did Elastic do the hard work, or Lucene?

There is a ton of work on top of Lucene. And Lucene is still OSS. So yes what Amazon is doing is stealing Elastic’s work.

I’m sure this will change how every other company is the OSS world will operate from now on. CockroachDB for example is already preventing a monopoly like Amazon from taking over.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#42

Post by true_religion »

zokier wrote: post #22
wmf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They changed the license after Amazon took all their revenue.

> We have experienced significant growth, with revenue increasing to $608.5 million in the year ended April 30, 2021 from $427.6 million in the year ended April 30, 2020 and $271.7 million in the year ended April 30, 2019, representing year-over-year growth of 42% for the year ended April 30, 2021 and 57% for the year ended April 30, 2020 https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_downloads/2021/Elas... Revenue for FY2…

The fact that they grew despite Amazon doesn't mean that AWS Elasticsearch wasn't a viable competitor. It just means that at the moment it was not an existential threat.

However, when competing with a literally A in FAANG, one must be very careful about writing them off.

To compare, I knew a company that 10 years ago made really great business intelligence integrations into Excel. They'd operated for 15+ years and were a major local employer. They thought Palantir was going to be their competitor, but then Microsoft came out with Power BI.

At first, revenue grew because Microsoft's marketing shined a great spotlight on the field (plus MS had only entered because the field was growing in the first place). Then as the situation matured, MS's capacity to offer integrations to the rest of the stack became a key sales point.

Like AWS, the point of investing in their stack isn't one particular product but the fact that all the billing, support, and integrations happen via one company.

You can even accept it if any particular product is deficient (e.g., some say that about Teams or Skype), but in the case of an open-source product like Elastic--the value of the software itself is 100% the same.

AWS was going to eventually kill Elastic. Not just because of all I wrote above, but also because Elastic's got a significant part of its revenue by selling Elastic as a distribution on top of AWS. Anyone would want to cut out the middleman and simply use AWS's version even if it lagged behind the current Elastic.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#43

Post by jusonchan81 »

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".

It’s one of those things. Until Amazon does this to you, you will love that company no matter how many people they will screw over.

Mind you this company basically is a monopoly in multiple domains. I’m afraid of the world where we align with the villain on something only because it’s convenient for us.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#44

Post by binarymax »

So many people in this discussion take sides. The only thing I see, is divergence. APIs will now evolve separately, and compatibility will break soon. I think this competition and diversification will be good for innovation in search. But it’s also going to be confusing for a while. If you use Elasticsearch in Amazon, you better decide very quickly whether you want to hitch your wagon to the OpenSearch future. Migrating is going to be a pain in a year or two.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#45

Post by Sebb767 »

echelon wrote: post #34
josephcsible wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon is working on a fully open version that you can fork, edit and host yourself. Elastic closed their product and is changing their client libraries to not support the open version. In fact, this whole thing started because Elastic got envious of Amazons revenue, which is not quite the open source spirit.

I mean, I get why Elastic is not happy. But in this case, neither intent is pure, but at least the result on the Amazon side is.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#46

Post by altdataseller »

binarymax wrote: post #44

So many people in this discussion take sides. The only thing I see, is divergence. APIs will now evolve separately, and compatibility will break soon. I think this competition and diversification will be good for innovation in search. But it’s also going to be confusing for a while. If you use Elasticsearch in Amazon, you better decide very quickly whether you want to hitch your wagon to the OpenSearch future. Migrat…

Why would most companies need to migrate if they're happy with the features in a past version? Why not stick with it (assuming there are no major security flaws?)

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#47

Post by unityByFreedom »

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".

They're literally keeping the source open. Call Amazon out for other stuff, not this. Enough with this good vs. evil attitude. People and companies are more complex than that and have varied interests. They do not fall neatly into one camp or the other.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#48

Post by Sebb767 »

binarymax wrote: post #44

So many people in this discussion take sides. The only thing I see, is divergence. APIs will now evolve separately, and compatibility will break soon. I think this competition and diversification will be good for innovation in search. But it’s also going to be confusing for a while. If you use Elasticsearch in Amazon, you better decide very quickly whether you want to hitch your wagon to the OpenSearch future. Migrat…

I think most people can see both sides of this conflict. But, as you yourself pointed out at the end of your comment, finding a side to pick quickly is important.

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#49

Post by [deleted] »

thayne wrote: post #32
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…

Amazon did contribute code back.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service

#50

Post by altdataseller »

bink wrote: post #38
akerl_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 packa…

>> 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.

What better licenses or monetization strategy would have allowed them to charge enterprises who use it for more commercial purposes, and allow the individuals/casual users to use it for free?

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