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Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

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31–40 of 188 posts

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#31
post #25
post #10

Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream. One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it. https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/ Enhanced version mea…

Sometimes fixing upstream is hard / not possible, when maintainers don't want to accept others' proposals/vision, or are cautious to change architecture with breaking changes.

So they don't release the result as OSS because upstream wouldn't have included it?

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp on every company built around open-source solutions.

How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something open source and accept the world's free contributions without acknowledging that.

Except AWS is not forking open source for their own use. They sell it and get a lot of profit from it.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#34
post #24
post #12

Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the insights. When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share some more up to date insights here. Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 contributors https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... while Elasticsearch had 181 https://oss.gitsens…

Elastic is already a mature product, with little to improve. Even 8.0 release is focused on speed and footprint. Many companies still use 2.x happily. License implications are not worth it.

Having interacted with Elasticsearch a lot, I assure you there is a lot for them yet to improve. Frankly, I think Elasticsearch followed the MongoDB model of "make it easy for developers to adopt and then make it good." MDB did that by making it easy to throw "schema-less" documents into their database and then later working on "advanced" things like avoiding data loss [0]. Elasticsearch did something similar in that you don't have to run a separate cluster coordination server like Zookeeper which Solr requires. It's also easy to get up and running with indexing unstructured data. Running it at scale with heavy workloads? There are still plenty of rough edges there. It's a good way to gain market share and both products have definitely improved, but I wouldn't want my day job to involve the operation of a large Elasticsearch cluster.

[0] https://pastebin.com/raw/FD3xe6Jt

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp on every company built around open-source solutions.

There is. AGPL + dual licensing.

How would dual licensing go down, ideally in these cases?

I figured if that worked, Elastic, Redis, MariaDB, Mongo, Timescale, and Cockroach Labs would have gone that route

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#36
post #23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be curious to see what happens as well. I ended up going with Opensearch since I use AWS. I figured I'm already locked in to that environment anyways, so why not

Somebody that does consulting work with Elasticsearch mentioned that they had some pretty innovative features in the pipeline and these are the things that can really pull people away from OpenSearch. It could also be that, people only really want basic search functionality so who knows right :-)

i think that for all the people which just want a logging system in their k8s, opensearch is pretty good.

lots of software ist stable and just works. everyone uses bash. let the elastic guys make their new software more shiny, good for them. i am now glad i can use a real opensource version at home and for small to midsized projects. if opensearch won't cut it? no problem, the customer can pay elastic :)

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL?

AGPL seems to guarantee mostly that you can obtain changes people are applying downstream in order to host your software, and apply them back up. It does not prevent someone from making billions off of doing nothing but hosting your software because they are better than you at hosting.

But, if the value-add is hosting more than the software itself, why would you prevent the 'value-adder' making the bulk of the money?

I'm like OP, trying to take a step back. What do we want here? As users? As developers? That no one does too much (or any) money hosting our software for other people willing to pay? Profit-sharing? On what basis?

Really, naively, apart from the use of the Elastic brand, that I might conceive could cause problems, who's hurting whom?

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL?

AGPL seems to guarantee mostly that you can obtain changes people are applying downstream in order to host your software, and apply them back up. It does not prevent someone from making billions off of doing nothing but hosting your software because they are better than you at hosting.

Nor should it, that's what OSS is about. Why should they not do what they want with your software? As long as it stays open it's OSS

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#39
post #33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something open source and accept the world's free contributions without acknowledging that.

Except AWS is not forking open source for their own use. They sell it and get a lot of profit from it.

> Except AWS is not forking open source for their own use. They sell it and get a lot of profit from it.

They sell a hosted service that uses the software. They're not selling the software.

Pretty difficult to see how a company building a SaaS business around some software is not "for their own use".

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#40
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something open source and accept the world's free contributions without acknowledging that.

Again, you’re leading with the definition-of-FOSS argument. Step back from FOSS for a second. I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting. Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? Both Mongo and…

> Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS?

The answer is simple - no. Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but".

I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good with the bad.

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