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Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

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Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#81
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…

Can see the number of commits drastically drop off where OpenSearch forked Elasticsearch:

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/graphs/contributors

https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/graphs/cont...

Over an order of magnitude more development on Elasticsearch than OpenSearch since that fork

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see several cases where open sourcing your core product will be very helpful to your company at one phase and harmful in another. Whether that’s a big problem in the system is a topic that people will differ on.

I get it, you see this as complaining about how things shifted when this is a tradeoff they embraced from the start. But there are situations where it's not that things changed, with companies that would love to be open source but it would hurt them at all phases. If you have to be super proprietary to make any money off software, that's bad for everyone. When a piece of code is responsible for enormous amounts of mo…

Does the presence of AGPL address most (almost all?) of your concern? It seems like that would offer individual users freedom to use and modify the source while precluding Amazon from monetizing it effectively.

Those same properties of AGPL mean it’s generally viewed as not as effective at attracting a community of early users, but in a case where the alternative is proprietary-only and the company “wants” to be open-source, AGPL seems a better option for them.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we've seen that the corps with the lawyering and engineering know-how will definitely touch AGPLv3

Name one. Google won’t: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl... Unless things have changed recently I know Amazon won’t, and I’m fairly sure Facebook still won’t. For most corporations it’s simply not worth the risk

Maybe I got the timelines wrong - isn't that what was originally happening with Mongo and AWS - AWS was hosting Mongo when it was still under AGPL?

Also the Google policy seems to stem from:

1. It's never really been defined very well what "interaction over a network" means for AGPL and how truly viral it really is - although I'm sure ever there were ever landmark cases in the US establishing it, things would magically end up in Google's favor

2. Google purposely spreading FUD around more restrictive OSS licenses to discourage their existence

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#84
post #75

Hopefully this will let each of them compete on their own merits. I’ve been tossing up moving our workloads to Elastic Cloud anyway, because AWS ES Service is a source of constant headaches for us. Feels like at least once a week a server ends up in a state where we can’t fix it, and AWS engineers have to manually fix their internal state. Their standard response is “add more nodes”; well, we did that, and it is cost…

We had similarly terrible experiences with AWS ES, so we moved to self-hosted Elastic. It's better but still pricey and requires more manhours dedicated to tuning.

Their move away from open-source has been unfortunate. For that and some other reasons we've ended up more impressed with Logz.io and Splunk SaaS.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#85
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…

A side question: is there anything licensed AGPL that AWS uses? Either AWS releases the code or found a way around the license?

Yes, but AFAIK it isn’t modified.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#87
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is there a moral issue when the software creators specifically and explicitly granted that right?

Surely why they granted it and they intent they had should matter for morals. "Specifically and explicitly" is much more of a legal argument.

From a purely practical angle, how am I to ascertain why they chose Apache 2.0 as the license and how should I weigh that knowledge/guess against the crystal clear grant terms of “Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.”?

If I license any of my code under that license, I hope someone builds a billion dollar business on it. If someone else does the same, how should a licensor understand the difference and act accordingly?

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#88
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…

Disclaimer: ex-AWS as well, worked very closely with MemoryDB, but not paid to shill! You're entitled to your opinion but your line of reasoning for how MemoryDB for Redis came to exist or the reasoning about why it isn't in upstream Redis is not factual. MemoryDB's architecture uses Amazon's home grown log replication services as pointed out by Werner Vogel in his blog post about MemoryDB[0]. This architecture is fu…

Incompatible or not isn't the point. Not releasing is what it's about. And yes, they can. But that doesn't make it right.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#89

I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand A…

This is kind of unrelated but "Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)" is such a verbose product name. If you mark it as one of your favorite services in the AWS Console, it will take up a large chunk of the navigation bar (diminishing its purpose).

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#90
post #76
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…

So.. Redis had a choice of licenses: BSD (improvements do not need to be contrbuted back) or GPL (improvements do need to be contributed back). For whatever reason they chose BSD. And now Amazon made some improvements and is not contributing back. Not sure why anyone is surprised.

GPL wouldn't prevent Amazon from forking and then providing managed instances of the project without releasing the source code of the fork. AGPL would, though.

But yes, this is the reason I won't work for free on my own or others' BSD or MIT licensed projects.

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