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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

#91

Post by skrtskrt »

touisteur wrote: post #37
skrtskrt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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?

Sure, but maybe there's a way for the original creators to get more than $0 (while still satisfying OSS people)?

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#92

Post by rmbyrro »

elesbao wrote: post #55
dhd415 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, there is a lot of room to improve. I managed a cluster that grew from 9 to 40 then to 60 EC2 Servers over 2 years, with all updates and support we could afford. It was a a nightmare to manage. The amount of cluster rebalancing, magic nodes that claim to be leader and then do not behave like it is amazing. I don't want ever to get back managing it again. Last thing I did (ES7 at the time) was to split the clus…

Curious, I never came across someone using ES as a replacement for Mongo.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#93

Post by zeckalpha »

sokoloff wrote: post #82
Dylan16807 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AGPL only requires modified software used over a network to be contributed back. If it isn’t modified, no need!

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#94

Post by heavyset_go »

deepsun wrote: post #25
uji wrote: 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.

Unless they actually tried to upstream it, this point doesn't really matter. From what I can see, they never actually tried or intended to upstream their changes, so this is irrelevant. They didn't even release the fork's source, let alone try to upstream it.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#95

Post by owenmarshall »

skrtskrt wrote: post #83
owenmarshall wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 magical…

> 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?

Absolutely not.

The AGPL terrified AWS so much that they did a clean room implementation and built an entirely new database that was wire compatible with MongoDB.

Hence, Mongo relicensed under a new license, the SSPL, that says if you implement an SSPL-covered API, the SSPL extends.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#96

Post by shawnz »

skrtskrt wrote: post #80
shawnz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free contributions to something which only you are allowed to monetize? And how can you satisfy users to the greatest extent while also preventing them from using the provider that is best able to meet their needs? EDIT: regarding your inline response, > Nowhere in OSS licenses does it include the expectations of free contributions The expectation is not encoded in the…

There are plenty of reasons for choosing an OSS license - people can easily audit the code, people can self host for their own purposes, etc. There is plenty of code that is only open-sourced after it has been fully created by a single organization/entity - no free contributions needed! If we're talking about expectations not encoded in the license it's very clear that developers would just like to be able to release…

I don't think those are really reasons for choosing an OSS license, they are reasons for choosing a source-available license (of which OSS licenses are just one kind).

> I'm not denying AWS is adding value, but it sure is odd that they're the only ones making a dime there.

I don't understand what's odd about it. If ES were never open source and was a proprietary product from the beginning, there would be nothing stopping Amazon from paying for it and providing it as a service under contract from Elastic, if they thought it added enough value to make that worthwhile. Then they would both be profiting in a monetary sense from the relationship. But it's not a proprietary product (or at least, it wasn't previously)

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#97

Post by alwaysanon »

shitlord wrote: post #89
WaxProlix wrote: post #2

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).

You have to imagine at some point they are going to drop the (successor to Elasticsearch) part of it and this is temporary...

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#98

Post by arecurrence »

rmccue wrote: 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…

I also had a serious problem with AWS Managed ES. In my case, some of the heap didn't free on every garbage collect which would eventually result in cluster failure. This was likely a JVM misconfiguration and was most easily observed by viewing a shrinking sawtooth pattern on the memory graphs. This resulted in a multi day marathon of sleeplessness keeping the cluster alive by continually rolling it every few hours (We initially assumed we had done something wrong and investigated ourselves first... eventually I shunted traffic to both my own cluster and the managed cluster... my cluster did free heap as expected and we successfully switched over without downtime but wow was it ever hairy during high traffic periods).

We saved a bunch of money and gained performance by using our own cluster. That cluster hasn't gone down since... years later.

It's very difficult to debug these problems when you don't have direct access to elastic search's configuration... what would normally take minutes to verify can take hours to isolate.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#99

Post by skrtskrt »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #57
Sebb767 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

The question was not "would it be FOSS". The question is whether you can have the benefits of FOSS, or as much of them as possible. Imagine just as an example, a license for personal software that is exactly the same as GPLv2 except billionaires can't use it. Functionally that has the same benefits as FOSS, even though it's not.

This is exactly the framing/idea I am going for.

Honestly it seems like the only downside there would be all the OSS purist/billionaire-defender HN commenters would have a field day, then you could move on.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#100

Post by thekevjames »

rmccue wrote: 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…

FWIW that experience is exactly the same as my team has... But we're on Elastico hosting. Constant black box breakages that can't be debugged, nodes getting restarted for opaque reasons... We've been considering switching to Amazon's hosting to avoid these.

Sounds like it might be a "grass is always greener" scenario. ...maybe I'll spend more time looking into self-hosting...

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