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I recently used Elastic Cloud, and as much as I hate the company, their product is actually really good. I’d always recommend Elastic.
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At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow looms large over BigCloud.
It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that matter) in with the likes of Microsoft.
Honesty sounds like AWS is giving up on providing hosted elastic search. I hated using it, it always was failing and I spent more time administering it than anything else. I recently used Elastic Cloud, and as much as I hate the company, their product is actually really good. I’d always recommend Elastic.
Yes, Elastic’s press release is carefully crafted to give that impression, but, AFAICT, all AWS is doing is using the name of the open fork (“OpenSearch” [0]) for their service, which is now labelled “Amazon OpenSearch Service” and subheaded “(successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)” [1], and not using the ElasticSearch name (except as a historical reference.)
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> 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.
And it is in the best interests of FOSS to make it clear, time and time again, that the answer is no, and to work to ensure the answer is no.
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
repo | commits | authors
------------+---------+---------
elastic | 2719 | 179
opensearch | 265 | 54
repo | commits | authors
------------+---------+---------
elastic | 1681 | 122
opensearch | 153 | 41
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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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…
So AGPL is open source, but in practice it seems like it's so much more restrictive than something like BSL that is not open source.
This just makes OSS vs not-OSS seem like even more of an theoretical line in the sand.
As for
> Hence, Mongo relicensed under a new license, the SSPL, that says if you implement an SSPL-covered API, the SSPL extends.
That definitely looks ugly on Mongo, implementing an API is such a fundamental part of software compatibility. Seems like the exact wrong way to go about it.
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Start out that way, and you'll find it harder to build a user base. So instead companies have done it as a bait and switch (planned or otherwise)
Would it be fair to do something where you start off with the BSL approach where older code automatically becomes fully open source (like GPL or Apache), with the exceptions that the first N versions or N years of work will start off fully open, then the BSL stuff will kick in later?
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It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing. IMO, they chased the benefits of being open source and then changed course when the costs to them exceeded the benefits (which is fine for code going forward), but trademark…
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.
The reason for everyone not selling the software in question to prefer F/OSS is exactly that it requires surrendering the kind of exclusive control that is also what allows you to build a company around the software as a product.
Yes, this means that F/OSS as such is unlikely to be the key product of a successful company. That's always the way it has been with F/OSS.
“But if I can’t center my business on F/OSS-as-product and I can't center my business on commercial software for the same use because F/OSS products, even if somewhat inferior themselves, develop more robust ecosystems, then how am I supposed to compete with free?” one might ask. And the answer is this: “Maybe you’re not: you are entitled to a business model.”
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If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software.
Well, it's just the free speech issue all over. Either you censor speech or you risk people saying things that you really don't like. This is exactly the same situation: Either you go FOSS, with all the benefits it entails, and risk getting forked by a major player or you go proprietary and risk not getting adopted at all by major players and open source enthusiasts. Don't get me wrong, I feel with the Elastic team a…
Not technically open-source, but much closer to open-source than what we would generally think of as "proprietary" software