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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

#131

Post by taf2 »

everfrustrated wrote: post #106
thekevjames wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ditto. Really want to support Elastic but have found their cloud offering just randomly breaks. Latest problem is we lost a node and the new node couldn't recover its shards from backups. Constant crashing until we upsized the instance to have more memory. Makes no sense and support wouldn't lift a finger to help.

Are you running dedicated master nodes? We switched from every node does everything few years ago and it’s been incredibly stable

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#132

Post by theamk »

skrtskrt wrote: post #113
dragonwriter wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 There's going to be less people trading on the idea of open source software while relying on the exclusivity of control of proprietary software—which in fact does not solve the problems which lead users to prefer open source software —to enable monetization, s…

I mean it seems to me like of these two situations: 1) there's a lot of software that's mostly-open-source-except-Amazon-isnt-allowed-to-run-a-hosted-version-of-it-without-paying-the-authors 2) all the software from 1) is completely proprietary a lot more people benefit from 1 than 2. But somehow it seems that OSS purists prefer #2? It seems like they would rather less Open-Source Software in the world, all to mainta…

Yes, because OSS software enjoys a massive popularity boost -- there are a lot of people who will always chose an open source product if one is available. So in the option (2) some software will turn proprietary, but I bet that overall number of OSS users will not change that much... it will be just re-distributed.

For example, if ElasticSearch would have been closed source? People would go to Solr. If Solr closes? Postgres and a lot of swearing.

You have to remember that while AWS ElasticSearch was a bad thing for Elastic Co, it was absolutely great for all sorts of much smaller companies who did not have enough resources to run their own clusters, as Elastic's offering is 2x price of AWS one [0].

[0] https://medium.com/gigasearch/which-elasticsearch-provider-i...

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#133

Post by madeofpalk »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #78
growse wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

You also never hear anyone complain about the thousands of hosting providers that build their business around the LAMP stack. I wonder if it is because Amazon is so big, or just the lack of competition.

It is definitely because Amazon/AWS is so big. That's the biggest part of the complaint.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#134

Post by ethbr0 »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #78
growse wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

You also never hear anyone complain about the thousands of hosting providers that build their business around the LAMP stack. I wonder if it is because Amazon is so big, or just the lack of competition.

I think it's a general sense of unease with the probability that future F/OSS looks like "{Project}, sponsored by Amazon" due to cloud market dynamics and size.

Coupling that with the fact that, in the past, F/OSS project control or domination by a single party hasn't turned out well.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#135

Post by nijave »

AWS has gobs of open source software. I think they open source everything that runs client side (all the agents and integrations for EC2 for instance).

It's pretty disingenuous to say they don't open source.

Based off experience with AWS and GCP, AWS has significantly more widely available. On the other hand, Google the company has contributed a lot to OSS (like cgroups in the Linux kernel)

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#137

Post by gqewogpdqa »

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…

AWS never hosted MongoDB, under AGPL or SSPL.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#138

Post by pabs3 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #26
Salgat wrote: 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…

How is the AWS situation different to the money made by companies using the Linux kernel or the Apache web server or PHP?

(Of course, for the Linux kernel, many companies don't comply with with the license either).

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#139

Post by gqewogpdqa »

skrtskrt wrote: post #107
owenmarshall wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting - so a clean room implementation is somehow more attractive than complying with the AGPL. 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…

Amazon didn't implement an entirely new database. As you can see on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_DocumentDB, they just built an (admittedly clever) PostgreSQL plugin on top of Aurora PostgreSQL.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#140

Post by pabs3 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #126
dragonwriter wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a lot of software that's mostly-open-source-except-Amazon-isnt-allowed-to-run-a-hosted-version-of-it-without-paying-the-authors That's...not mostly open source. Being able to pay whomever to run a hosted version for you and not have that be exclusive to the original creators isn't, especially in the age when hosted services are in high demand, a peripheral feature of open source. It's integral to the value…

I said nothing about having hosting "be exclusive to the original creators" If AWS/Google/Azure had to pay some fee to the original creators to provide a hosted version, they would definitely do it for a popular enough product. Everyone would still get all the benefits, except AWS/Google/Azure get a little less money (down from some hundreds of millions) and the creators get a little more than $0. I fail to see the n…

AWS would just write their own compatible implementation from scratch and still win against the original creators.
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