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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

#141

Post by pabs3 »

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…

There is a talk by an OSS person (I forget the details), where they make the argument that AWS selling hosting for a particular piece of software increase the market for that software, which means that while AWS takes some share of the pie, the size of the pie is bigger so the original author's share goes down but the size of their slice goes up. So I'm not sure in every case AWS selling hosted software is actually a bad thing for the original authors.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#142

Post by bink »

taf2 wrote: post #131
everfrustrated wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm surprised they'd even let you run a cluster without dedicated master nodes. It's basic good practice and their docs emphasize this quite clearly.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#143

Post by owenmarshall »

gqewogpdqa wrote: post #139
skrtskrt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aurora PostgreSQL is based on Aurora, which amusingly traces its roots to MySQL, but that was a long time ago. You can decide how many planks Amazon must install on the ship of Theseus before you're willing to call something "a new database", but the fundamental point is that none of those planks came from MongoDB, thanks to AGPL3.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#144

Post by 8note »

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…

I want anyone to be able to pick up development of the software, not needing permission to do so. If elastic the business goes under, hosted solutions should still be available, with changes still be made on it

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#145

Post by pabs3 »

ignoramous wrote: post #9
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If anything AWS has increased its co-operation with F/OSS businesses of late and this clear shift in strategy was apparent in product / partnership announcements leading up to 2021 re:Invent. AWS, I believe, realise the F/OSS ecosystem mustn't be taken undue advantage of. I mean, AWS stands a good chance of getting caught in a vehement backlash (let alone sporadic bad PR) from the developer community, who ironically…

If the rumours here on HN are true they need to start working on giving back some of their internal patches too. I think they also need to start providing funding to FLOSS projects too, and doing something like Google Project Zero.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#147

Post by sokoloff »

skrtskrt wrote: post #99
Dylan16807 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the key benefits of FOSS is that if I don’t want to (or am not capable to) do something with the software, I can pay someone to do that part for me. Maybe that’s fix a bug, extend/modify the software, or maybe it’s operate and host it for me.

I’d like to choose AWS to do this hosting in a lot of cases, assuming they’re willing. Barring them from hosting it is impinging on my freedom as a user and therefore with respect to whether I think that software is Free and Open.

That’s the exact freedom that Elastic is trying to remove here, for their own (totally valid) business reasons (they don’t want to compete head-to-head with AWS hosting), but in so doing, they’re removing an essential freedom from users. This is not about defending billionaires; it’s about having choice in the use of the software purporting to be free and open.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#148

Post by stevefan1999 »

For anyone who wanted out of this fiasco, checkout MeiliSearch: https://docs.meilisearch.com/

It's written in asynchronous Rust with native application speed albeit using much lower memory usage than ElasticSearch, and comes with even more features than ES, so it's feature-rich, blazing fast and can still benefit on multithreaded CPUs. Downside is that it does not have distributed indexing mode yet, but it is scheduled on this year (presumably Q4 2022 I guess)

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#149

Post by Dylan16807 »

sokoloff wrote: post #147
skrtskrt wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the key benefits of FOSS is that if I don’t want to (or am not capable to) do something with the software, I can pay someone to do that part for me. Maybe that’s fix a bug, extend/modify the software, or maybe it’s operate and host it for me. I’d like to choose AWS to do this hosting in a lot of cases, assuming they’re willing. Barring them from hosting it is impinging on my freedom as a user and therefore wit…

I don't think they want to stop you from doing those things, and hiring out to do that, I think they want it to not be offered as a prepackaged product.

So it's a reduction in freedom, but it's not a reduction in user freedom.

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