Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 144 posts

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#101

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

cutemonster wrote: post #94
YPPH wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of…

> This was an entirely foreseeable consequence I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out. Especially not " entirely foreseeable." There's a cognitive bias called "hindsight biasy", namely "the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias I agree with you abo…

> I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out.

The GPL exists because of the problem of other people taking your code and hiding it in their products, placing you at a disadvantage.

The AGPL exists to extend that protection regarding SAAS.

According to Wikipedia, the AGPL is from 2007, and Elasticsearch started 4 years later.

I disagree that you need hindsight not to be surprised by how Elasticsearch was used by e.g. Amazon.

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#102

Post by dijit »

tempest_ wrote: post #25
whalesalad wrote: post #11

PostgreSQL should be everyone’s first choice for a data store. It can do so much, including serving as your full text search system.

Elastic's main selling point is not so much the full text search. The search is what it does but most of it's value is centered in the management/scaling/monitoring of full text search over many machines. I love Postgres but it's "clustering" story is definitely not as user friendly.

for logs (where you can shard on a modulo of timestamp) you might have luck with CitusDB (PostgreSQL sharding)

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#103

Post by ayush--s »

whalesalad wrote: post #11

PostgreSQL should be everyone’s first choice for a data store. It can do so much, including serving as your full text search system.

Even though we are currently replacing ES (hosted on elastic.co) with Postgres for ~100M docs + low QPS usecase, it's no real competition to Elasticsearch. There are better™ alternatives for niches (like Algolia), but nothing just works like elasticsearch at scales when not everything can fit in a single machine.

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#104

Post by necovek »

cutemonster wrote: post #94
YPPH wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of…

> This was an entirely foreseeable consequence I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out. Especially not " entirely foreseeable." There's a cognitive bias called "hindsight biasy", namely "the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias I agree with you abo…

You are right: none of it was foreseeable, but rather, an expected outcome.

In case of success, which Elastic has certainly achieved with ElasticSearch, it is fully expected that other companies will jump in on the bandwagon and try to profit off of it too! And as a company, you hope for success, or rather, that to play out, but just that you'd be the go-to for earning the most off the product you created. While not foreseeable, it is not unexpected that you might not be the one to profit most from your product, and you should plan to profit enough! Where it gets complicated is that nobody expects to earn orders of magnitude less from a product they created than others relying on it.

What they did not foresee was that one of those companies would be The Cloud Provider, thus minimizing their value proposition since Amazon can throw significant resources at it, possibly even greater than Elastic themselves. One could argue that Amazon abused their monopolistic position in cloud providing to offer a bundled ElasticSearch experience that Elastic could never compete with. Even if they developed an alternative in-house product, it looks exactly the same as Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day.

Even today, if you are willing to develop an open source or free software product, if you get successful enough, you are likely to be an exploitation target of a megacorp. Companies always have an option to relicense in-house written code, and any code submitted by signatories of an appropriate contributor license agreement (CLA).

Basically, I agree it wasn't nice of Amazon, and that it wasn't foreseeable, but it ultimately wasn't unexpected either. To me, this is monopolistic behaviour that should be treated as such.

This also raises another interesting question: if AGPL is an appropriate solution, why did Elastic not relicense under it today? (I am sure they answered this very question when they published their original license, so it's mostly rethorical)

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#105

Post by necovek »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #101
cutemonster wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was an entirely foreseeable consequence I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out. Especially not " entirely foreseeable." There's a cognitive bias called "hindsight biasy", namely "the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias I agree with you abo…

> I disagree. I think it was hard to know that many years ago (10+?) how things would turn out. The GPL exists because of the problem of other people taking your code and hiding it in their products, placing you at a disadvantage. The AGPL exists to extend that protection regarding SAAS. According to Wikipedia, the AGPL is from 2007, and Elasticsearch started 4 years later. I disagree that you need hindsight not to b…

GPL exists because nobody can (should?) stop users from modifying software they use (at the very least, on the machine level) and such modifying should neither be illegal nor hard (thus source code).

The "sharing" bit is on top, and only comes out if you distribute your changes too. AGPL fixes the flaw where "users" don't really get a copy of the software they are using distributed to them in full (eg. only part of it with JS in the browser, but backend stuff is hidden).

So the focus point of GPL is use of the software (thus users), not writing of it (developers). Developers embrace it because they are simultaneously users of the software written by others, and they are best positioned to make the most out of those liberties ("standing on the shoulders of giants").

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#106

Post by reacharavindh »

Barrin92 wrote: post #39
YPPH wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of…

>If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license They or anyone else are also free to relicense their project, there's nothing wrong with it at all and anything under the old license is still what it was before. It seems kinda strange to demand that someone operate under some license in perpetuity, there is no such rule. Licensing questions don't stop after the incepti…

That is not quite fair is it?

Publicise your work as open source and make hay with the work of open source contributors who thought they were contributing to a truly free and open source project only to find out a couple of years later that their contributions are now locked into a project that locked itself up with a changed license... (I know that their contributions may stay with the license it originally was, but if the total product changes license, who is going to continue an unmaintained fork? )

IMO, it is fair criticism when someone starts off with a liberal license and then changes it when it is time to monetise, or someone else figures out how to monetise it better than the creators. Either be okay with it or not, you can't have it both ways.

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#107

Post by tomytosian »

ayush--s wrote: post #103
whalesalad wrote: post #11

PostgreSQL should be everyone’s first choice for a data store. It can do so much, including serving as your full text search system.

Even though we are currently replacing ES (hosted on elastic.co) with Postgres for ~100M docs + low QPS usecase, it's no real competition to Elasticsearch. There are better™ alternatives for niches (like Algolia), but nothing just works like elasticsearch at scales when not everything can fit in a single machine.

why everyone comparing algolia to ES. algolia is an inmemory search engine for docs and webpages

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#108

Post by chippiewill »

nullify88 wrote: post #99
reilly3000 wrote: post #69

I’m not going to say that Elastic has no real competition, but as a whole package it stands alone. It’s speed and versatility definitely differentiate it from other similar systems. The fact that it can be a log aggregator, search engine, personalization system, seim, analytics tool, and forecasting tool make it a lot more useful than typical full-text search systems, often which can’t process aggregations or run in…

A lot of people like myself just want to view logs and dont care for features like SIEM. This is where the OSS and OpenDistro versions shine. I have revisited Loki after all this new though, but I think its still missing full text search.

> but I think its still missing full text search.

That's very much by design, by not having indexing of the logging content it's much much leaner and efficient. It's aimed at a completely different use case where you already know the set of log streams you want to monitor.

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#109

Post by bigiain »

YPPH wrote: post #15
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easy to judge another’s actions from afar when it’s their meal and roof they’re working for. It’s okay for Amazon (a trillion dollar company) to make money off of their work but not themselves? Imho, the problem isn’t “well it’s not open source anymore then.” The problem is people who give more weight to a religion/philosophy than sustainability. Who cares if it’s open source if the people developing it can’t s…

If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of…

On the plus side, the python repo is Apache2.0 licences, so fork away...

Re: Official Elasticsearch Python library no longer works with open-source forks

#110

Post by mschuster91 »

YPPH wrote: post #15
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easy to judge another’s actions from afar when it’s their meal and roof they’re working for. It’s okay for Amazon (a trillion dollar company) to make money off of their work but not themselves? Imho, the problem isn’t “well it’s not open source anymore then.” The problem is people who give more weight to a religion/philosophy than sustainability. Who cares if it’s open source if the people developing it can’t s…

If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of…

> No one at FreeBSD is jumping up and down about it. Maybe because there's more to a software project than maximising profit.

That is because xBSD have more than enough people to develop on it - hobbyists and companies alike.

For smaller software with less of an established ecosystem, the supply of people willing to work on it for free is... not exactly much.

Post reply on HN