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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#131

Post by hamilyon2 »

sofixa wrote: post #85
chadash wrote: post #69

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…

Same applies to BSL and similar. Not being able to compete with the project owners is much less restrictive, for me, than AGPL/GPL.

GPL is viral and somewhat compatible with AGPL.

BSL and GPL code are probably never mixing since they prohibit each other. This creates friction in GPL world and tends to produce incidents line this [1] out of thin air.

1. https://github.com/jshint/jshint/issues/1234

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#132

Post by Spivak »

phoronixrly wrote: post #112
Salgat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like they're trying to cover up a bad case of regret. At our company we've fully shifted to OpenSearch, so there's no going back to ElasticSearch even if we wanted (not that we would want to). Also there is a lot of engineering contribution from Amazon that's seemingly gone now from Elasticsearch, right?

Sounds like you've fully shifted to exploiting (without contributing anything) to OpenSearch. I think Elastic will be just fine without your company or Amazon.

How truly far we've fallen that people refer to using open source software— literally software given away for other people to use, exploitation.

Gonna go tell those freeloading kids who take my candy on Halloween that they're exploiting me unless they contribute to next year's candy bowl.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#133

Post by subomi »

ezekg wrote: post #37
foxyv wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story. I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.

Am I the only one not buying this reasoning? Seems like there's more than is being said, otherwise they would have said this by now. I'd reckon that ELv2 had friction that couldn't be easily overcome without OSS or at the very least DOSP [0]. I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so makes me curious. [0]: https://opensource.org/dosp

> I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so makes me curious.

Can you share more? What friction did you experience with ELv2?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#134

Post by lsh0 »

echelon wrote: post #46
everfrustrated wrote: post #16

Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch. I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of people had their data compromised due to that (due to people inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)

Yes, let's praise and reward the hyperscaler and not the small company that is 1% of the size of AWS. AWS got Elastic's goodies for free. They just came in and gobbled up all of that value for themselves like vultures. Meanwhile the people putting in the work effectively got robbed. Small companies should stop doing open source and switch to source available + MAU/ARR restriction clauses.

> the small company that is 1% of the size of AWS

What on earth? Elastic is a multi-billion dollar company. They are no indie startup, scrappy underdog nor are they victims here.

AWS took the high road during this fiasco despite Elastic's mudslinging and flailing about.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#135

Post by everfrustrated »

orra wrote: post #8
foxyv wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story. I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.

I don't understand why they didn't treat Amazon's previous offering as a trademark infringement.

Also worth noting that AWS was already selling products using Elastic in the name before Elastic/Elasticsearch (2010)

Eg AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (2006) AWS Elastic Block Storage (2008)

I suspect if Elastic tried to take them to court they would have got the trademark thrown out.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#136

Post by paulmd »

davidgerard wrote: post #126
wmf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you try to sell AGPL software the owner will probably shake you down.

Examples?

lowagie/itextpdf being an obvious/prominent one.

it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#137

Post by chadash »

SahAssar wrote: post #104
chadash wrote: post #69

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…

> The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch" "changes to the product" means changes to the service itself, and "publish all of your source code" means the specific service, not for everything you build. If you patch the ES service you make the patch public, but you don…

The words of the license are "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.".

I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not an issue (but only if using the most recent version of ES, since the license for the code that I fork today has no bearing on future code that ES hasn't written yet).

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#138

Post by jcoc611 »

reflexe wrote: post #124
shiomiru wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, at first, it read as satire - but that doesn't make sense, coming from the official blog. Being LLM-generated is a plausible explanation - considering the circumstances, saying "open source is in our DNA" is right inside the uncanny valley.

Not like us is pretty new (may 24), not sure any proper llm could have been trained on it. All big openai models know nothing about 2024.

Nothing a simple "Browse the Web" plugin/tool before replying can't fix ;)

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#139

Post by everfrustrated »

DominoTree wrote: post #19
unethical_ban wrote: post #10

Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat. Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences? I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having RBAC built into their Kibana portion.

I've found OpenSearch to be a bit flaky but I haven't worked with it very seriously compared to ElasticSearch (and before OpenSearch, the AWS-managed ElasticSearch absolutely hurt the ElasticSearch brand because of all of the issues Amazon created - it couldn't even rebalance shards, let alone add new nodes or switch to larger nodes without a blue-green deployment)

This would be the same period when Elastic didn't even have a cloud offering....

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#140

Post by dotancohen »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #32
vineyardmike wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?

> If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement? A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than copyrights are meant to prevent. The trademark law doctrine of nominative fair use allows you to descr…

I remember when CentOS' website described it as, more or less, a major American Linux distribution with the trademarked parts removed. Everyone knew it was RHEL but the official word was mum.
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