Elasticsearch is open source, again • Hacker News Board

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#151

Post by greatgib » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 11:35 PM UTC

Despite what they are claiming, they are clearly changing back the license because they felt the pain of not being Open Source anymore.

The proof that companies like that publicly under value the success that they owe to being Open Source.

   But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.

Also it makes me laugh so much the guy is trying to victimize himself pretending that they are unjustly targeted by FUD when it is not FUD but a real existing problem.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#152

Post by prepend » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 11:38 PM UTC

jeppester wrote: post #123

pjerem wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different than the thousands companies selling you PostgreSQL or Redis services ?

Development of postgres is funded by the companies using it, for instance Amazon. Elasticsearch and Redis are private companies that fund most of the development themselves. When Amazon sell Elasticsearch and Redis, they are in direct competition with its creators. Obviously such a situation isn't sustainable in the long run, and as such both Elasticsearch and Redis (and to my knowledge also mongodb) have changed the…

It’s the license type that matters, not how development is funded.

Postgres’ license is similar to BSD so even if Microsoft made and was the sole developer and sold it, anyone could distribute or sell it or whatever regardless of who contributes. Similar to Elastic’s old license and why Amazon was legal in what they did.

Amazon (and most all large companies these days) do a ton of OSS dev, but that doesn’t matter. The license of the various software counts.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#153

Post by haolez » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 11:42 PM UTC

Is it still open core? Which parts are only available on the enterprise version? Couldn't easily find in their website (after this announcement).

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#154

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 11:55 PM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #42

aabhay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are songs by Kendrick Lamar. I guess that these were used to try and add a youthful, lighthearted touch to the article? Didn't work on me though.

[Count me out] No reason to use Elasticsearch in 2024.

[deleted]

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#155

Post by dhd415 » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 11:58 PM UTC

everfrustrated wrote: post #135

orra wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a previous comment noted, Elastic _did_ take them to court over the trademark and it was _not_ thrown out: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-and-amazon-reach-agreeme...

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#156

Post by ok_dad » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

samspenc wrote: post #148

Spivak wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events: - ElasticSearch was open-source - Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service - ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license - Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch - (Few ye…

What, when Amazon forked an open source project, as was allowed by the license, and continued to support that open source license even when the original company abandoned theirs? I’m not an Amazon fan, but they did the same thing (forking) that many others do, and they did it perfectly legally according to the license.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#157

Post by therealdrag0 » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #38

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.

OpenSearch has terrible docs.

Can’t be worse than Solr heh.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#158

Post by Salgat » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 12:01 AM UTC

samspenc wrote: post #148

Spivak wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events: - ElasticSearch was open-source - Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service - ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license - Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch - (Few ye…

The true irony being that elasticsearch would be no where near what it is now if it wasn't opensource and receiving contributions in the first place. AWS had employees dedicated to contributing to Elasticsearch (same as Redis).

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#159

Post by hintymad » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 12:04 AM UTC

Could be a defensive move of Elasticsearch to win the mindshare of the community. OpenSearch has been gaining some momentum, albeit far from being comparable to Elasticsearch. See OSS Insight: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/elastic/elasticsearch?vs=opens....

I'm not sure Amazon is willing to go all in to win the war of search services, for that means they need to to handsomely reward the best coders that contribute the most to the OpenSearch project to produce insane amount of high-quality code for better and new features. See the great article Code Hard Or Go Home: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home. Nonetheless, there's a chance that Amazon may be determined to make OpenSearch catch up with ES, just like Apple has made Apple Maps comparable, even not better than, Google Maps. Therefore, open sourcing ES with AGPL is not a bad choice to retain the talent in the ES community.

And AGPL is kinda restrictive to many large customers too, as the customers do not want to risk being forced to open source their business-critical code. In fact, many companies simply ban the use of licensed software. Therefore, AGPL reflects quite the spirit of OSS while in the meantime will not undermine Elastic's business model.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#160

Post by nerdjon » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 12:04 AM UTC

Honestly at this point I just see little reason to invest in Elastic Search.

I have to wonder how much what is happening with terraform and tofu is related to this.

While I can understand why they went down this path, it burned a bridge and I just don’t know why I would even bother instead of using opensearch.