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Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

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Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#161

Post by DougBTX »

brlewis wrote: post #44
sokoloff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me (not a lawyer) that “Amazon Elastic Search Service” would be OK in a way that “Amazon Elasticsearch Service” would not. (AWS had EC2 before Elastic’s trademark was registered.)

I'm not a lawyer either, but as I understand it, a trademark is violated if it's likely to confuse people into thinking the product/service is from the trademark holder when it actually isn't. If Amazon's CEO experienced such confusion himself, that does sound like a slam dunk to me. FTA: When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us…

It does seem tricky. On on hand, they want to stop AWS using "Elasticsearch" in a product name because it isn't in partnership with Elastic co., but on the other hand AWS's product really does contain Elasticsearch, which is why they are changing their license. If AWS had a product called "Elasticsearch Service" which didn't contain Elasticsearch, then it would be pretty clear cut as that would be very confusing, but a product called "Elasticsearch Service" that really does contain "Elasticsearch" seems pretty self-explanatory.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#162

Post by mcintyre1994 »

> We collaborate with cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud, and others. We have shown we can find a way to do it. We even work with other parts of Amazon. We are always open to doing that; it just needs to be OK.

I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into this but it sort of feels like they don't want/expect to keep offering the proper AWS integration that their elastic.co product has now. I know at work we have something hosted by them in AWS and I assume that's inside our VPC and we'd need that feature to keep using them.

If they do still think that feature is important then saying they "work with other parts of Amazon" feels like it's really under-selling that collaboration/integration with AWS.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#163

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

mjburgess wrote: post #120
luisfmh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what should we be using instead of elasticsearch for logs? To mitigate that licensing risk?

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Seagate+BarraCuda&ref=nb_sb_noss_... & grep ( with parallel ) ...if it matches your use case, you'll find it trivially outperforms elasticsearch.

Search speed is not the most important aspect at play here.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#164

Post by znpy »

longhairedhippy wrote: post #105

Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the last version with a friendly license and then transition to the Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a business standpoint it seems like a reasonab…

> Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork?

If they're dumb, yes.

As stated in their blog, changes apply pretty much only if you're either embed or redistribute elasticsearch/kibana. And these are two specific use-cases btw.

If you're already a customer, nothing changes.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#165

Post by viro »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #95

> Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us. I feel like I just said this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849 The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. ElasticSearch is trying t…

>The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified

No, Thats not true at all. Most open source companies survive off of support contracts. It's why companies choose rhel over centos.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#166

Post by stavros »

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service?

No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. They were hoping to make money off their product, which I don't think anyone can fault them for, but instead Amazon came in and took a bunch of that money while not giving anything back.

Now Elastic is not happy, and I wouldn't be either. As an end user, I'm grateful the circumstances exist that allow companies to make a living from OSS, and I want to encourage that. AWS is the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how blaming Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is anything other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is OSS at all, and we should want an environment where companies that produce OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for wanting to get paid for the work that they release freely into the world.

Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I think Amazon is.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#167

Post by edoceo »

ironmagma wrote: post #77
edoceo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Against the huge wallet of Amazon? Litigation isn't free. How much "justice" can Elastic afford?

On the other hand, as a result there are probably tens of millions to be made off a successful suit.

Works on Contingency? No. Money Down! - L. Hutz

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#168

Post by gpm »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #142
colechristensen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are valid differences in opinion in what “open source” means and an organization with an agenda shouldn’t try to own the terminology.

> I think there are valid differences in opinion in what “open source” means Disagree. It's a well standardised term of art: it means what the OSI define it to mean. It's pretty precise, and is not a meaningless marketing term like premium . Similarly free software (and especially Free Software ) means what the FSF defines it to mean. When people start using these terms to mean whatever they feel like it should mean,…

> Tellingly, such redefinitions are generally broader than the accepted OSI definition, so as to include whatever product someone is trying to push.

I disagree. In fact I'll present the counter example of "myself". I don't agree with the OSIs definition of open source, I think it run contrary to the plain meaning of the term, and is contrary to pre-OSI use of the term. I've argued that numerous times on this forum (and I'm going to avoid repeating these arguments in depth here, just google "gpm Open Source site:news.ycombinator.com"/"gpm Open Source site:lobste.rs" and you will be able to find the arguments).

I have never pushed a product claiming to be open source that does not meet the OSIs definition, nor do I anticipate I ever will, since that seems to be a great way to make discussions about the product devolve into arguments about licensing, which is terrible advertising.

The fact that these arguments usually only come up when there is a reason to argue, i.e. someone has used the term in a way outside of the OSIs definition, does not mean that people only think the right definition of the term is something else when it's for their own benefit.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#169

Post by mrsuprawsm »

I recently ran a project to compare AWS Elasticsearch and Elastic-hosted ES.

Surprisingly, we found that AWS did better for our use-case. Better IaC - easy to set up clusters with Terraform, and associated alerts. Better monitoring and easier setup. Better price/performance. AWS is obviously lower friction from a purchasing point too once you're already an AWS user.

This makes me curious if Elastic are shooting themselves in the foot a bit here.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#170

Post by pietrovismara »

yrgulation wrote: post #119

The cringe on this thread is appalling. Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, taking time away from their families and lives, only for companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make billions in prof…

The impression this thread gives me is that most commenters are shills hiding behind a concern for "open source values", which are not being touched in any sense.

Actually, moves like what elastic is doing are necessary to preserve the FOSS ecosystem.

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