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Elasticsearch is open source, again

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#191

Post by lolinder »

grogenaut wrote: post #188
lolinder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find. Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.

AWS revenue. Internal AWS stats. Open search client pulls (not sure if the client is different now). Opensearch is mainly going to be used on AWS so that won't show up as much in GitHub stars.

None of those metrics measure the value of the brand, so none of those metrics are useful for the question that this thread is about: figuring out if AWS benefits from sticking with the OpenSearch brand.

If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#192

Post by fsndz »

Elastic trying to reclaim the lost ground in their original territory by re-embracing open source is a bold move. They might be hoping to attract developers and businesses back by offering more transparency and community involvement. Could this have anything to do with vector databases starting to eat into some of their market share, pushing Elastic to innovate and re-establish their relevance?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#194

Post by jkaplowitz »

vineyardmike wrote: post #72
jkaplowitz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. > you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted…

> The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing.

It isn’t, though, when comparing it to the ElasticSearch service offered by Elastic the company. Using the same codebase is very different than offering the same service. At minimum, pricing, billing, support, legalese, etc will all vary between the two. Downsides in Amazon’s service shouldn’t be misattributed to Elastic the company without Elastic’s permission, and trademark law quite rightly seems this more likely if Elastic trademarks are in the name of the product.

As for RDS’s PostgreSQL version, I presume the lawyers very carefully made sure it was called Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (as indeed it is) and not PostgreSQL for Amazon RDS or PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS Edition or PostgreSQL on Amazon Web Services. Wouldn’t any of these last three names quite reasonably make a lot of people blame the PostgreSQL project rather than Amazon for any failings? Doubly so if the PostgreSQL project offered their own managed service on AWS, as Elastic does.

And as for Amazon Linux, I can think of a bunch of ways they might be operating legally in this regard, but a key one is that they probably have explicit permission from the Linux Foundation or Linux Torvalds to do as they do; in any case, the Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds are both highly unlikely to sue Amazon for this usage regardless of the legalities, for purely pragmatic reasons that have nothing to do with whether a judge or jury would take the lawsuit seriously, and that don’t apply to companies like Elastic.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#195

Post by tyre »

remram wrote: post #170
andrewmutz wrote: post #113

For use by businesses, the AGPL is a nightmare from my perspective. What does it actually require on behalf of a company using AGPL components? If I write my own library and link statically I need to release that? What about if I link it dynamically? What if the library is running on a separate machine and is separated by the network? I'm sure there will be people commenting in this thread that they understand exactl…

The AGPL is actually pretty clear: > if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version > To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the m…

It’s not the network call, it’s what you do with it.

Let’s take redis, pretending it’s AGPL.

Adding a new command to the source code: definitely a modification.

Adding a new feature to the redis client: also a modification.

Creating a class (RedisPlusClient) that inherits from its client and adds a feature: Maybe a modification? Feels modification-adjacent.

Building a microservice that uses the redis client and exposes the exact Redis API? I don’t know! Maybe? Feels like a technicality that it is “using a network call” so it doesn’t count.

The thing is, I don’t want to think about any of this. I want to build things. We have seen overwhelming evidence that for-profit companies give back to open source, both through contributions and open sourcing their own code.

Are these licenses limiting the actual impact of the projects in exchange for ideological purity? There is consistent feedback from engineers that this is the case.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#197

Post by arp242 »

prepend wrote: post #143
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 think the logic goes something like: 1) Amazon is powerful, thus bad 2) we’re discussing Amazon 3) find something potentially bad 4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1 It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contri…

This is not the argument at all. Software (open source or otherwise) is not created for free; devs gotta eat, pay rent, etc. The business model of Elastic and similar is to offer a SaaS. They feel that Amazon offering a SaaS is directly competing with their business model, and because half the world runs on AWS it's not too different from Windows shipping IE back in the day killing Netscape. Elastic feels Amazon is eating their pie.

Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#199

Post by ninjin »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #131
sofixa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but the issue that you link is different. The "problem" there is that Debian (and many others) only distribute software that complies with the open source definition of freedom, which Crockford's license and the BSL runs afoul of as they both discriminate against uses. So, this is about what some are willing to distribute, not license compatibility.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#200

Post by remram »

tyre wrote: post #195
remram wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is actually pretty clear: > if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version > To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the m…

It’s not the network call, it’s what you do with it. Let’s take redis, pretending it’s AGPL. Adding a new command to the source code: definitely a modification. Adding a new feature to the redis client: also a modification. Creating a class (RedisPlusClient) that inherits from its client and adds a feature: Maybe a modification? Feels modification-adjacent. Building a microservice that uses the redis client and expos…

I don't disagree with those new examples, though you've moved the goalpost quite a bit.
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