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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#221

Post by bad_user »

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…

If you use the Elastic license, legally speaking, you're in hot waters. The biggest problem with software licenses for freemium is that you have no contract with the company, money doesn't change hands, and the license itself can be open to interpretation. What's a competitor anyway? This sounds like that JSON license saying you shouldn't use the software for evil.

The Open Source licenses have been vetted and are time tested. That's one big reason for why Open Source is valuable. When you adopt an OSS project, you know exactly what you're getting, and the legal departments of corporations are prepared for it. Some are banning copyleft licenses, of course, for good reasons, but the knowledge is there.

Personally, I wouldn't touch the Elastic license.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#222

Post by ok_dad »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #208
ok_dad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit more complicated than that because Elastic during all of this had some of the plugins in Amazon's OpenDistro (now OpenSearch) project recycling proprietary code from Elastic's commercial, source available codebase under OpenDistro's permissive Apache-2.0 license. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...

Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did.

I get it, Amazon is bad, I agree they are too, but not because they’re malicious, Amazon is bad because they’re too large to compete on level ground with anyone other than Google or Microsoft in the cloud.

My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps.

At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They don’t even go around acting all superior like those “open source” corps do about it.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#224

Post by sickmate »

cortesoft wrote: post #218
ok_dad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one ever accused Amazon of breaking the law. The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that. Now, there can be a lot of o…

>The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing

Amazon first offered Elasticsearch as a managed service in 2015. Elastic began offering managed services in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Managed_services

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#225

Post by PeterZaitsev »

Looks like Elastic is bowing to OpenSearch threat. This is great news to have more Open Source choices, yet I think for those who care about Open Source the trust have been broken and there is little assurance there will not be a license change one again, serving needs of the moment

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#228

Post by tsimionescu »

ratorx wrote: post #149
lolinder wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product Specifically, this is the text [0]: > 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 There are a few companies who try to make it sound like i…

> not great for the re-seller If the AGPL is exactly as you say, I don’t see why this would be a problem for a re-seller. For a pure re-seller I don’t think the value add is provided by modifying the software. E.g. take the example that Amazon hosts the service and integrates with their internal services etc for logging, storage, load balancing etc. If they only have to distribute the modified source, then their inte…

The two parts you quote apply just as much to the GPL as to the AGPL. And virtually every company today uses GPL software in some fashion.

Also, AWS did offer at least one AGPL service, managed MongoDB. They still offer it, Mongo just changed their license precisely because the AGPL didn't protect them from Amazon in the way they were hoping.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#229

Post by qaq »

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 being clear to eng. and how lawyers evaluate risk are pretty orthogonal.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#230

Post by nullify88 »

Since Elasticsearch changed their license, Loki has also appeared as a competitor and the Grafana machine have released a suite of tools that cover the observability categories. It may also be that the license change encouraged users to look for alternatives and there are more now than just being graylog and Elasticsearch.

Clickhouse has proven to also be a very capable database for logs and there are stacks that use it for log storage.

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