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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#231

Post by petejohnson »

dragonwriter wrote: post #103
mminer237 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.

With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source users to pay you is “doing it wrong”. Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

Elastic has indeed found a profitable business model: they have their own cloud (cloud.elastic.co). But for it to be profitable they need to cover the costs of both developing the Elastic stack, and running a SaaS. AWS only has to cover the cost of running a SaaS (since they are getting the stack for free) which gives them a HUGE cost-wise advantage.

To counter this advantage Elastic is asking them to partner with them like other cloud providers do (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba etc) but AWS has refused to do that.

Isn't it then fair for Elastic to restrict AWS from using their software?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#232

Post by sgift »

syshum wrote: post #179
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so…

This is where the Free Software, ideology, and the "open Source" ideology really show its difference I view SSPL as a Copy Left style License for the SaaS age. They picked the wrong license in the first place with Apache, they should have used GPL, AGPL, or some other copy left anyway I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off…

> I generally oppose Apache, MIT and other non-copy left license exactly because it allows Amazon and other large companies is leech off the work for their own commercial offers while giving nothing back

Like Elastic "leached" of Lucene? Elastics whole business model depends on Lucene being under the Apache license. If Lucene followed your suggestion (funny enough, Lucene used LGPL very early in its history) Elastic wouldn't exist at all.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#233

Post by Kalium »

dragonwriter wrote: post #141
mirthflat83 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understandable, because a lot of people open source their code under a permissive license because it’s a cool thing to do, not because they understand what truly open sourcing their code means.

I don’t think VC-backed startups do that. They open source code because open source materially benefits adoption and mindshare, which grows the potential market for services, and that’s how they end up with big valuations selling premium services on top of their open source core. Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables other people to sell premium services on top of the open source core, and sometime…

This is a pretty important point. That AWS can make something a big business does not mean a small startup could have done the same without AWS.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#234

Post by munk-a »

rileymat2 wrote: post #212
jeswin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original te…

I generally agree, but isn’t the ability to do unforeseen things one of the powers and major wins of being a user of open source ecosystem? I don’t disagree about, what I would say charitable, instead of decent thing to do is.

The issue is, I think, that acting in such a manner is supposed to cost you in community good will. The potential for bad PR can force you to act in a more ethical manner, but there's a big separation between the people with the checkbooks and the folks who are aware of the issues here. The courts are there for extraordinary circumstances but it's generally better for all parties to settle a dispute without litigation and AWS could just shovel some money in the direction of elastisearch.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#235

Post by __blockcipher__ »

Roybot wrote: post #142
caymanjim wrote: post #63

AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source. Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money…

Contributor efforts are remaining open source. The change in license goes into effect in the 7.11 release. Code contributed under Apache stays that way. Typically open source projects have only a handful of core developers - with a large majority being pass-by contributors interested in fixing their problems/use case. Characterizing it to sound like all these developers are being slighted is strange. Not being able t…

> Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic.

Simply put, this is a naive and entitled attitude. And here's my proof of that: Elastic is a success story. They gave away software for free and turned it into a $15B business. And yet there's still people like you being apologists for their outright lies and intentionally misleading statements. I find it so incredibly absurd.

Elastic is tricking you into thinking that they are not an absurdly successful business. That's not true.

Oh, and one last time: This license change doesn't even protect their business, so it's totally pointless. It's just a business blunder. The SSPL will not make a difference to Amazon because they're not going to use the SSPL version of the code. It's so simple.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#236

Post by jrochkind1 »

fastball wrote: post #203
floatingatoll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interpreting your point to be "If it's legal, it's automatically acceptable", I can offer you clarity on why some people are coming down on AWS here: They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.

I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge. It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose . This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it". Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!…

Indeed. And it's not like an accident, I'd say it's totally part of the original intention of these open source licenses that anyone in the world has an equal right to profit off the software, nobody monopolizes that. That was part of the intent of open source licenses such as apache, consciously designed.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#238

Post by ctvo »

jeswin wrote: post #191
weego wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original te…

> The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original team.

Who are the members of the original team? Are we not going to give a cut to all the other contributors to the project throughout the years? How much should each contributor get? Are we measuring by lines of code touched?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#239

Post by sparc24 »

jeswin wrote: post #191
weego wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original te…

> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors.

First release of elastic was Feb 2010. AWS launched in March, 2006. The folks at 10gen used the AGPL for MongoDB since Feb, 2009. Yeah nobody could've seen this coming.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#240

Post by ignoramous »

Ominous. AWS is going to pay premium to acquire services of those core Elasticsearch developers, aren't they?

The blog post also signals an intention to make sure there's parity in terms of API surface with mainline Elasticsearch.

Also, AWS' decision to create a committee is something Elastic.co could have done... Alas, this is where we are. Would be interesting to see which of these forks take off. The developer community is likely to rally behind F/OSS. I can also see a lot of IaaS/PaaS upstarts like RailwayApp [0] prefer OpenDistro.

I'm half-expecting AWS to announce a managed Solr service and prompt an exodus to it with lower pricing and free data migration.

[0] https://railway.app/changelog/2021-01-15

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