Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#251

Post by TheDong »

worldsayshi wrote: post #118
MisterPea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.

My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the ga…

> Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.

If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead.

The AGPL would ensure users of elasticsearch, whether hosted by elastic or AWS, have access to the source code of the software they're using.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#252

Post by parasubvert »

majormajor wrote: post #189
parasubvert wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, sustaining a for profit business wasn’t a guaranteed right. It’s called competition, and plenty of companies fail. If you can’t sustain a business around open sources, then don’t be open source. Elastic chose to close their source but are now lying about it to make it look better than it is. AWS is releasing an “actually OSS” fork - totally inline and allowed under permissive OSS - and is somehow unet…

Having "open source" vs "source available" or whatever you want to call the new license isn't a guaranteed right either, so if there's no problem with the one then what's the problem with the other? Would you prefer more software to be released openly or less? Cause if you're making moves like Amazon did with their ES service, you're pushing the world towards "less." I'm not too concerned with this, but it's strange…

I would prefer that companies stop abusing their communities by leveraging them and then discarding them when they have enough power to do so.

OSS was never about source availability - that’s just a form of cheap escrow and has fairly limited value. Open source is about user freedom to do whatever they want with the software - guaranteed freedoms.

This isn’t about “purity”, it’s about using a label on the tin that says “FREEDOM INSIDE” and then peeling the label off and telling a subset of users to pay up or give away any software code you’ve ever used to touch my software. We used to call that a “bait and switch” to be polite , though really it’s more like a shakedown.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#253

Post by zbobet2012 »

I'm not sure I understand Amazon's game theory on this one. Anything they contribute to their Apache License branch can be used by Elastic, but not vice versa.

This means Elastic can continue to differentiate from Amazon without worry. Amazon however can keep the code they've not contributed back internally, but they could always do that.

Perhaps this is simply an image move they don't plan to actually enhance or maintain the fork?

Also Elastic moving from Apache to (essentially) GPL is not making it closed source. Just as Amazon was within their rights to maintain an internal fork, so is Elastic to move to a GPL model. Demonizing either over business decisions is dumb.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#255

Post by bigiain »

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…

On the other hand, a lot of people (myself included) have no intention of ever being in Amazon's large scale hosting business, and actively avoid building my software on GPL/AGPL where there are more permissive (but still "standard" like Apache/MIT) license choices available.

(I _do_ totally understand the principle of strongly viral licenses, I think the GPL is an amazing thing. The chardonnay socialist in me wishes the whole world would use it. Pragmatically, at work I feel obliged to point out the responsibilities of using GPLed dependancies. From a profit-focussed business decision, it's often better avoided. I agree what Amazon does with Mongo/Redis/Elastic et al. qualifies as "leeching", maybe I'm only fooling myself that my work's projects are somehow better...)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#256

Post by __blockcipher__ »

geofft wrote: post #68
izolate wrote: post #49

We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but par for the course for Bezos's company.

The fundamental "open source sustainability" problem is capitalism, or at least our incarnation of it, and everyone dances around it. You can't license your way out of this problem. You can't services-company your way out of this problem. The fundamental issue is that it is good for the world for skilled developers to spend all day writing software and giving it away, but they can make much more money writing softwar…

> but they can make much more money writing software and not giving it away

Hey guess what. It's possible to take an Apache 2.0 codebase, let's say Lucene, and then build more Apache 2.0 code on top of it, give it away entirely for free, and still build a $15B business. And you think capitalism has failed here?

Absolute nonsense.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#257

Post by senko »

asim wrote: post #65

Amazon are the masters of theivery. The hypocrisy is not going unnoticed. Amazon contributed nothing of value to open source, then they basically stole the hard work of others and again contributed nothing back and now they're going so far as to preach about open source. Please. The sad part is, users won't care and customers won't care because at the end of the day ease of use wins. Elastic are taking drastic measur…

> Open source is no longer just about the freedom of choice but now a marketing and commercial strategy for big tech.

It always was, that's how Elastic got to IPO.

> Just keep that in mind if you ever want to build something of value in the open.

Or just keep in mind that "it's open source, but it's MY open source" isn't a valid business plan.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#258

Post by retzkek »

m00dy wrote: post #5

If you are Elastic, how could you compete against AWS even if it is your own software ?

Elastic.co has a lot of proprietary add-ons in their cloud and subscription tiers, for example machine learning, application tracing, endpoint security, threat detection, in addition to enhancements to the core software, like fine-grained access control. This is where much of their development and marketing effort goes, and is what differentiates them from others offering ES-as-a-service.

Unfortunately for them a lot of users don't need any of that, and are just fine with the formerly-OSS core.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#259

Post by seniorThrowaway »

wyaeld wrote: post #182
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Exactly this. Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model. The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they'…

ES had a business model. It was open-core, but with critical features like Security and Access-Control hidden behind their paid support. The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working. Enough blame for the current situation on all side…

Thank you for pointing this out. I used to run elasticsearch on a project and these pay walled features were a large source of frustration to the point that eventually I recommended moving it to the AWS service because we were already paying amazon anyway and in a large organization it is a huge pain to contract another vendor.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#260

Post by ABeeSea »

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…

AWS launched RDS with MySQL 4 months before the first version of ElasticSearch. Yea in that case it was Oracle, but I think it was clear what the direction was. And it was definitely clear in 2014 with Aurora and Redshift. They could have changed their license in 2015, but they didn’t. Why?
Post reply on HN