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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

251–260 of 473 posts

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am biting here because I don't understand the train of thought. How would such a license suppress innovation? What evidence?

For all those new search projects named in my OC to be viable, ES had to stop being “open source”. Before that it was not worth trying because there was one single dominant player in the market giving search away for “free”. The same is happening with Redis after their license change.

I wouldn't really see it as an innovation blocker in that case just because someone is dominant. Or, if we really indulge in this wider sense, a lot of companies would block innovation too. Amazon as a whole for example, so I cannot really make the connection to the license.

You could of course argue that because air is free, it stops innovation in the air trade. But in the end that doesn't end in a sensible argument.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#252

Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat. Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences? I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having RBAC built into their Kibana portion.

I support both professionally. The last Apache licensed version of Elasticsearch was a very capable product and Opensearch inherits all of that. In the few years since the license change both products have evolved a little bit but the vast majority of those changes don't really matter to new users. Both products use the same core component, which is Apache Lucene; which powers all of the search features. If you are a new user, there is very little reason to prefer Elasticsearch over Opensearch. And this is confirmed by the fact that most of my new clients default to Opensearch.

The exception to this might be vector search, which is a relatively new feature that was implemented on both sides post fork. Lots of users want/need this. And both Elastic and Opensearch provide independent implementations with very similar feature sets. Both build on what Apache Lucene offers on this front. So there isn't a massive difference between the two. But I would give the advantage to Opensearch here since its implementation offers a bit more beyond just the Lucene support.

Kibana had a lot of closed source components before the fork already and Amazon fork of that is a bit more limited. But notably Amazon indeed re-implemented the security layer (before the fork actually), which on the Elastic side is a bit of a dumpster fire of complexity. In general I'm not impressed with the product from a usability point of view. Either on the Elastic or the Opensearch side. But the Elastic version is arguably a bit richer in features.

Some notable recent changes there include trying to introduce a new query language based on SQL and the whole fleet ecosystem (an agent based system) to get logging and other data into Elasticsearch. I don't think either is getting a lot of traction because of the licensing.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found OpenSearch to be a bit flaky but I haven't worked with it very seriously compared to ElasticSearch (and before OpenSearch, the AWS-managed ElasticSearch absolutely hurt the ElasticSearch brand because of all of the issues Amazon created - it couldn't even rebalance shards, let alone add new nodes or switch to larger nodes without a blue-green deployment)

This would be the same period when Elastic didn't even have a cloud offering....

Elastic bought found.no, which became Elastic Cloud in 2015. That was years before Amazon forked Opensearch. The AWS hosted Elasticsearch emerged around the same time.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#254
post #163

Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat. Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences? I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having RBAC built into their Kibana portion.

Pure hearsay, but apparently ElasticSearch is considerably faster than OpenSearch. Would be good to compare the sources again, but I don't see any links to source on elastic.co yet.

That would be strange as it's largely based on the same Lucene library.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#255

Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch. I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of people had their data compromised due to that (due to people inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)

That's hugely overblown. Maybe 20% of the companies I work with have switched.

It's the new users where the pain is. A lot of companies that were using Elasticsearch indeed haven't switched because doing so is a bit of work without a lot of advantages. But all my new clients are defaulting to Opensearch. It's not even close.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words of the license are "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.". I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not an issue…

They're probably mixing up the SSPL with Hashicorp's version of the BSL, which does talk about competition [0]. [0] https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

Yes, we don't have that competitive clause — it's Hashicorp [I work for Elastic]

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#257
Here’s the initial AWS response to the license change that they made in 2018, which I helped write. At the time we didn’t think a new license made sense, as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code, but the core of the issue was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at the time. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#258
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation. It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that. But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time. If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS…

Funny, you're doing exactly what you accused others of: defend Amazon with argument 1. Ah, argument 1 completely misses the point? Well, just defend Amazon with argument 2. Say no word about how you missed the point originally, because the only important thing is to defend Amazon.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words of the license are "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.". I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not an issue…

They're probably mixing up the SSPL with Hashicorp's version of the BSL, which does talk about competition [0]. [0] https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

Ah, yeah, that sounds right. I was under the assumption that they had similar restrictions.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#260
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic wouldn't be able to integrate Amazon's patches back into their codebase without losing the ability to change the license in the future. (I anal, even if I were a lawyer, I am definitely not YOUR lawyer, yada yada) If I were Elastic, I would require Amazon dot com or anyone else who wants to contribute code to Elastic to sign a CLA. Depending on how the CLA is structured, this could allow Elastic to continue…

In this scenario, Amazon doesn't want to contribute to Elastic, Elastic wants Amazon's changes from Amazon's fork (Opensearch). So they can't demand Amazon sign a CLA, because they can't offer Amazon anything for it. Amazon is fine just ... not signing and continuing on their open fork. Elastic have lost the Schelling monopoly on what constitutes the "mainline".

But Elastic can already take the changes from Amazons fork - opensearch is permissively licensed. What they might want is that Amazon stops maintaining its fork and contributes directly to elastics mainline. I believe that ship has sailed, and it's not coming back to pick up stragglers.
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