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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#261

Post by lucianbr »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #127
vineyardmike wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if that’s true. I see tons of car repair services advertising “we repair $BRAND with original parts” and they’re definitely not owned by $BRAND. Clearly not confused with the original brand, but also advertising a service built off that brand.

Right, but they aren't naming their business "Bob's $BRAND" which is kinda the point.

How can that be the point? That would be parallel to Amazon calling itself Elasticsearch, which never happened or was even a remote possibility.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#262

Post by maxloh »

lolinder wrote: post #150
chadash wrote: post #137

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

It is authored by MariaDB, actually.

Hashicorp is just one of the company using it.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#263

Post by maccard »

crewdragon wrote: post #232
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…

It feels like Elastic got burnt with the license change, their stock is down 40% since they announced the fork, and they are starting to realize that being open source is important. I don't think AWS would abandon the fork given the amount of efforts they put in, they cannot walk back and re-brand their products. It's sad to see elastic turning sides for their benefit, and as a contributor I feel betrayed. While Open…

It’s impossible to know what would have happened if they had continued on their existing path. My guess is Amazon would have eaten their lunch and they’d be in a similar situation.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#265

Post by _pdp_ »

adrianco wrote: post #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…

Unfortunately many companies charge extra for security where security should be the default. Truth to be told there some some situations where extra security costs could be justified but there are not many if charge is necessary it should be considered as a temporary measure. My $0.02.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#266

Post by davidgerard »

wmf wrote: post #141
davidgerard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples?

Grafana https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic... RethinkDB http://web.archive.org/web/20161003231505/https://rethinkdb.... BerkeleyDB http://web.archive.org/web/20170211004058/http://www.infowor... MongoDB tried the shakedown but I guess it didn't work http://web.archive.org/web/20240202161503/https://www.mongod...

None of these are examples of shakedowns - they are just posts about adopting a license. Do you have any examples of shakedowns? 'Cos that's quite a claim you made there, and surely there are some examples.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#267

Post by wokwokwok »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #210
Raed667 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is preventing AWS from dropping OpenSearch and going back to just selling Elastic ?

well importantly, Elastic was originally Apache-2.0. Then Amazon started using their stuff and they relicensed to their not-really-FOSS-license. Then Amazon forked their stuff, a bunch of legal conflicts happened. Now they are friends again. And now they relicensed to AGPL (which is FOSS). So they were originally Apache-2.0 which was permissive versus now they are AGPL which is copyleft. The important distinction her…

Realllllly? I sure hope not.

There going to be some hard irony here, of making such a fuss about it before, when it was someone else doing it, and then doing it themselves.

We’ll see. Maybe they’re principled enough not to rip off the open search contributions.

If not, you’ve really got to believe there’s no sincerity left at elastic.

I guess time will tell; I’d like to believe they’re better than that.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#269

Post by giamma »

crewdragon wrote: post #232
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…

It feels like Elastic got burnt with the license change, their stock is down 40% since they announced the fork, and they are starting to realize that being open source is important. I don't think AWS would abandon the fork given the amount of efforts they put in, they cannot walk back and re-brand their products. It's sad to see elastic turning sides for their benefit, and as a contributor I feel betrayed. While Open…

My understanding (after talking to several market analysts) is that OpenSearch is focused on APM/monitoring/log-aggregation, while Elasticsearch has an edge on pure search engine functionality and now AI.

That's because the license change by Elastic impacted not only Amazon, who could not provide Elasticsearch as a service anymore through its administrative consoles, but also all those vendors who were building APM/monitoring/log-aggregation solutions as-a-service on top of Elasticsearch. In fact, such vendors would typically use Elasticsearch as a back-end behind some custom UI.

So those vendors teamed up with AWS to develop OpenSearch.

Now last time I checked the commit history of the two projects, Elasticsearch had 3x more commits and many of them on cool new stuff, while OpenSearch focus seems to have remained on APM/log aggregation.

As someone who needs an actual "search engine", I am glad of the change, as I was worried OpenSearch may not be a viable open source alternative as it could be lagging behind in this domain.

Now I need to check what happens with the clients: will the client remain Apache License or will they change to AGPL? The latter would be a problem for closed source software.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#270

Post by maccard »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #194
vineyardmike wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 should…

Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit.

No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks (which weren’t in place in this case)rather than focusing on the actual details of the product

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