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Elasticsearch is open source, again

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#281

Post by giamma »

simonw wrote: post #2

> The good news is that while it was painful, it worked. 3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever. We were even named AWS partner of the year. I don't entirely understand this bit.

My guess: as I wrote in another comment, Elasticsearch had significant evolution in the area of "search engine", while OpenSearch trajectory (to use the wording of the press release) has been in the direction of APM/monitoring.

When Elastic changed the license, all vendors of APM products based on Elasticsearch jumped to OpenSearch.

Maybe, they want to pass the message that the fork, OpenSearch, is enough different to not represent real competition, and in any case, now that it exists, after the investment done, AWS will offer that as an alternative to Elasticsearch and not Elasticsearch itself but managed by AWS as it used to be before the license change.

Now, who wants a managed Elasticsearch service will only buy it from Elastic.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#282

Post by wg0 »

That is great news but I have prepared my stack for OpenSearch which seems even if less feature rich but is more trustworthy.

At least there are some security features built in (OIDC/OAuth/JWT/Proxy etc.) which are dead critical to operate any software stack be it internal or otherwise.

As for centralised logging or building a search functionality, OpenSearch was already good enough back in the day at the start of the fork.

I think both ES and OS would continue to flourish in their own ways.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#283

Post by OuchLinux »

The software engineers who care enough to have an opinion probably likely don't contribute to the ELK stack, and those who are impacted by this license change are no better off. Ever since Elastic went on the warpath with their serverless cloud and Gen AI the entire "open source" pitch is moot, regardless of the license.

Regardless of the openness of their code - their observability product is grossly bloated and unimpressive, the security product is sideways, fleet is broken by design, the entire database sector is coming after their analytics use cases at much better perf + much lower costs (and winning), management look incompetent, RAG is a big bet - but unlikely to be the saving grace the stack + company needs. It's truly a product on fire. Elasticsearch was interesting 10 years ago - nowadays not so much. This just seems like a "hope for the best" distraction for scarier things to come for Elastic.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#285

Post by OuchLinux »

nklmilojevic wrote: post #275
nullify88 wrote: post #230

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…

Loki and Clickhouse are not really excelling in what ES is. For example, full text search. VictoriaLogs is very promising in this regard!

It's fair to say that most elasticsearch use cases aren't search based, they are analytical - which they don't 'excel' at. There are much more compelling products on the market these days.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#286

Post by [deleted] »

thelittleone wrote: post #272
_pdp_ wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Including the recent trend of access to SOC2 reports requiring an "Enterprise" tier subscription.

[deleted]

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#287

Post by ratorx »

tsimionescu wrote: post #228
ratorx wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, it doesn’t matter as much for GPL because there are no requirements over the network, which means no requirements for SaaS (which is exactly what AGPL addresses).

And also, software distribution is different. Typically, you don’t bundle dependencies and instead install them with e.g. a package manager or system library (at least on Linux), so the separation is clearer because you don’t need to distribute the GPLed code to your user (in many cases).

> Amazon offered at least one AGPL service

Are you sure? I only found DocumentDB (which only promises MongoDB compatibility). There’s also a comment by an Amazon employee that suggests Amazon never provided hosted MongoDB when it had AGPL or SSPL [1]. Further down that thread, it also suggests that AGPL at Amazon is possible, but requires extensive review beyond other open source.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085386

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#288

Post by aljarry »

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…

Maybe the license is pretty clear, but interpretations differ. E.g. Minio provides a very aggressive interpretation of AGPL, equating to "if you use it in closed-source commercial product, it's a violation of AGPL": [0], [1], [2]. For me the whole problem with AGPL is that it's so subjective.

[0] https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929...

[1] https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/12829#issuecomment-889...

[2] https://github.com/minio/minio/discussions/13571#discussionc...

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#289

Post by jotaen »

bad_user wrote: post #221
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 ti…

The Elastic license doesn’t use the term “competitor”. To me, the definition of the limitation is actually pretty clear:

> 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.

https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#290

Post by YetAnotherNick »

thelittleone wrote: post #272
_pdp_ wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Including the recent trend of access to SOC2 reports requiring an "Enterprise" tier subscription.

In fact I like the change. This allows them to make almost everything free of charge to individual/small companies, but could fund it from revenue of larger organization, who generally don't have problem paying.
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