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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#321

Post by parasubvert »

marricks wrote: post #316
markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

This is how must awful actions by powerful entities are justified. I say "Rich people get huge tax breaks, why??" you say "well that's how tax law works, why get angry?" I say "I'm a small business getting exploited by a goliath!" you say "well everyone is playing by the rules so it's their fault" Systems are so biased by large actors and for some reason everyday people jump in and defend them? We should totally take…

Everyday people jump in and defend them because sometimes the big company is doing the right thing? Like some of us have been around since 25-30 years ago when the OSI was created and Linux was taking off. We have had these arguments for decades.

There seems to be a generational knowledge gap where people of a certain age think there large actors are permanent and evil. That’s plainly untrue. Often the scrappy upstart is being unethical.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#322

Post by worldsayshi »

reader_mode wrote: post #278
worldsayshi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Open source is a type of generosity. Open source should be about optimisation. For example you have some infrastructure code (like LLVM, Linux kernel, etc.) that brings you little competitive advantage but you benefit from distributed maintenance - OSS is a perfect fit. And people using it but not contributing back is not really that big of a deal. The incentives to upstream exist without licensing requirement - ma…

> Open source should be about optimisation.

Sure it's nice when you can motivate it like that but I feel that the long tail of open source projects doesn't fit your description but are projects driven by a few enthusiasts.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#323

Post by javajosh »

mminer237 wrote: post #55
markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

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.

I agree. What Amazon is doing is clearly legal , but it also clearly violates cultural norms about fairness. I don't know much about the Elasticsearch team or company, but from a 50k ft view it seems like Amazon could and should throw them a couple mil, at least out of pity.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#324

Post by sjwright »

gnfargbl wrote: post #195
Chyzwar wrote: post #41

They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs of total 41000 in elastic repo. They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.

AWS's model seems to be to take a popular OSS product, do _just_ enough to make it work with AWS, make tons of money out of it, contribute a minimal amount back... and then act all surprised when they're painted as the bad guys. Take postgres. RDS is a core AWS product. They absolutely rely on it. But if you take a look at https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ , are any of the current major contributors…

Other people have chosen to license their own work with the license of their choice. The license is being complied with by AWS in fact and in spirit.

If you don't agree with the spirit of the Apache license terms, that's fine. You can draft an Apache-for-everyone-except-AWS license and lobby for its use by others.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#325

Post by Spivak »

worldsayshi wrote: post #183
chc wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's forks will still be Apache-licensed, so if there's a tit-for-tat element here, it appears to be Amazon responding to Elastic's abandonment of open-source.

Yeah, and here I feel that there's something missing in my description. While I think Elastics move is bad I definitely don't feel like Amazon is the good guy here either. I feel that there's a good chance that Amazon steam rolls Elastic and then five ten years away the community is worse off.

Open Source makes the most sense when your position is “I made this because it solved a problem I had and am giving it away so that it might solve problems for you.”

We might actually be better off with Amazon as the steward because they don’t need to make money on the software itself.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#326

Post by geofft »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #256
geofft wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it's possible to take an existing Apache 2.0 codebase, release some new Apache 2.0 code, build a $15B business, and then stop offering your code under Apache 2.0. Great! Shareholder value! That's literally what you set out to do! How could it have possibly failed?

What I'm actually saying is that when people think that outcome is a bad thing, their beef is with our particular breed of capitalism. When they say "This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones," then what they're saying is that they're objecting to the free market as it exists in our particular breed of capitalism. And when they say, as others say, "This good outcome could have been so much better if it weren't for the dictators at the OSI micromanaging the term 'open source'," then what they're actually saying is they're objecting to companies freely choosing to believe what the OSI says, because the OSI has no power. If you think that something was short of the mark here, that something was our breed of capitalism.

I'm agreeing with you. Capitalism did not fail. It did what everyone expected it to do. If you're happy with the outcome, great! I'm not telling anyone they ought to be unhappy with the outcome. But if you are unhappy with the outcome, I'm telling you why.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#327

Post by bigiain »

sg47 wrote: post #277
pjmlp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the community decided to use a license that allows it.

The community did that in good faith. What's the incentive for the community to contribute to the project if Vendor XYZ is going to offer the same project with more optimizations?

The buggy whip community invested in buggy whip manufacturing too.

Sometimes step changes happen, and things are just different afterwards.

I see two related "changes in the world" here that are contributing to this current drama.''

1) the rise of SaaS and globally centralised cloud hosting.

2) the emergence of companies solely (or mostly) built on paying salaries to developers writing an open source software project. (Elastic/Mongo/Redis being the primary examples).

As I see it, the 30 year old "Open Source" principles didn't see these coming any more than the buggy whip industry saw the Model T coming.

Personally, I'd really like to see those three companies (and others/new entrants) come up with a workable new model for software licenses for some kind of "freely usable software" ("free" in the generic "no obligations" sense, not the GPL/Stallman "freedom" sense) written by salaried devs at for-profit companies. I think the world would be a better place with more software closer to the Stallman end of the license spectrum than the Oracle end. I don't think that's necessarily a given. It might well be true that in general, a for profit company cannot make enough money out of writing software and giving it away to keep teams of full time developers paid.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#329

Post by spion »

There has to be a way for an OSS project / companies to offer licences to managed service providers in a way that gets them supported financially. That would be a massive win for everyone

Something like: okay yes, this is OSS, except if you want to offer it as a managed service, in which case you need to purchase a licence.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#330

Post by sjwright »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #263
merb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what aws does is more oss than that what elastic does. elastic also did it because of $$. so neither of them wins.

Elastic say they want to make money of the product they've spent money developing and literally point at the company who basically announced they were using it in partnership with them and turns out isn't and isn't paying their fair share - AWS. AWS say they want elasticsearch and kibana to be open source. What they really mean is they want to use elasticsearch without paying their fair share.

What is the "fair share" payment for ElasticSearch under its Apache license? I'm not a lawyer but it appears to be $0. Meanwhile, how come everyone showing sympathy for Elastic's position doesn't seem to be showing equal sympathy for Apache Lucene? Surely Lucene is deserving of at least as much credit as Elastic.
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