Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

331–340 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#331
post #329

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.

That's the AGPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#332
post #191
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…

> 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 Affero General Public License (AGPL) was published in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Plenty of people saw this coming. It was completely predictable. The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught on are complex. But I don't think anyone can credibly claim that they were blind-sided. Rather, I think many people and companies simply feared the day of reckoning, discounted the threat, and did as most everybody else was doing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criticizing capitalism doesn't require being stalinists, so please stop with this cliche, it's old and extremely boring by now.

What’s even more boring is critiquing capitalism when that has actually nothing to do with the problem at hand. I brought up socialism as a counter example of how there is very little practical way to solve this issue with a different economic system. You’re free to bring up a different example of how an economic system will help the conundrum of preserving economic exchange and user freedom. A Potlatch gift economy…

Right, I don't know the answer here. I just want people to start thinking seriously about the problem, because neither the regulatorily-captured free market nor the Politburo sound like great options.

And I'm mostly agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, because it is concretely thinking seriously about alternative models. "Capitalism, but your company can't get too big" seems fairly compelling tbh.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#334

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…

Is it not consistent with a dislike of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Entinguish approach?

While what AWS is doing is (probably, IANAL) within their legal rights, it's arguably immoral because it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." Which, given AWS's widespread adoption, puts the OS version in peril.

Edit: Thanks for pointing out that AWS will be releasing the code under an Apache 2 license. That does change my opinion somewhat, though I'll leave my original comment for posterity.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#335
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah let's talk about greed for a second. Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment. So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in. Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the m…

[flagged]

Except What Elastic is doing is fundamentally opposed to open source, and what Amazon is doing is fundamentally aligned.

At least according to the OSI, who last I checked, really care about open source ideals.

https://opensource.org/node/1099

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#336
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 is at least open about reasons. AWS pretend to be an OSS champion. Compared to other players Google, MS they do the least amount of OSS work. Hypocrisy is really worse than selfishness. It definitely shifted my neutral view of AWS. I can still spin ElasticSearch cluster for my backend and I have somehow open license. Where is open source version of Aurora, Dynamo, DocumentDB, Neptune or Redshift? Where is any…

> Elastic is at least open about reasons.

Is it though? Every single one of their blog posts have been focused on spinning their decision as being great for the open source community. What they should have said was - we are a business, have VCs/shareholders and need to make money now, so sorry but the free ride is over.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#337
Elasticsearch is now being released under a proprietary license. The last FOSS version got forked by Amazon. This is a good thing if you care about software freedom. Sure, under Amazon it may be a "throw over the wall" model but at least there are open opportunities for the source code to be forked again, and in the meantime at least it's being maintained under an FOSS license.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#338
post #51

The fact that AWS doesn't link to the Elastic License is hilarious to me. The plain reading of the license is "APLv2 but AWS Can't Sell a Hosted Version" so of course AWS forks the last APL version and plows ahead. Note, I'm not trying to side with either AWS or Elastic here and I fully recognize that both Elastic re-licensing and AWS forking are within each org's rights. I really just think it is funny how beside th…

To be fair, it was actually extremely difficult for me to find the license text after Elastic's announcements too. All the announcements and FAQ's etc. seemed to omit a link to the actual text.

For those, like me, who were curious and wanted to take a look: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/license...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#339
post #191
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…

> "We proposed to give back jointly at a significant level and were turned down." Adrian Cockcroft (VP AWS)

https://twitter.com/adrianco/status/1105178074499375106?s=20

Post reply on HN