Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

elastic.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 708 posts

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#351

Post by twobitshifter »

granzymes wrote: post #34
dhd415 wrote: post #10

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification . Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That mak…

Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. Maybe we can change the link to this post?

> hack the source code to grant yourself access to our paid features without a subscription, or the use of modified versions in production.

I think the change that you can’t modify the code and use it yourself in production is a big change that is glossed over. ES is now free as in beer. You can look at the code but you can’t touch it or change what it does.

Edit: I was wrong about this. The license itself does not say this, but the blog post seemed to indicate that it was a change. I think it’s an exclusive inclusive or problem.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#352

Post by michaelmior »

jeffasinger wrote: post #312
nrmitchi wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends…

At my job, we evaluated moving from AWS hosted ES to several of the Elastic offerings. Many of them were more expensive than AWS was before taking hardware into account (as in comparing cost of Elastic licensing vs the whole cost from AWS). This made it exceedingly difficult to justify the move. It's not only the headstart with the client (billing relationship in place), but the cost that hampers them.

But isn't a big part of the reason Amazon can offer better pricing because of the scale of their existing client base? I'm not saying that they are doing this, but they could if they chose operate on very thin margins or even at a lost to keep their hold on clients and make up with it on other products in their ecosystem.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#353

Post by forgetfulness »

brabel wrote: post #332
forgetfulness wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because while it's true that Amazon is following the terms of the license, it's having real repercussions in that the people actually maintaining the Software are seeing decreased ability to grow the product because a huge company, belonging to the second richest man in the world, is offering it as part of their vertically-integrated oligopoly. Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is short sighted, it's…

> the people actually maintaining the Software are seeing decreased ability to grow the product because a huge company, belonging to the second richest man in the world, is offering it as part of their vertically-integrated oligopoly. When you choose an OSS license, you're giving permission to any company or person to exploit your product in any way they want, this is how OSS works. Amazon is not the only one that ca…

Yes but that's what I'm talking about. That's a core principle in OSS so far but you can't sweep the issues of fairness to the people doing the actual work nor the issue of contributing to increasing the power of organizations whose interests are more likely counter to people's freedom and welfare.

I know that prominent figures in FOSS have expressed the sentiment that you have to suck it up, but you know, the people actually living through this have a say.

Thus, licensing changes and a conversation on their moral standing.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#354

Post by paxys »

ec109685 wrote: post #240
delfinom wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody sees it. They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.

Elastic is a 10B company and have the ability to write all the proprietary code they want to compete with Amazon.

$15B actually

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#355

Post by rsstack »

paxys wrote: post #336
brodouevencode wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more about the source of the revenue stream. Redis (from what I know, which is minimal) relies more on support - they have a hosted solution but support/licensing of modules is where they really make money. Elastic relies on hosting - they've invested a lot in infrastructure.

No, the difference is that Elastic is a massive $15 billion company which needs more revenue to survive, while Redis is still largely run by one person.

This isn't true. Salvatore retired earlier this year. Redis is run, more or less, by Redis Labs which is valued at $1 billion.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#356

Post by ignoramous »

c0l0 wrote: post #189
longhairedhippy wrote: post #105

Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the last version with a friendly license and then transition to the Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a business standpoint it seems like a reasonab…

The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream relea…

You should consider opening an issue on their github [0]?

AWS, from what I know, takes security seriously, and given they themselves use OpenDistro internally, this should become a top priority for them.

[0] https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b...

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#357

Post by paxys »

znpy wrote: post #164
longhairedhippy wrote: post #105

Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the last version with a friendly license and then transition to the Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a business standpoint it seems like a reasonab…

> Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If they're dumb, yes. As stated in their blog, changes apply pretty much only if you're either embed or redistribute elasticsearch/kibana. And these are two specific use-cases btw. If you're already a customer, nothing changes.

Find me one lawyer who is going to be convinced by this blog post. There is a blanket no for using SSPL software at every company I know.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#358

Post by julienb_sea »

nicoburns wrote: post #322
spinningslate wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.

Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.

Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? Because they are careful with their data and legal obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements, but even then you might argue its better for a large organization to pay attention to other companies' licenses instead of stepping on them.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#359

Post by dragonwriter »

api wrote: post #347
dragonwriter wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FOSS and its gift culture ethos just isn't working in today's world. It absolutely is working the same way it always has (to which “gift culture” matters only around the edges). It doesn't work for people who want to start a business with a business model of using copyright law to extract monopoly rents, but then, it never has, and that's always been the point. And, yes, it's not, for that reason, a good fit for na…

I don't think I totally disagree, but here's the problem: if OSS is not a good fit for software entrepreneurship, then it puts a really severe cap on how advanced, polished, easy to use, or well supported OSS can be, because pushing really hard on software development and implementing tens of thousands of hours of fine-grained polish is far beyond what the vast majority of people can afford to (or are willing to) vol…

> if OSS is not a good fit for software entrepreneurship, then it puts a really severe cap on how advanced, polished, easy to use, or well supported OSS can be, because pushing really hard on software development and implementing tens of thousands of hours of fine-grained polish is far beyond what the vast majority of people can afford to (or are willing to) volunteer for free.

Even if they start out as labors of love, OSS that gets beyond the niche stage tends not to have most work done “for free”, it's done (or paid for) by people/firms who are using the software in their business, but where the software is supporting, not the thing being sold. (Whether the OSS is infrastructure that is invisible to customers, or whether what is being sold is support and professional services tied to the OSS software.)

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#360

Post by tw04 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #337
tw04 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest, I've never heard a single business say the reason they use open source is because support is commodified. It's generally cost or functionality, and quite frankly they want a go-to support expert, not a list of support options. Redhat didn't become huge because people had all sorts of options for third party support. In fact, I can't say I've ever come across a single enterprise who: uses third party s…

CentOS and WhiteBox Linux were 3rd party sources of RHEL and to a large part Linux distros are interchangeable which makes them commodities. Not perfect commodities, but still close. RHEL with subscription vs Debian & burdening yours ops guys are choices available. VMS has no such choice.

But he didn't say: businesses use open source because they can find compatible binaries from multiple entities. He said it commodified support. CentOS and WhiteBox never promised or offered enterprise support agreements that I'm aware of. And if they did, I can't say I ever ran across anyone utilizing it in the wild.
Post reply on HN