You can’t have a business only based on open source software. As a company you need to provide bit more than what is there in open source world. Just technical support won’t cut it. What elastic provides can be very well mimicked by other players if they want to and have money for it. I believe Elastic
Realized their business model is not working and so they changed their license. But AWS has money and man power to fork it.
AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
361–370 of 969 posts
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If Linus had hindered AWS' use of Linux early on, would that have been better for Linux? What would "the cloud" look like? They don't seem to have any revenue sharing scheme with Linus, yet all the Linux companies seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.
Linux is not project developed as a product mostly by a single company. Substituting Linux into this situation doesn’t really provide any insight.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#363Weasley move
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#364I 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…
Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package. Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance…
> The first version of the Affero General Public License (AGPLv1), was published by Affero, Inc. in March 2002
Stallman strikes again!
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understandable, because a lot of people open source their code under a permissive license because it’s a cool thing to do, not because they understand what truly open sourcing their code means.
And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub.
What are better alternative licenses that also wouldn't deter contributors?
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#366I 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…
I think this is actually best for users and the community. Sucks for elastic, but glad to see the project continuing as open source.
Also good to see Amazon sponsoring lots of OSS development. Wish they could have done it in collab with ElasticCo, but I think that’s on them as there’s no way they can allow peers to contribute and stay in business.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
The announcement claims: > All changes to Elasticsearch were sent as upstream pull requests (#42066, #42658, #43284, #43839, #53643, #57271, #59563, #61400, #64513), and we then included the “oss” builds offered by Elastic in our distribution. This ensured that we were collaborating with the upstream developers and maintainers, and not creating a “fork” of the software. With links on the issue numbers. Why should we…
That's 9 PRs vs, as someone pointed out below, roughly 41000 commits in the project.
Disclosure: I work at Amazon on cloud infrastructure, but not directly on the codebase being discussed here.
Someone pointed out elsewhere:
*Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream.Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward. If they want to ensure others "pay it forward" (also release their source code), they should be contributing to copyleft projects instead. The AGPL would ensure users of elasticsearch, whether hosted by elastic or AWS, have access to the source code of the software they're using.
A restrictive licence limits the potential value that the code can bring to the world. To maximize the value you bring as an open source developer you can't expect returns (to the community), only hope for it.
> To maximize the value you ...
... have to let Bezos et al. exploit it?
(And that's maybe not as bad a thing as it sounds on the surface. Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, HAProxy, Nginx, and probably hundreds of open source projects I can't even start to list don't seem to feel the need to come out swinging like Elastic/Mongo/Redis have. )
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#369I'm not sure how the "AWS is stealing Elasti Cos product" holds up. AWS is willing to dedicate the time and infra to maintaining a copy of the last "freely" available version.
It is surely a significant investment on AWS part and they're even maintaining the Av2 license.
At the end of the day, we have a huge, highly profitable company backing and a better license
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#370I 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…
> 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."
No, you won’t be charged to access their fork on Github. If you want them to host your Elastic or Kibana service you’d have to pay for the service, but that’s not related to access to the Apache licensed source code.