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

Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 473 posts

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#361

Post by skywhopper »

lolinder wrote: post #150
chadash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words of the license are "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.". I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not an issue…

They're probably mixing up the SSPL with Hashicorp's version of the BSL, which does talk about competition [0]. [0] https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

This is why the proliferation of these custom licenses is yet another self-own by these companies. To HashiCorp, their own products are special unique flowers and deserve their own license, but to their customers, HashiCorp is just one of dozens or hundreds of vendors. Adding layers of confusion and risk to using their software is not going to encourage anyone to try it out.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#362

Post by fieldcny »

cduzz wrote: post #351
_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.

I'm not sure what you mean by "security" in this context. Identity management, role based access control, useful audit logs; all "enterprise" features, probably are very expensive to implement, and make for obvious "up-charge" product segmentation. I suspect there's some combination of "the community doesn't add useful implementations of these features" and "we can't possibly risk our reputation based on some communi…

Using your yardstick, we wouldn’t have any open source software, everything costs time to implement, that’s the point of open source, we donate time to the collective community. All those security features are not enterprise specific, they are rudimentary for any modern open source product

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#363

Post by skywhopper »

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.

The "market confusion" bit has always struck me as disingenuous. The market was never confused about who was offering the old AWS "ElasticSearch Service" or what it was. Elastic's licensing shenanigans and the fork they forced AWS to create have introduced far more long-term confusion. It's certainly not the case that any confusion has been resolved by licensing the ElasticSearch code under three different licenses, all of which are unusual, confusing, and untested in various ways.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#364

Post by batch12 »

willcipriano wrote: post #315
batch12 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software should be secure by default. No defense of honor is necessary. > This line of thinking has lead to many foreign wars of choice, where we send young men to die and our nation recieved nothing in exchange. "It was the right thing to do" is uttered by those who did nothing I am not able to find any references to the war of regression or the battle of cve-2021-44228, so I'll have to call nonsense on this one.

Why? What was paid that now this is owed?

We've become too accepting of trivial bugs and logic issues that could have been identified through proper quality controls.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#365

Post by prepend »

jen20 wrote: post #344
prepend wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation. It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that. But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time. If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS…

> If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. So maybe they should stop releasing future contributions as OSS? Oh, wait…

Exactly. It’s their choice as the creator. And they can change their mind as much as they like.

It’s cool being a programmer because we have such autonomy over our actions and our creations.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#366

Post by aseipp »

jen20 wrote: post #349
cmiles74 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was crazy for Amazon to name their hosted search product Elasticsearch! At that time, Amazon clearly felt the name had some value. I agree that this is probably not the picture of the huge win they are painting. Still, it must have been frustrating for Elastic to have to explain to potential customers that they weren't reselling an Amazon product. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252513588/Amazon-drops-E...

It was probably also crazy to call the search product “elasticsearch” 4 years after Amazon had started using “elastic X” branding for their already-popular cloud services.

You can call any decision you want crazy, but it's not relevant in a matter of trademark, and they talked about this at the time of the original license change. The word "Elastic" isn't enough on its own. In contrast Amazon was literally offering a product identical to theirs (quite literally) that was also using the exact same name "Elasticsearch".

If Elastic the company sold a product called "Elastic Amazon EC2" and it was an API compatible copy of EC2 cloud compute, you can reasonably assume that Amazon would be pissed off about it.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#368

Post by remram »

aljarry wrote: post #288
remram wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#issuecomme…

Yes Minio lies, but they can do that no matter what anything is.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#369

Post by prepend »

arp242 wrote: post #212
prepend wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation. It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that. But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time. If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS…

I'm not really interested in discussing the merits of the argument (or lack thereof); I've done this a dozen times over the last few years and I have no interest in repeating it. I am just saying your post hugely misrepresented the argument. That you think the argument is a load of bollocks changes nothing about that.

It’s unfortunate you don’t want to discuss the merits of my argument.

Not to give out advice, but if your aim isn’t to learn and debate and change minds and be changed, what’s your point? Do you just want to make noise or something?

I would like to properly characterize the argument to understand all sides. Because I want more great software to exist in the world. My belief is that the way to do this is to have people create and share, of their own free will. And I want to learn if there’s a better way.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#370

Post by redwood »

nijave wrote: post #330
redwood wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, did you pursue a rev share model with Elastic (Co) for your Elastic managed service? I guess that's not something thay can be discussed openly but recognizing you probably had 10x their revenue in the managed service and another 10x their revenue in compute behind the OSS, I wonder if there could have been a proactive happy middle ground found years ago. I suppose that they might not have accepted s…

From previous threads, my understanding is Elastic is a pretty arduous enterprise sales process which turned a lot of small/mid customers away. High vendor management overhead is a huge pain for smaller companies that don't have robust IT to manage those relationships. The smaller/mid size startups I've worked at almost never acquire "enterprise" software and always leverage pay-by-credit-card type SaaS Besides opera…

Totally and that goes back to their lack of execution as a managed service/SaaS offering because the GTM for those is different, more self-service. If you can't unwind yourself from selling a heavy weight legacy style enterprise software package, you struggle to execute in SaaS, you burden yourself to be understood by your customer as the opposite of modern.
Post reply on HN