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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#391

Post by 9dev »

eadmund wrote: post #328
chadash wrote: post #69

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…

> To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to open source their code,…

That is a very US-centric perspective on freedom, and one that isn’t actually very helpful in assessing actual real-life restrictions of a license. You may win the philosophical argument on the nature of freedom, but you lose the debate participants. If both the vendor can’t continue working on the software, because they’re unable to monetize it, and the user is unwilling to use it due to concerns over exposing business secrets, the outcome is a net-negative, no matter how venerable your cause might be.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#392

Post by skrtskrt »

tyre wrote: post #195
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…

It’s not the network call, it’s what you do with it. Let’s take redis, pretending it’s AGPL. Adding a new command to the source code: definitely a modification. Adding a new feature to the redis client: also a modification. Creating a class (RedisPlusClient) that inherits from its client and adds a feature: Maybe a modification? Feels modification-adjacent. Building a microservice that uses the redis client and expos…

I think it's worth considering that stuff like Elastic and Grafana tooling at most places is just internal ops & analytics.

Elastic yes moreso can be used for user-facing search, but in general the point of these ops technologies is plug it in and let your employees use it.

If you wanna modify and have SSO and re-sell it sure yeah you should expect you're gonna need the enterprise license unless you're gonna host a purely vanilla version and layer your own auth over it, which is also possible.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#393

Post by YetAnotherNick »

lsaferite wrote: post #307
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact I like the change. This allows them to make almost everything free of charge to individual/small companies, but could fund it from revenue of larger organization, who generally don't have problem paying.

And what of small companies that need things like SOC2 reports from vendors? If you want to work with large companies, being SOC certified makes it easier. Part of that is ensuring your vendors are also compliant with good standards and that's best done with SOC reports.

Getting SOC 2 compliance alone takes ~10k USD apart from vendor reports. Yes they may be small with employee count, but when I said small I just meant someone running something for small set of users for free or close to free. Not someone working with other enterprises.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#394

Post by cokeandpepsi »

jchw wrote: post #119
chadash wrote: post #69

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…

For the most part I don't think people are against shared source or closed software existing, being sold, being marketed, etc. There's really only two things people viscerally don't like: - Marketing a project that isn't open source as open source. Debate about what the "definition" is or why it matters all you want; taking a term and using it in a way that contradicts the vast majority of domain experts is bullshit.…

[dead]

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#395

Post by purpleidea »

KingMob wrote: post #273
remram wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus they lost all trust now. Who's to say they won't pull the same thing again if developers were to come back? It's not like they stopped requiring a CLA...

To be fair, though, every project of a certain size requires you to sign away your rights via CLA, so I don't think that can be held against them. (Though I admit, dispensing with a CLA would be an amazing gesture of good will.)

This is not at all true. Only projects that have the intention of wanting to be able to screw over their users have a CLA.

The obvious counter example is Linux which has no CLA.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#396

Post by winterowlpigeon »

crewdragon wrote: post #232
chadash wrote: post #69

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…

It feels like Elastic got burnt with the license change, their stock is down 40% since they announced the fork, and they are starting to realize that being open source is important. I don't think AWS would abandon the fork given the amount of efforts they put in, they cannot walk back and re-brand their products. It's sad to see elastic turning sides for their benefit, and as a contributor I feel betrayed. While Open…

I think your comment around the dip in their stock price is fairly misleading because it lacks context of the market sector overall. When ETSC announced in January 2021 their stock was around 150 and by November 2021 it was in the 180s, so the change very much was not responsible for crashing their stock - the market was. Their entire industry sector was pounded heading into 2022 and has never recovered. For example Datadog crashed from ~$190 to $80 over the course of 2022.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#397

Post by jen20 »

aseipp wrote: post #366
jen20 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" an…

It might not be sufficient to trigger trademark violation, but that doesn’t stop it being a dick move.

Edit: As was Amazon's choice to offer a service named that once Elasticsearch was established, to be clear.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#398

Post by skrtskrt »

weinzierl wrote: post #292
adrianco wrote: post #257

Here’s the initial AWS response to the license change that they made in 2018, which I helped write. At the time we didn’t think a new license made sense, as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code, but the core of the issue was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at…

"as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code" I have taken this position in another thread a while ago, but the responses seemed to indicate that this is not a clearly cut situation at all. If it was, what is the point of the "source-available" licenses in the first place? I mean, the idea that they were invented to cut out AWS is pretty prevalent, no?

translation: AWS refuses to provide unmodified open source hosted software as a service or to open source the changes they make to host it.

It's not a "can't" it's a "won't".

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#399

Post by skrtskrt »

eadmund wrote: post #328
chadash wrote: post #69

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…

> To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to open source their code,…

the four freedoms were not written by God, just a bunch of ideological pedants.

it's perfectly valid to have a completely different view of what freedom is for software

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#400

Post by rty32 »

phoronixrly wrote: post #112
Salgat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like they're trying to cover up a bad case of regret. At our company we've fully shifted to OpenSearch, so there's no going back to ElasticSearch even if we wanted (not that we would want to). Also there is a lot of engineering contribution from Amazon that's seemingly gone now from Elasticsearch, right?

Sounds like you've fully shifted to exploiting (without contributing anything) to OpenSearch. I think Elastic will be just fine without your company or Amazon.

Then why is Elastic opening sourcing their code again? No need to change any part of their business model if things are going perfectly well? Altruism?
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