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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#441

Post by adrianco »

redwood wrote: post #295
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…

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…

There were several proposals made to Elastic at the time, but their attitude was that they controlled the project and didn’t want AWS to make big contributions to the open source distribution that would reduce their differentiation. They were also mixing licenses in the code base and deliberately making it hard for AWS to use.

I was also assisting in the deal with Grafana, which I thought was a good deal on both sides, setting up a framework for AWS and Grafana to work together over a longer timeframe. Ash Manzani who negotiated the deal for AWS later joined Grafana to run Corp Dev for them.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#442

Post by adrianco »

sanderjd wrote: post #305
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…

> But I do think it'd be a good look for AWS to proactively help these companies. But how much value does "a good look" have to AWS?

AWS tends to optimize for whatever its customers want, rather than what its partner ecosystem wants. However we did spend some time trying to help open source partners figure out how best to work with AWS and to leverage the marketplace etc. to be successful by leveraging the platform rather than fighting with it. Mongo is a good example of how that can work.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#443

Post by YetAnotherNick »

lsaferite wrote: post #419
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that even small companies may need SOC reports from their vendors but still not be able to financially support enterprise level plans with every one of them. By being supportive of hiding those reports behind enterprise level contracts you are effectively supporting pricing those companies out and potentially making them unable to work with larger clients.

SOC reports are only needed for SOC compliance and compliance costs 10k USD. It depends on the subscription cost, but if the company could afford the compliance they could afford extra 100 USD/month. No one expects small companies to pay few 1000 dollars per month.

Although few companies have minimum ticket size for enterprise clients and that is a bad thing IMO.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#444

Post by xorcist »

redwood wrote: post #295
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…

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…

Why? Does Amazon rev share with Red Hat? Does Google rev share with Linux? Or is it the other way around, should perhaps Linux instead pay Android for putting their product in front of billions of eyeballs? I'm sure there's a way of monetizing a billion users even for a kernel.

The answer is no, because Linux is open source. It is a multi stakeholder model where no single actor is allowed to control other actors use of the product. There is ownership, but it is separated from control. This is implemented with the GPL, but the license is only a tool to achieve the outcome, a multi stakeholder product.

This is why Amazon, Red Hat and Google all can justify to employ hundreds of engineers all contributing to a common product. Amazon can work on security functionality with no risk that Red Hat will veto it because it threatens its revenue stream. And while none of the top kernel developers have made billions from their important work, they still earn well, and all the mentioned companies have grown to become billion dollar companies.

Everyone knew this in the 90s, that's why we have the philosophy around open source. Now the discourse has changed. It is suddenly immoral to earn money from someone else's product, because if you start a project then you own it outright. Not only that, but you also have a right to become rich from your work. Discussions how immoral it is for a large company to use a piece of software without paying the original author is a completely normal thing to do, never mind that they would have no problem reinventing that particular wheel in a heartbeat.

Companies like Elastic have latched on to this, and call their product open source, but call foul when other people build products and make a living from their software. They're not actually interested in a multi stakeholder model at all.

How big would Wordpress have been without every cloud actor out there offering to host instances for a cheap fee?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#445

Post by _cenw »

kikoreis wrote: post #433
_cenw wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's enough legal uncertainty about API calls being considered linking that it keeps coming up. Minio are probably at the forefront of claiming this somewhat implicitly while referring you to your lawyer (or their pricing page, preferably) when asked about how they understand the AGPL. FSF/GNU have an example of an AGPL proxy becoming compliant by serving it a page with the offer to download source code on the fir…

Nah, the AGPL is pretty clear (and way clearer than the GPL and LGPL due to combined/derived work fuzziness). The issue with it isn't anything to do with the mechanism of the license itself, because it is pretty clear what the criteria are (and offering an API over the network definitively constitutes Remote Network Interaction) and how you can fulfill the source distribution. The real issue is that the AGPLv3 doesn'…

The problem with Minio is how many layers of indirection "interacting with an API" consitutes. If I write a webapp that uses Minio in the background, Minio has stated that their belief is that your webapp is subject to the viral part of the AGPL.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#446

Post by outop »

sofixa wrote: post #233
outop wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it restricts your ability to use a commodity product based on Elastic, provided by a third party who will compete on price or bundle it with other cloud services.

Yes, but what I'm more interested in is self-hosting. I couldn't care less that someone else is unable to profit off of others' work. And of course the third party can compete on price, they don't have to develop the actual software they're selling!

The company that 'owns' Redis or Elastic also do not need to develop the software they are selling. They already have it, since its creation for free on a non-commercial basis.

Without competition, they are free to charge any rent they like for it.

If you think that the person that originally wrote Redis or Elastic should have an exclusive license to charge people to use that software, that's a totally valid opinion and a totally valid licensing/business model. However, it has nothing to do with open source software.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#447

Post by outop »

KingMob wrote: post #375
outop wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hyperbole aside, they certainly haven't given as much as they've gotten, though. Agreed, but the point of sharing software is that it's not a zero sum game. The thing you create once is not diminished by me using it many times.

We still have to pay our bills under capitalism, though. Software copies might be infinite, but money isn't.

Of all the people who have to pay their bills under capitalism, why are you specifically concerned about the ones who wrote ElasticSearch and Redis?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#448

Post by eadmund »

skrtskrt wrote: post #428
riedel wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But FOSS and OSS are brands/labels of FSF and OSI and sometimes it is good to have such labels. This like arguing that same SmartTV is not smart or that there is other ways making a TV smart. I think it is good to have some innovation in licencing (like ethical licences which are by definition probably not free), but not by redefining stuff.

sure then people should stop crying and pooping their pants when someone tries to introduce a license that's not technically OSS but tries to address ethical concerns. "It's not OSS" is a not a value judgement unless you think that the four freedoms were written by god. But it is treated exactly as religiously.

> "It's not OSS" is a not a value judgement unless you think that the four freedoms were written by god.

It’s not a value judgment unless the four freedoms reflect one’s values. They reflect mine; therefore I judge that non-free software does not align with my values.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#450

Post by davidgerard »

paulmd wrote: post #420
davidgerard wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shakedown" is a rather stronger claim than "adopted a licence".

I fairly well knew that your question wasn't good-faith, that's why I hesitated to respond rather than just flagging it.

what element was "bad faith", that the query was nonsense? Point me at anything that would legally or even ethically constitute a "shakedown" as alleged by OP, who it appears in the subthread to have misread the license?

like, answer the question instead of evading, surely it cannot be that hard.

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