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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#461

Post by dblock »

hintymad wrote: post #159

Could be a defensive move of Elasticsearch to win the mindshare of the community. OpenSearch has been gaining some momentum, albeit far from being comparable to Elasticsearch. See OSS Insight: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/elastic/elasticsearch?vs=opens... . I'm not sure Amazon is willing to go all in to win the war of search services, for that means they need to to handsomely reward the best coders that contribute t…

Note on the ossinsights data point, there are 115 public repos in https://github.com/opensearch-project, including, as an example https://github.com/opensearch-project/k-nn where all vector search is written, or https://github.com/opensearch-project/neural-search.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#462

Post by KingMob »

outop wrote: post #447
KingMob wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, ElasticSearch is the topic of the link.

But specifically, those two are examples of companies who started off FOSS, then got exploited by AWS.

Every FS-focused person gives them sh!7, but leaves Amazon off the hook because they exploited under the FS rules, which is an inversion of who actually does harm in the world.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#463

Post by dangus »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #418
dangus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly it. They made the gigantic miscalculation that Amazon wouldn't win this battle. I can't believe they didn't predict that this exact outcome would happen: Amazon forks under a more permissive license and becomes the new standard instead of Elastic because the entire package (managed service from AWS + more permissive license) is a lower risk package to the average business.

I mean, if you actually can't believe they didn't predict this exact outcome, that means you believe that they DID predict it and this is what they intended/hoped to happen!

I am certain you are familiar with this colloquialism, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#464

Post by jrochkind1 »

dangus wrote: post #463
jrochkind1 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you actually can't believe they didn't predict this exact outcome, that means you believe that they DID predict it and this is what they intended/hoped to happen!

I am certain you are familiar with this colloquialism, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

This is literally what we're talking about though -- Elastic Search claims they did predict it, and this outcome now was their hoped for plan all along. So I wasn't sure what you were trying to say, if you don't believe they didn't predict it...

I guess you're actually saying that despite their claims otherwise, you don't believe they did predict it?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#465

Post by cduzz »

ang_cire wrote: post #386
cduzz wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that companies that opensource their products tend to distinguish "enterprise" and non-enterprise based on things like RBAC and audit mechanisms, neither of which is "security" as much as "compliance". The original license owner, if a commercial enterprise trying to sell the product alongside the "open" version, has less incentive to accept those features from the community as it would reduce their sales o…

RBAC is absolutely a practical security control, even for non-commercial users. Least necessary privilege is not a checkbox, it will 100% save your butt in a breach by limiting blast radius.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about.

Let's say you work at a company that uses Elasticsearch. Let's say you're running a newspaper and you've got your logs in elasticsearch. Let's say one of your reporters ends up getting chopped up while they're visiting the Ostrich embassy to get a marriage license. Now let's say you're then asked "who looked at the logs of the CMS who searched for and found the IP address that was used by that reporter on October 1st 2018"

That example, purely hypothetical, is an example of "security" but not the typical security you'll see in some open source application -- it's an enterprise "compliance" feature that won't be trivial to implement and will be judged not just on completeness but on user interface, ease of use, ease of implementation, etc.

"security" means different things to different people

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#466

Post by dangus »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #464
dangus wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am certain you are familiar with this colloquialism, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

This is literally what we're talking about though -- Elastic Search claims they did predict it, and this outcome now was their hoped for plan all along. So I wasn't sure what you were trying to say, if you don't believe they didn't predict it... I guess you're actually saying that despite their claims otherwise, you don't believe they did predict it?

What I’m saying is that if they are claiming this is the outcome they wanted, they are lying.

The truth that I think they are trying to hide is that they are losing adoption to their Amazon-backed competitor and that they will bleed more customers if they don’t go open source again.

I think that when they made the original decision to change the license they thought their product had more pull than it really did. They thought customers would leave Amazon’s managed product for their “superior” product rather than Amazon’s “inferior” fork. They thought people wouldn’t trust Amazon to have the expertise to continue development. In reality what customers wanted was a managed solution from their cloud provider, they didn’t really care if it was Elastic or not.

I totally understand that the situation was a pickle for Elastic in terms of being able to be a sustainable company and perhaps they had to do something. But the thing they did didn’t work, or else they would have stuck with it.

In my experience companies that modify the licensing of their products or get bought by bad stewards like IBM (Hashicorp) or Progress (Chef Software) scare away the engineering managers who make purchase decisions.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#467

Post by foxyv »

lolinder wrote: post #80
foxyv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the OpenSearch brand has more value now than Elastic.

I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead. What metric are you using to come to the conclusion th…

I'm basing it off my own experience with managers, developers, and sysadmins. No one wants Elastic Search over Open Search. We're spending all our money on Open Search. Whenever I mention Elastic Search I may as well have just farted. Everyone hates the support and enterprise licensing model. We already pay for AWS support anyways so why not use their fork? Why add yet another vendor to our tech stack?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#468

Post by PeterCorless »

lmeyerov wrote: post #201
PeterCorless wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a related proxy for market awareness, DB-Engines.com's ranking is a composite index of a number of factors: • Google search volume and quantity of search result pages (blogs, recipes, etc.) • Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill • Number of job post listings as a requisite skill • Social media mentions It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under m…

Relevant, the curves tell a different story: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/Elasticsearch... A big question is New + Churning installs. I'd expect a scary portion of the New, and inherently slower rate of Churn are heading to OS instead ES. The curves support that: note that ES isn't substantively growing on that chart. Anecdotally, we see most new installs as leaning to OS in the security industry, w…

Yes, exactly. I often do comparative results like this to see where there is "momentum."

Opensearch is definitely coming on strong.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#469

Post by pizza234 »

js4ever wrote: post #248
pizza234 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're referring to the SSPL (it's unclear), it can be used without obligations when a service uses it as a storage, rather than providing it as a service to the clients. Since the latter case is essentially cloud companies, I'm confused by the business nature of the "hundreds of customers"; if they're not cloud companies, Elasticsearch pre- or post-license change makes no difference.

SSPL is also preventing DevOps/services companies to deploy for their customers, it's not affecting only cloud providers.

> SSPL is also preventing DevOps/services companies to deploy for their customers, it's not affecting only cloud providers.

If a "DevOps" company purely provide deployment services, and doesn't offer a managed Redis service, SSPL makes no difference.

It seems that the term "DevOps/services" is a way to refer to companies that offer Redis as managed service, without calling them "cloud providers". This type of service is what a large part of the IT community is againt, and that licenses like AGPL/SSPL try to prevent.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#470

Post by christinac »

julesvr wrote: post #309
thelittleone wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including the recent trend of access to SOC2 reports requiring an "Enterprise" tier subscription.

I have the same problem at the moment with Supabase. We're a startup trying to get ISO 27001 certified and need to upload Supabase's SOC2 report to Vanta, but we can't because we're on the Pro tier and they don't give access to that, even after emailing them. It's ridiculous.

(I work at/started Vanta. Email support@vanta.com and they should be able to give you guidance and help out. If that doesn't work, email me -- christina at vanta)
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