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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#511

Post by manigandham »

jeswin wrote: post #272
manigandham wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS didn't undercut anyone. They offered their customers exactly what they wanted. Many of these software vendors have delayed offering their own cloud-hosted versions, often years after AWS, even when these vendors should be better equipped at running them. Elastic is also infamous for data loss and still has consensus problems so maybe proper priorities are the real problem.

There is no meaningful way for an independent vendor to compete with a Cloud Provider offering the same service. It gets bundled in the initial sales pitch, promoted in their documentation and at events, and gets heavily discounted. It simply becomes the default - and (if on AWS) nobody will even think of Elastic after a couple of years.

And yet many companies are competing just fine. Elastic's biggest growth comes from cloud services, which matches every other database vendor from MongoDB to Redis. [1].

AWS just proved that the market wants to buy solutions, not software. There are tons of customers and environments where a dedicated vendor can offer something far better than the lowest-common-denominator that AWS provides.

If you want another success story, just look at how Snowflake built a better Redshift on AWS (quite literally).

1. Start at page 23 of their earnings report: https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#512

Post by [deleted] »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #496
dathinab wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plan having a gaping hole instead? A hole which didn't exist in this way 10 years ago. But well you could have seen it coming tbh. > all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited? If so then why do GPL and similar exist, which are normally considered as Open Source? It's just th…

The hole did exist ten years ago, though. The AGPL was released in 2007, three years before Elasticsearch was created, to fix this exact problem. …except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies. Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the wide adoption of open source software, while als…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#514

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

there are 2 distinct issues here

(1) Ethical and (2) Tort.

Ethical is the question of good corporate practice to do what's right to your partner. As a key executive of a company, I am expected to call any CEO and say - you know what CEO Joe, that contract we signed 2 weeks ago, we goofed. Can we please re-cut ? And because Joe is interested in a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts a long time, that's what usually happens.

Enter the FAANGS.

Clearly, it was Elastic's mistake to operate on a open license that lends to FAANGS literally imploding Elastic market share. Elastic mistake, OK . However, it is not ethical for a FAANG to profit off errors, just as it is not ethical for a Bank to charge overdraft fees over overdraft fees from a grandma. They can, but they really shouldn't. What is legal is not ethical.

In the middle east it is legal to stone a female adulterer to death. That's not OK.

2) Tort. It will be argued in court that AWS misappropriated the Elastic TM. That's where AWS is going to pay. AWS clearly stepped over the line.

It is just a question of how costly that mistake was.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#515

Post by kotxig »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #475
pdpi wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are systems/infra people for whom foundational stuff is where the interest lies. Some of us are product people who thrive on more direct user-facing value. It’s a lot easier for the latter group to find interest in integrating preexisting open-source building blocks, while the former wish they could be making the building blocks themselves.

But is that dynamic being driven by open source or does it just exist naturally? Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years or write a brand new implementation of a web server. Code reuse is encourages by open source but it happens a lot with out it as well. And I'd argue it makes technology a lot more valuable because we have a suit of existing well built software that's been tunn…

> Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years

No but it does make sense for us to pay for using an OS given that it's fundamental to what we do. The free as in free beer model means that the entities that produce operating systems do not extract any significant fraction of the value they are responsible for generating. It also perpetuates this idea that we shouldn't pay for software at all, not even $5 for a compiler.

So with that in mind, I'm saying that we should be careful about what software we opensource, and ideally we should at least be commercially sponsored to produce the software that we do open source if we want careers in building these high quality components or if we want to breed a culture whereby employers do invest engineering hours building these things.

> And I'd argue it makes technology a lot more valuable

Yes it means that businesses are able to produce a lot more for a lot less, but it also means that my skills are valued less. Companies value engineers by their hours of input not by the commercial value of the code. For example, I think Electron is terrible for desktop app development. It's great for prototyping but it's bloated and inefficient, I think we can do a lot better. There is no real market for an alternative because we have QT on the high perf C++ side and we have the trash web code on the other. If we had a culture of expecting to pay small amounts for software it would be more likely that I could write a high quality middle ground based on Golang or something, which is less approachable than web dev but more approachable than C++, and we would have higher quality and better performing code produced by it. For us to have this thing I either have to build this thing for free also or I have to come up with some fairly contrived business model, hope that kind people donate etc. The backdrop of opensource culture has devalued this implementation beyond the point of viability, so we will not see it unless a commercial sponsor has a specific need for it or I'm feeling particularly charitable.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#516

Post by toyg »

danShumway wrote: post #230
rdsubhas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing I'm not old enough or experienced enough with computer history to seriously argue about this, but this statement sets off some alarm bells for me. My understanding is that extremely early on in computing history, especially early in the Internet era, people were thinking about SaaS. We had shared terminals, Sun was even try…

Let’s leave alone for a moment the fact that the most permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) were not really designed, as much as they appeared out of historical accidents as a “just don’t bother us” device...

When it comes to licenses that were written “with a plan”, there is a charitable reading and an uncharitable one.

The charitable reading is that, back then, it was assumed that every computer user, local or remote, would have access to a compiler; and that any user would eventually learn how to operate a compiler, hence making it obvious that they would want to mod and compile the software they ran. And then they saw the licenses worked well enough to develop an ecosystem, and more or less left it at that (unless explicitly threatened, as they did when reacting to freeloading trends in embedding with the GPL 3).

The less charitable reading is that they left the door open precisely because they knew it ensured demand for service providers and system administrators (which many of the original “foss hackers” were, in their day job).

In any case, I don’t think anyone would have predicted they would become so dominant; everyone just assumed the big commercial vendors would be around forever, and FOSS would always be the underdog ecosystem; hence, leaving certain activities commercially unburdened would have always been somewhat necessary.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#517

Post by ywei3410 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #221
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I understand it the only prohibition of use is to offering the software as a cloud-hosted solution of the software itself. You very profoundly and deeply misunderstand what the SSPL actually says, which is understandable because Elastic have helped promulgate this misinformation. Please go read the license. It is not straightforward, it's very vague and exposes an organization to enormous uncertainty. If you don…

> but I think you should also explain another way for companies that develop these frameworks to be financially viable. Ironically, it is exactly Amazon that seems to be demonstrating a way to develop an open source ElasticSearch fork and be financially viable, right?

If becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world in an adjacent field and using that to fund an open source SaaS is a demonstration of a financially viable open source business; we're in trouble.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#518

Post by belval »

hanniabu wrote: post #365
belval wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am not sure that there are, but that's also the point. Open source software does not guarantee or even offer a business model. If you want to license your project with a "do what you want, no warranty" license that is attractive to contributors, you cannot also add a clause to limit something.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#519

Post by autarch »

vrtx0 wrote: post #492
autarch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SSPL is not an open source license. This is quite clear. The Open Source Initiative, stewards of the term "open source", have said so at https://opensource.org/node/1099 . While AWS may be disingenuous, the statement you quoted is 100% correct.

Nobody wants the SSPL (not even MongoDB), but Amazon is forcing companies to do this while contributing nothing. These projects are still open source, and actually contribute to the libraries they depend upon. As a former developer of MongoDB who watched this happen, I’ve contributed to a variety of open source projects. MongoDB also couldn’t just lay everybody off and let Amazon grow their monopolies (much like Orac…

I'm not defending Amazon here, just pointing out that they are correct to say that the SSPL is not open source.

I _do_ think it was very shifty of Elastic to say that switching to the SSPL was "doubling down on open".

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#520

Post by cphoover »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #211
cphoover wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary." Hmmm.... is that what happened or did AWS usurp Elastic's main stream of…

So one reason I choose open source is precisely because of the legal guarantee that there will be comptetition in providing services based on it. If I become dependent on it, one company can't control the pricing of people offering hosted services, because it's open source, nobody needs their permission to host it. "vendor lock-in" does not exist with open source. If that was incompatible with ES's business model for…

It is a fair point
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