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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#571

Post by tebruno99 »

dathinab wrote: post #481
mixedCase wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this is a "gap in Open Source licensing"? Is it not more easily explained as Elastic's business plan having a gaping hole instead? Don't put the cart before the horse. They built on top of a license that gave the user a set of freedoms they don't want the user to have. End of story. Now they've patched this hole, but they want to keep the goodwill that comes from Open Source licensing instead of…

> 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…

If you actually do Open Source, you wouldn't feel exploited. You would feel happy that the terms you specified were honored.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#572

Post by skywhopper »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #476
dialamac wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really get how people get this twisted. Quite condescending this attitude. I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple. And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are somet…

I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software license…

Why does Elastic deserve to be deferred to here, though. They are making the license overly restrictive. Now I can’t start my own ELK stack hosting company. Meanwhile Amazon will likely benefit more users by keeping ES and Kibana open in a way that encourages their use and encourages contribution. I’m certainly not going to submit patches for Elastic’s forks now.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#573

Post by skywhopper »

lmm wrote: post #510
kodah wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to th…

> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported. Or Amazon (or a third party) may take over maintenance of ES if it's worth it to them. That's the whole point of open source. > You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can…

To be clear, Amazon is taking over maintenance of ES and Kibana. That’s explicitly what’s happening.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#574

Post by m-p-3 »

z77dj3kl wrote: post #294
tschellenbach wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that >95% of Elastic's code is created by the company and not external contributors.

Yes, but open-source software adoption and growth is about more than just those who build it, it's about those who use it. Elastic wouldn't exist without the users either.

And Amazon wouldn't have ElasticSearch without Elastic.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#575

Post by [deleted] »

markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#576

Post by tebruno99 »

tybit wrote: post #508
kodah wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to th…

If you believe that just because you can exploit a license doesn’t mean you should, do you believe Elastic have wronged ElasticSearch and Lucene’s contributors by not compensating them(other than those that are employees)? I don’t understand the argument that a company should get to “own” all the profits for a particular FOSS project.

Its not exploited. There are several other license options Elastic could have used other than the one that says "Do whatever you want".

The license communicates to others how you approve the usage of your copyright work. If you aren't communicating "do whatever you want" don't pick a license that literally says "do whatever you want".

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#577

Post by wpaladin »

sciurus wrote: post #358
MisterPea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.

Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ > Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.

Kafka is an ASF project, and not controlled by Confluent. There is nothing stopping anyone from offering a hosted Kafka. You seem to be conflating Kafka with Confluent's own products.

>No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors.

I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#578

Post by tebruno99 »

NDizzle wrote: post #418
bigiain wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Maybe. I can no longer tick the "does it use an approved open source license" compliance checkbox any more. Sadly, for me, there's now a very strong incentive to move forward with an Apache2.0 licensed Amazon fork instead of the Elastic one.

Nobody can afford to use an Apache 2.0 license when an Amazon type company also uses your product in the same way.

Nobody has to use a license. If you don't feel you can afford it, don't use it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#579

Post by cycloptic »

reissbaker wrote: post #473
kodah wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to th…

I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back. The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acqu…

>The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service.

I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying on AWS" they have to be able to translate that into profit. This seems like a lose-lose for Elastic as they have effectively ceded all that away to this fork. The use of SSPL also seems like nonsense here that won't result in them seeing a dime from Amazon.

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