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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#591

Post by sandGorgon »

The issue here is that it's quite impossible to compete with AWS if it offers even an inferior version of a service.

Because of network egress pricing.

You are most likely on AWS already. And even if elastic offers a 2x better product at 1/2 the price, your cost of traffic for an external service will easily 4x versus using AWS services. And that's really the frustration for these service providers.

You can NEVER compete. Ever. Against an equivalent service offered by AWS because the egress pricing acts as a pricing barrier.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#592

Post by jasontedor »

bawolff wrote: post #551
jeswin wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. That doesn't follow from your preceding statement. Elastic doesn't want to constrain all users of their software by using AGPL; and instead they adopted a license which imposes restrictions only on cloud providers. That's better compared to AGPL for general consumers, if you ask me.

Not if I am a cloud provider.

Jason from Elastic here.

I want to clarify this. Building a SaaS product with Elasticsearch or Kibana on the backend is okay and not prohibited, as long the service is not “managed” Elasticsearch nor Kibana. For example, a music service that uses Elasticsearch on the backend to provide music catalog search is okay. A service that offers site search powered by Elasticsearch is okay. A log search service powered by Elasticsearch is okay (again, provided it doesn’t expose Elasticsearch functionality). We welcome applications built with Elasticsearch or Kibana in the backend, even those that would be seen as competitors, as long as they are not managed Elasticsearch nor Kibana services. The Elastic License allows this, and you can do it for free. See this [item][0] in our FAQ. If you have any doubt, reach out to elastic_license@elastic.co and we would be happy to clarify.

Disclaimer: I am on the Elasticsearch team and work for Elastic; I welcome any and all feedback.

[0]: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing#i-build-a-saas-...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#593

Post by skolsuper »

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…

> Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients.

I wouldn't necessarily say AWS' ability to use ES as a loss-leader for their Data Transfer charges is better for AWS's clients in the long-run. I can certainly see the argument for calling it exploitation.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#594

Post by paulryanrogers »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #429
paxys wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight. They are both multi-billion dollar corporations looking out for their shareholders' interests. "Open source" is being thrown around by both sides as a marketing/goodwill tool, nothing more.

“Acting out of self interest” doesn’t make you the bad guy. In fact, it makes you the good guy because you chose to align your own interests with something that is good. This is why Apple is the “good guy” when it comes to privacy and Google is the “bad guy” (relative to each other at least). Sure, Apple is acting in their own interest when they advertise how privacy focused they are. But they chose to make that a se…

And not for lack of trying, but rather because iAds failed

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#595

Post by LordHumungous »

kodah wrote: post #384
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…

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…

And all of their servers run Linux kernel.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#596

Post by cameldrv »

kodah wrote: post #424
ryukafalz wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. Gaps in open source licensing? The license Elastic chose explicitly allows anyone to take the code, run it as they wish, and not contribute anything back. There are other FOSS licenses that are slightly more strict about this; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone…

CentOS and Fedora are both trademarks owned by RedHat and staffed by RedHatters.

They are now. CentOS was originally created outside of Redhat to remove all of Redhat’s trademarks from RHEL, since that was the only part of RHEL that wasn’t freely redistributable. When CentOS originally came out, my impression was that Redhat was not very happy, similar to Elasticsearch here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#597

Post by paulryanrogers »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #533
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic. Simply put, this is a naive and entitled attitude. And here's my proof of that: Elastic is a success story. They gave away software for fr…

On the contrary, this is win-win for everyone: Amazon now has to make their fork competitive with Elastic's, so they'll have to invest more resources in open source development. Elastic is also still free to grab their Apache-licensed improvements. Meanwhile, if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

> if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

Except Amazon has a moat: no egress fees and network effects. AWS is starting the race way ahead.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#598

Post by paulryanrogers »

riku_iki wrote: post #98
caymanjim wrote: post #63

AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source. Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money…

> This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product. This is controversial example, in my understanding MySql creator requested to agree with his terms for all OSS commits, which gave him copyright rights on codebase, then sold his rights to Sun, and only then created MariaDb - OSS fork.

Where is the controversy there? Did he sign a non-compete?

NextCloud and OwnCloud

Jenkins and Hudson

More software is good.

I'd say the MariaDB-is-better conclusion is controversial since the improves to Oracle's MySQL are substantial. At least around Innodb, and disregarding their embarrassingly bad bugs.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#600

Post by skolsuper »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #564
eins1234 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective. But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term: I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good…

It’s not a chilling effect. It’s how value is exchanged in a free market. Open source makes sense when many companies benefit economically from sharing resources to develop common software/tooling. Open sourcing code from inception can lead to adoption and create profits. At some point that code may be more valuable to another company in some way and they profit from it. I don’t see Linus Torvalds complaining about c…

They're literally describing the chilling effect. It shows a lack of imagination if you think this "free market" is the only way to create valuable software.

PS. In a truly free market, there would be no enforcement of license violations except that which companies could muster themselves, i.e. Elastic would be able to hire mercenaries to loot and pillage AWS' data centres

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