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Elasticsearch is open source, again

elastic.co

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Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#61

Post by zokier »

echelon wrote: post #46
everfrustrated wrote: post #16

Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch. I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of people had their data compromised due to that (due to people inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)

Yes, let's praise and reward the hyperscaler and not the small company that is 1% of the size of AWS. AWS got Elastic's goodies for free. They just came in and gobbled up all of that value for themselves like vultures. Meanwhile the people putting in the work effectively got robbed. Small companies should stop doing open source and switch to source available + MAU/ARR restriction clauses.

The small company with over billion dollar revenue and thousands of employees?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#62

Post by NewJazz »

aabhay wrote: post #24
richbell wrote: post #12

> [D.N.A.] > [LOVE.] I don't understand what these are supposed to mean. Is this a new writing style, song references, or just a quirk of the author?

These are songs by Kendrick Lamar. I guess that these were used to try and add a youthful, lighthearted touch to the article? Didn't work on me though.

I'm a fan of that album and I didn't even realize the reference. Is there any other point to it?

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#63

Post by lolinder »

everfrustrated wrote: post #16

Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch. I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of people had their data compromised due to that (due to people inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)

What is "the community" here? Every metric I'm able to find (commit frequency, gh stars, gh stars gained since the launch of opensearch, stack overflow tags, google search result counts...) suggests that OpenSearch didn't really take much of Elastic's mind share in the end. Each metric I've looked at shows OpenSearch at somewhere between 20%-50% of Elastic's numbers, which isn't nothing but is a far cry from "the community".

I've heard a few anecdotes suggesting some people took it seriously, but while we're sharing those: my company actually adopted ElasticSearch since the license change and never seriously considered OpenSearch.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#64

Post by zem »

vineyardmike wrote: post #11
orra wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why they didn't treat Amazon's previous offering as a trademark infringement.

If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?

but if you set up a showroom that only sells toyota cars, i'm fairly sure you can't call it a toyota dealership

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#65

Post by coding123 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #10

Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat. Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences? I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having RBAC built into their Kibana portion.

The spark components were rushed and the documentation is super crappy.

Elasticsearch hands down for this area.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#66

Post by fmbb »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #32
vineyardmike wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?

> If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement? A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than copyrights are meant to prevent. The trademark law doctrine of nominative fair use allows you to descr…

The problem in that case is that ElasticSearch named their company after their product that they published for everyone to use or sell.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#67

Post by beardface »

unethical_ban wrote: post #10

Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat. Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences? I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having RBAC built into their Kibana portion.

For most use-cases (indexing denormalised data as documents then running searches against them), there's little difference between the two. The mechanics of how the cluster operates are almost identical.

There are some Elasticsearch features that were part of X-Pack (their commercial offering) so aren't included in the OpenSearch fork. Some of those features are really nice to have and make life much easier; the enrich ingest processor is something I really miss in OpenSearch.

The biggest differences are in the tooling around Elasticsearch. All the observability stuff, the SIEM features, various integrations, and now the AI fluff. I've worked with clients in different sectors and - aside from the observability stuff (which is really nice) - none have had an appetite for any of that.

The OpenSearch team is doing some really cool stuff and the project has come a long way. I'm sure it'll continue to improve. It has a very loyal customer base and even has its own annual event; OpenSearchCon 2024 is next month!

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#68

Post by system2 »

dboreham wrote: post #56
system2 wrote: post #33

Nice, maybe they can hire some humans to write more explanatory website text, documentation, pricing information—better yet, anything on their website. Elastic.co is the #1 example we use with our clients when we want to show how 'vague websites make you lose clients.' We show them the website and ask, 'What do you think of this company?' and 'What do you think they are providing as a service?' Not a single client, i…

I assumed that "website that tells you nothing" was a deliberate thing, presumably because somehow they make more money as a result. It seems to be the rule more than exception.

I can't think of any company does that and makes money. Imagine Apple doing the same, they'd go bankrupt.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#69

Post by chadash »

I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to open source their code, but very few of them plan to sell hosted search.

Personally, I do wish that there was more broad acceptance of the Elastic License. Who wants to put in years building a business and then have a competitor with better distribution take your code and compete directly with you? For me, the reasons to want open-source code are:

* If a vendor goes under, I can self-host

* If a vendor raises prices too much, I can self-host

* If there's a bug in the code that affects me too much, I can fix it

* If there's a feature I really need, I can add it

The Elastic License allows for all of the above. Seems fair to me.

Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again

#70

Post by shiomiru »

jcoc611 wrote: post #28
richbell wrote: post #12

> [D.N.A.] > [LOVE.] I don't understand what these are supposed to mean. Is this a new writing style, song references, or just a quirk of the author?

It kind of reads like it was LLM generated..."Write an announcement/apology about ElasticSearch finally being open source again (for now), where each paragraph starts with a relevant title from a Kendrick Lamar song"

To me, at first, it read as satire - but that doesn't make sense, coming from the official blog. Being LLM-generated is a plausible explanation - considering the circumstances, saying "open source is in our DNA" is right inside the uncanny valley.
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