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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#661

Post by rualca »

jeswin wrote: post #191
weego wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original te…

> Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model;

This claim is highly unrealistic. Offering managed services has been the hallmark of the cloud from day 1. The cloud is nothing more than managed solutions.

It's highly disingenuous to claim that it was not possible to expect a business dedicated to offer managed services to offer a managed service.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#662

Post by skolsuper »

fastball wrote: post #624
skolsuper wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For me, exploitation has always required the exploited party not having a choice. Customers of AWS ES vs. Elastic ES definitely have a choice in this matter and have done so deliberately.

Oh I'm sorry, I'm referring to AWS exploiting the free software, not their customers, but I can see how I was not clear.

The rest of the 500+ comments here do a good job arguing both sides of it so I won't rehash that. Just saying that I can see that AWS taking the free thing and using it as a loss-leader (i.e. no possible way Elastic can compete) could be construed as exploitation of the free thing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#663

Post by __blockcipher__ »

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.

I totally agree, I think this is great for the community because the writing was on the wall ever since the initial X-pack source-available drama as well as the original OpenDistro drama.

I think this will be better for all involved.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#664

Post by __blockcipher__ »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #597
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elastic doesn't need to make more money than Amazon. They just need to be able to make enough to have a healthy business, and so far they've achieved that. $500MM yearly revenue with 40+% growth is nothing to scoff at.

It really seems like Elastic's motivation here is jealousy more than anything else. Which I understand from an emotional perspective, but from a logical perspective it's a big business blunder they've made IMO.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#665

Post by hrktb »

parasubvert wrote: post #96
tw04 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because an 800lbs gorilla is trying to crush an open source project? They could've come up with some agreement to oem Elastic and they both could've benefited. Instead they decided to just build a competing service at the expense of Elastic. It's the same reason most of the community had no time for Oracle forking RHEL. >AWS contributes improvements to the project. Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't v…

You’re confused. This isn’t about crushing an OSS project: it’s about ensuring there actually IS an open source project. What Elastic is doing with its licensing is not open source. You might argue that if Elastic Inc dies then the project dies, but then it wasn’t a very robust project.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a project would die if it’s original developper community dies. Some projects survive that shift, but it’s the exception more than the rule.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#666

Post by hrktb »

fastball wrote: post #613
dodobirdlord wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made a mistake with their original licensing, and now they have corrected it. The comments on this post seem strangely invested in Elastic not fixing their mistake.

Right but "who is wrong" is what the disagreement is about, and if Elastic made the mistake then arguably it is them who are wrong. In contrast, a number of people here are acting as if AWS is totally in the wrong. But the only wrong here is Elastic making the mistake and then acting as if the whole thing is AWS' fault. No, if you license your software improperly that's on you, not anyone else.

Does it need to be a binary thing ?

Elastic made a strategic mistake, and Amazon made the jerk move that was open to them.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#667

Post by jasonkester »

eins1234 wrote: post #557
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 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 frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no reason for you to feel the need to justify building a business off of your software product, but I can completely understand why you do.

Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad thing, and that the only true way to be a developer is to give your work away for free as Open Source. Even silly things like negotiating for a market rate salary from your employer are frowned upon as caring only for money.

But that's all backwards. There are good reasons to release your work product as Open Source, and those all share the quality that they give you or your business some tangible benefit. So it's simple: do the benefits of open sourcing your thing outweigh the downside? If yes, go for it. If no, don't. But don't spend even a second worrying about whether it's the "right" thing to do for silly moral reasons.

If there was one thing I could change about our industry, it would be to remove the 5 year Open Source Indoctrination brainwashing session you need to go through at University before entering it. Because we'd spend a lot less time being taken advantage of later in life.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#668

Post by supermatt »

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…

The real problem is that WE, as a community, demand certain licenses from the tools we use. If Elasticsearch didn't have such a permissive license, we simply wouldnt have used it, it wouldnt have become popular, and there would be no demand for AWS to provide it as a managed service.

So is ES to blame for having a permissive license? Or is it AWS for making it trivial to use? Or are we to blame for dismissing any license that isn't OSI approved (and even then, we still snort at things like Affero GPL!)

IMHO, if there IS a "bad guy" in this situation, its us...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#669

Post by ayush--s »

Rudisimo wrote: post #569
mathnode wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MariaDB came out with the BSL license for projects like maxcale to help protect against AWS nonsense (and the like). The mysql -> mariadb response is completely different, but no less terrible. This is history repeating itself as Amazon, once again, attempt to gut open source efforts. For a short while Amazon did contribute to some MariaDB projects. MongoDB now have similar license and AWS offers compatible API's.

Yet, MongoDB seems to maintain a healthy, symbiotic relationship with AWS [1][2][3]. [1]: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/lp/try2 [2]: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/aws-mongodb [3]: https://www.mongodb.com/mongodb-on-aws

it does feel like the whole issue blew up so much because AWS & Elastic.co are unable to work together. We many never know the details, so can't say who's in the wrong here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#670

Post by dijit »

inssein wrote: post #284
dijit wrote: post #7

And I, for sure, will never use them. The AWS version of ES has been abysmal- it’s only saving grace is that it’s “in the ecosystem”- I was convinced by an AWS zealot on my team. Never again.

Might want to elaborate a bit. It is true that from a feature point of view, Elastic's own offering wins out, but from a perspective of uptime, cost, and performance, AWS wins.

I guess it depends on who’s managing your elk. I’ve been running elks stacks for just about 8 years in some form or another, AWS’ was very poor in availability compared to what it should have been.

There was a bunch of issues honestly, large messages got truncated, huge stalls in throughput (like 300-500ms of freezing), the fact that it was missing a bunch of features and was slower to query was just icing on the cake.

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