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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#671

Post by test-account »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #410
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, have you ever operated Elasticsearch at scale? I haven't operated at the petabyte level but I have at the terabyte level, and everything I've seen tells me that this move is going to hurt Elastic immensely. They've forced Amazon to create the Elastic equivalent of postgressql/mariadb/jenkins ci.

What downside exists for Elastic from making this change? If AWS makes valuable contributions on their fork, Elastic will absorb them, but the converse is no longer true. If the downside is that the AWS hosted ElasticSearch service will become successful, well, that was happening anyway before the relicensing.

Aws has an advantage of the manpower. They can easily move ahead of origin and ES can never catch up.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#672

Post by zapov »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #440
bigiain wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Stallman at least, the principles of "Open Source" are much less deep that the principals of "free software". His opinion says the "Open Source" philosophy is based off watering down "free software" principles. "The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free softwa…

> And that "free software" licences especially the viral ones exemplified by GPL/AGPL are also still relevant in 2021, and having chosen one of those would have given Elastic.co what they claim to be demanding... (I think I agree there too.) I think we agree up until this point, at which you fall into a trap. This is the same trap I was trying to avoid by giving my SSPL scenario above. A copyleft license like GPLv3 d…

A much better description would be "distributing usage to others" instead of just "using". Which is much better analogy for what is going on here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#673

Post by ayush--s »

sandGorgon wrote: post #591

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 com…

This is quite true. Right now we are working to move our $(msg queue software) from $(one of its market leaders) to AWS's in-house offering, because the network transfer cost is twice the cost of our subscription on the $(one of its market leaders).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#674

Post by smokey_circles »

I understand the question mark about what it is that Amazon did wrong here, and for the most part I agree that they've done nothing wrong.

But I am not Amazon's side here. This is my very subjective take on the matter and by no means am I claiming to be correct.

Amazon represents and existential threat to the open source business model. To those who say otherwise: How do you compete with a company with the incredible amount of resources available to Amazon? They could outprice you (running at a loss) and use that as leverage to bring your customers into their ecosystem.

I'm not saying Amazon is actively hostile towards opensource. I recognise that they even submit contributions to the stacks they use (at least the ones I've seen). But there's no argument that I could host a better instance than Amazon. That would be one hell of a grandiose delusion.

I don't know what the answer is here for open source. Maybe a license that allows free use, but prohibits you directly competing (offering a paid solution for support of the product) without a license.

I don't think that's unfair stance to take, it doesn't punish Amazon for being such an incredibly successful and powerful hosting provider (I like AWS, I really hope I'm not sounding hostile towards them) but it creates a symbiotic relationship instead of a directly competitive one.

Maybe I'm being naive and overlooking something, but I don't see what choices Elastic had here.

I don't agree with the arguments that Elastic made a killing last year and therefore they should shut up and be grateful. Be grateful for what, exactly? That a behemoth of a platform is taking business share from them? You can't expect them to be OK with that, surely. I don't agree with their response either, but I think it's time the open source community acknowledges that we're in a different era now and we need a license to reflect that.

1. Don't punish Amazon, they haven't done anything wrong (and you can very easily nuke small businesses that offered support too, nobody is whining about them). Open source should belong to all of us. Making money off of that should really belong the original authors. I don't think that's a wildly ridiculous opinion.

2. Protect your business model, or maybe even come up with a new one that works hand-in-hand with a hosting provider like Amazon, rather than waiting for them to drain your market (which is not their intention but you can't ignore that it's happening).

An example I can think of for 2) is building a version of the product that's more suitable for Amazon, which might help relieve overhead for them setting that product up. Then charge them for supporting that codebase. I'm imagining a twist of the "enterprise-grade" tier with extra features for enterprise-grade users. Have a "cloud-provider" tier on top of that (that supports replication, multi-instance, easy-up-down state or whatever you can think of).

Again: I'm just a dude who thinks there's a growing elephant in the room that can be addressed in a manner that's beneficial to all parties. I don't mean to attack Amazon or Elastic, but I think this incident is a harbinger for what's to come

-----

EDIT: Maybe the right move is to approach the cloud providers as an OSS provider and ask them to work with you on your business model. Don't wait for Amazon to build your product into an offering, build it with them. Take a cut of the revenue. Maybe?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#675

Post by smokey_circles »

fastball wrote: post #314
mikesabbagh wrote: post #303

What will happen next? AWS will poach elastic developers. AWS will need to show the open source community what happens when someone revolts. They now need to destroy elastic at any cost. I hope elastic has some large releases coming up, or some tricks up their sleeves

Do people really believe Amazon is as predatory as this comment makes out? Amazon is winning because they've been delivering a better product in general . AWS was a game-changer when it came on the scene. They continue to add new services all the time. AMZN is not MSFT. Why would Amazon need to nerf the other guys when people like them better in the first place?

I don't think their intention is to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but I also think it's a side affect of being such a behemoth with a much better offering.

I can't think of a way to offer an OSS product and make money in the "traditional" means of support when Amazon is around. You just can't compete with them because you're right: They are a MUCH better product.

Not because they understand the software better than you (although I'm not saying they don't either), they just have more resources.

Why can't we work together instead of being in direct competition, you know? There must be a way to do that

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#676

Post by wahern »

stickfigure wrote: post #659
wahern wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Affero General Public License (AGPL) was published in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License Plenty of people saw this coming. It was completely predictable. The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught o…

> The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught on are complex. They are not complex. Permissive licenses encourage adoption but hinder monetization; restrictive licenses do the opposite. Pick your poison.

That was the argument against the GPL, and yet Linux beat BSD. The tension exists, but it's not such a simple trade-off, and the dynamic is highly context dependent. The complexity is in identifying and achieving the best business model.

Like with the GPL 20 years ago, the intuition today seems to be that licenses like the AGPL are simply anathema to adoption (because "viral", etc) and therefore market capture, and if you can't capture the market you can't monetize your investment. It's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but eventually more people (authors, users, etc) will begin to explore the space commercially and, hopefully, disprove the conventional wisdom.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#677

Post by smokey_circles »

vrtx0 wrote: post #479

Wow. Amazon is blatantly misleading people here. They know the SSPL was created specifically because MongoDB had the same issues with Amazon’s service. I worked for MongoDB. Nobody wanted the SSPL, but Amazon was relentless. MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing nothing to the project. T…

> Amazon is blatantly misleading people here

I'm not so sure I agree about that, presuming you're talking about the open source comments. If not, you can ignore the rest of the comment (except the last paragraph, pertinent question for you)

The SSPL is not an open source license [0], and that's all there is to it.

There must be a better version of it out there somewhere. Something to the tune of "use our software as you wish, however you may not offer it as a hosted solution without a license from us. This license entitles you to direct support and other goodies to justify such a stance".

I can't think of those "other" goodies but that's why I'm not a business type :D

I don't think I'm making a crazy statement here, am I? Maybe I'm just being young and naive. Can you shed some light on your experience with trying to work with Amazon to address the problems? I imagine they didn't listen (they're just too big to care it seems), but I'd like some first-hand experience to gauge with.

[0]: https://opensource.org/node/1099

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#678

Post by temikus »

tim-- wrote: post #649
temikus wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code contributed under Apache stays that way. IANAL but I think code doesn’t really belong to contributors if they agreed to sign their rights over with a CLA, no? Which is why I always feel iffy about CLA’s. I get why they’re needed but I don’t like what they enable.

But the code licensed as Apache 2.0 stays that way. The open code doesn't magically become closed source.

So AFAIK it’s not exactly so. One can actually change project license granted they have agreement of every single contributor to do so. Which they do since they had the CLA system from the start.

So theoretically they can even unpublish all the code if they want. It’s just probably not worth the reputation as damage.

IANAL though so I’d be very interested to hear a patent lawyer take on this.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#679

Post by nprateem »

AWS slagging off Elastic in this post really isn't a good look. I expect more of them. There's one thing putting spin on their decision (which only non technical managers will be fooled by) but whinging about Elastic writing a 'blustery blog post' and doing something 'fishy' etc is pathetic.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#680

Post by sunderw »

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 an interesting anecdote.

I think a possible solution to that problem could be a universal basic income, itself funded on the likes of Amazon.

If you had the assurance that you'd always have something to live with, wouldn't you be more open to take the risk of going open-source and see if you can run a business of that ?

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