AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#711

Post by freeqaz » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #623

freeqaz wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?

I think this is the key. My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is: 1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES 2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES 3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software proj…

I think a good example company to answer this question would be: What happened to RethinkDB? They shuttered. How has development changed for that project? Is it still alive and healthy?

That would be a single data point to start with, at least.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#712

Post by Xylakant » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #305

seneca wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment and the one you're replying to actually just changed my mind on this topic. Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wan…

If a company or a person wants to relicense their open source project, either they need to get permission from all its contributors to relicense their contributions, or the contributors already signed a CLA that allows for relicensing, or the contributors' code is removed entirely. The "free work from the community" either was contributed under the terms of a CLA that allows for relicensing, or members of the communi…

There’s a bit more community contribution that just “code”. I have never contributed code to elasticsearch, but I have co-founded the Berlin ES meetup, before elastic, the company, even was a thing. The group was for some time one of the largest around. For a while, I was one of the most active posters in their IRC channel, helping other users with whatever issues they’d have using ES. I signed no CLA, I received no money nor do I want any. But I contributed my time in the understanding that we’re all working on something that benefits both ourselves and the wider community. That implicit understanding is now gone.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#713

Post by bigphishy » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:18 AM UTC

bww wrote: post #581

I have no affection for Elastic Co, but why should they sit there and let Amazon eat their lunch? Maybe I’m forgetting something but I can’t think of a single significant open source project created by Amazon. As far as I can tell they prefer to keep their differentiating services proprietary to their platform. That’s about as far from open source as you can get. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I do think…

amazon is eating open source, it's messed up.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#714

Post by m463 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:19 AM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #422

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…

> they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close? EDIT: I do think it's fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is wors…

RMS once said: the GPL doesn't restrict how you USE the software.

If it restricts who can use the software or what they can do with it I believe it isn't classified as free software.

The AGPL is slightly different than GPL. It confers more responsibilities on cloud providers, so that the users of the software (as a service) have the right to the source and any modifications.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#715

Post by imhoguy » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

m-p-3 wrote: post #574

z77dj3kl wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both wouldn't exist without countless hours of paid/unpaid FOSS contributors (Lucene, Netty, Docker, Linux, OpenJdk).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#716

Post by jabl » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #157

majormajor wrote: post #81

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. Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source only works if…

> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing…

> Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model.

Trite as it may sound, open source isn't a business model. For a profitable business, you need something unique, a moat that competitors can't cross easily. Open source can certainly be part of that model, for example by increasing the value of your core assets. Or as Joel Spolsky wrote many years ago, commodify your complement.

Google, say, releases a lot of OSS. Guess what they're not releasing? The data they have hoovered up of practically every internet user, that they sell to their customers (companies that buy advertising, not the users). "Data is the new gold". They release tensorflow under a permissive license, not the data they're training and running their DL models on. They release Android for free, as that lowers the cost of phones and drives more users into the Google online empire, giving them ever more data. Again, "data is the new gold", "commodify your complement".

(Not picking on google here to say that they are good or evil, just an example of how you can build a spectacularly good business while also releasing a lot of OSS)

Or for all those VC-funded corps popping up trying to build OSS databases and seeing it doesn't work out (Mongo, Elastic, etc.), build a database, not a database engine. Data is the new gold, software, particularly OSS, is a commodity.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#717

Post by freeqaz » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #703

freeqaz wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague for the legal team to confidently understand the "bounds" of the copyleft license. Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like…

In these specific contexts, it's important to stop using the term "FOSS." It just clouds the issue. FOSS is Free Software and software so permissively licensed that it could be relicensed and extended as Free Software. Open Source is simply giving up your ownership of the code one wrote, and this Spirit of Open Source is when one pretends that people won't actually take advantage of explicit grant of rights for reaso…

This comment is really insightful. Thank you for the perspective!

It's an interesting idea to think that "Free Software" creates a sort of "distributed code base". In the sense that "code will be eventually pushed to the main repo when the patch is created". That's an interesting perspective.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#718

Post by hvdijk » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #136

majormajor wrote: post #81

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. Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source only works if…

> Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so…

> (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0

Where did they make this claim?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#719

Post by youngtaff » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:28 AM UTC

jiofih wrote: post #692

kodah wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends. The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations se…

Elastic is a public company worth 15B dollars now. Not the underdog. > at what threshold should someone ... stop caring You’re not caring about OSS, but about keeping your turf and “ownership” of a product that is not yours. There really is no question here that Elastic is the one doing the “corporation” move and not the other way around. > to undermine the business that was setup to sustain it Successful OSS don’t n…

They're an underdog when compared to Amazon…

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#720

Post by gadders » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

I'm as capitalist as anyone, but you do have to wonder how much money is enough. AWS/Amazon has plenty of money to do the right thing and pay ElasticSearch fairly but they'd rather rip off their work to keep Bezos in his billions.