Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#771

Post by popcorncowboy »

Haha bravo Amazon, you couldn't have scripted a more perfect response. Well done. Game on etc.

Elastic is a 15 billion dollar MONSTER of a publicly traded company doing hundred+ million revenue per quarter. By market cap they'd be a ~top-20 biggest company overall and contender if not title-holder for the biggest tech company in the UK, Australia, and most other non-US countries. They are not some plucky feel-good startup fighting the good fight against nasty/unfair big-corps that are drinking their milkshake.

That multi-billion dollar corporation does not own ElasticSearch 7.10 any more than Amazon does. Elastic have taken 7.10 and released it under a new license that prevents others from doing stuff with it. That's allowed. You could do that too. It's allowed. And some plucky startup in a garage (or say, Google, or MS, or Amazon) could decide they'll make changes to 7.10 and release it open source. All fine. All allowed.

If your argument is that AWS is a form of mono/duo/oligo-poly and there are antitrust matters at play due to distorted market power being used illegally to crush a competitor... great make that argument.

Most of the other arguments boil down to variations on an anti-capitalist theme.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#772

Post by indeed30 »

Xylakant wrote: post #683
jasontedor wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ela…

What exactly does `provided it doesn’t expose Elasticsearch functionality` mean? Is exposing KQL via a search field in violation or not? Is exposing the Lucene query language okay or not? Is selling an on-prem monitoring solution that uses ES/Kibana as datastore and visualization interface ok? Is accepting payment from a client to run and maintain that solution in the clients datacenter okay? Is running that solution…

I agree and find that caveat baffling. "The ability to search a store of information for user-supplied input" is fairly clearly elasticsearch functionality, but it seems that is allowed? They have to be more specific on what this means.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#773

Post by emn13 »

pessimizer wrote: post #706
bccdee wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. Suppose Elastic does lose control of their codebase, and it winds up getting maintained entirely by AWS. Then what's to stop AWS from taking their forked Apache2 code closed-source? Bam, no more ElasticSearch. Without professional maintainers, CVEs will pile up and it will gradually become abandonware. Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Am…

> The whole point of open-source is to curate a useful software commons. If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.

Even if we take out the whole morals aspect of it all, because capitalism, I think this this is really right. Yes on: amazon is free to do whatever the license allows. But no on: if that wee the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license.

I think the point of OSS - and there are various flavors so this isn't some unitary point, but more like a general direction - is the insight that copyright isn't actually a good model for software development. OSS licenses are a hack to sidestep fundementally misdesigned legal structures while staying within them. But because OSS uses licenses to create a more open development model, it's restricted in what it can do; it's "just" an EULA essentially.

Ideally, we'd fix this in the law, not via tricky licenses, but we don't live in a world where that ideal is anywhere even close to a serious enough problem to be addressed - at least, that's my take on "the point of the [OSS] licensing".

The various flavors of OSS try additionally to either use various other approaches to encourage a more open model in a closed world, or conversely don't bother since it's a hopeless endeavor, or vary exactly how open they want things to be; but the general gist is that the license is a hack; it's a design limitation, not by design.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#774

Post by pas »

jiofih wrote: post #702
sg47 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has not been contributing back to the open source projects when they offer a service based on it. E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/performance-updates-to... Amazon EMR release 5.24.0 includes several optimizations in Spark that improve query performance. Why have these optimizations not been contributed back to the community?

There is nothing unfair about being able to make optimizations of your own on top of the software. That freedom is in fact one of the core values of OSS. Any “fairness” judgements you make are irrelevant for as long as the license satisfies its goal and the software is freely available to everyone .

Fairness (ethics, moral judgement, justice) is inherently a different layer of our civilization than license (law, contracts). I'd say fairness is more important than any and all licenses ever.

Also, I think through history every law was made in the name of making law more just, bringing the legal system closer to an ideal of justice.

We also know that simply throwing out law and bringing back case by case judgments (eg. what kings and lords of old did) just gets us further from that ideal, hence we work on our laws and licenses. But that doesn't mean we should forget that they are imperfect and sometimes they need updating.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#775

Post by pas »

weego wrote: post #58
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…

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…

The irony is strong in this case, because Elastic started by making ES into an open core thing and putting every new feature into their business side. (The improvements they made to the basic ES clustering, indexing, sharding, Lucene integration, etc. are very valuable, and I'm not discounting them, but their added value is drastically reduced compared to the features. Just like AWS' added value for businesses is a lot more important than having yet another cool x-pack feature.)

AWS is the bigger fish :|

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#776

Post by unilynx »

freeqaz wrote: post #717
pessimizer wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily. "Just" making it free software (eg slapping a GPL v2 on Elasticsearch) doesn't require AWS to share any changes to the codebase, and wouldn't have prevented the current AWS/Elastic drama as it wouldn't have prevented AWS from monetizing Elasticsearch.

Now AGPL might have, if it was used from the start... not because it would prevent any monitization, but because it might bring enough legal uncertainty for AWS to even consider using it

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#777

Post by sandGorgon »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #722
boulos wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Just to clarify, AWS has a feature called PrivateLink [1] that charges $.01/GB transferred between a Service provider and the end customer (I thought there was a free variant for same AZ, but I seem to be wrong about that). We offer a similar feature called VPC Peering, and in particular Private Service Access [2]. Because we can be sure that the traffic is in the same Zone (or not…

AWS PrivateLink is just one option. AWS also offers free VPC peering too, but PrivateLink works better.

VPC peering is not free.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#778

Post by TeMPOraL »

spoonjim wrote: post #626
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…

The people expecting a “code of honor” in American capitalism are hopelessly naive. You may as well ask a lion to observe a code of honor and not target any sickly antelopes.

A strong lion may seemingly indulge such a code of honor for a while - not because of honor, but because healthy antelopes taste better and the lion is fast enough to catch them. But these conditions can change at any moment.

This mirrors how, in general, markets approach human values. They're a nice thing to have if you can afford them, perhaps you can mention them in your marketing - but the moment competition threatens your margins, you'll drop these values to stay competitive. Ethics is a market inefficiency, and expecting companies to behave ethically over time if not explicitly forced to is, indeed, naive.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#779

Post by indymike »

First, the dispute between AWS and Elasic is a trademark dispute. Second, ES had always been incomplete in it's open source form. No auth or access control (this feature requires an x-pack subscription) is included. It's also important to point out that ES relies on other open source software (Lucene) for its core functionality. Its hard to feel bad for either party here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#780

Post by mathnmusic »

ksec wrote: post #241
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…

Forgive me, which part of [1] even mentioned Profits , Revenue , Business Models , CopyLeft ? And which part of the same article ever said Elastic are not OK with Amazon providing a Services using their Open Source Software? Which they are legally allowed to do so with Apache 2.0? They even mentioned and I quote: "We collaborate with cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud…

If the dispute is with AWS abusing the trademark, license change is an exaggerated punishment that harms many others besides AWS itself.
Post reply on HN