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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#801

Post by kevincox »

stefan_ wrote: post #364
rdsubhas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package. Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance…

> The first version of the Affero General Public License (AGPLv1), was published by Affero, Inc. in March 2002 Stallman strikes again!

The AGPL was a good attempt but it seems that it too vague. For example even Google, with its teams of lawyers doesn't feel comfortable using it for any purpose.

https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

It appears that they are concerned that it may be argued that if for example YouTube uses an AGPL DB that they would be required to release YouTube under AGPL.

I'm not saying that the interpretation is correct, but if companies can't be sure they won't use your software.

And to be honest IANAL but their interpretation seems reasonable to me. If you put Mastodon behind NGINX I think it is fairly easy to argue that the user is "interacting with it remotely through a computer network". So now if you have a theoretical AGPL Elasticsearch and your site sends the user search query to it and returns the user the results it doesn't seem clear that this is a legally meaningful difference. I certainly wouldn't want to argue that in court. I'd just use different software.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#802

Post by kevincox »

hrktb wrote: post #666
fastball wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about Elastic making the "jerk move" by switching the license under Amazon?

Amazon built the product with the hope that it would continue to be developed with that license. What are they supposed to do with the license change? Just accept whatever Elastic said? I don't think you can blame them for taking the last version where they agreed with the license and continue to use and develop it. Sure, maybe making it open is a bit of a jab back, but even in isolation it makes sense for them.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#803

Post by budlightvirus »

IgorPartola wrote: post #790
theamk wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at a single machine (i3.large, 15GB ram, 470GB SD): Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)

So if we assume the level of service is not much better, AWS is the more prudent choice, no? So trademark issues aside, AWS does ES better than Elastic?

To me that would depend on whether AWS Elasticsearch is actually profitable at that price point, or whether they are running at a loss to grab market share.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#804

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

kodah wrote: post #384
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…

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…

> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source.

Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, and Eric S. Raymond, the people who invented Free Software and Open Source, all specifically said, at the very creation of the god damn licenses, that this would happen, and was perfectly fine. They specifically wrote their licenses to allow this. It's not an accident or exploitation, it's a fundamental part of what they exist to serve, which is the user's rights.

The Open Source Initiative, Debian, and Fedora, have all banned licenses like SSPI which exist solely to punish cloud service providers. If that's not the open source spirit telling you where you can stick it, I don't know what is.

You are trying to twist things here. If the people who invented the thing said this is to be expected, then it's part of the spirit.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#805

Post by frant-hartm »

8ytecoder wrote: post #215
swiley wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get upset about the GPL but this is exactly why it was created.

Precisely why GPL is the way it is. If a company released Apache or BSD code they must understand that the code can be used and extended for commercial purposes and they don't have to offer those extensions back to the community. If you want to ensure those who derive benefits from it also contribute back, you choose GPL.

GPL doesn't require you to give back to the community, only to your users. That's a huge difference and that's why GPL is generally ok for internal projects.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#806

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #126
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…

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…

Your argument illustrates the hard fact revealed by the Parler ban. No, Amazon isn't a monopoly (I'm using an Elastic cluster on Azure), but they wield influence as though they were.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#807

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

loceng wrote: post #766
jazzkingrt wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you read the two parent comments to "this is the correct take", they also take an authoritative mood. Rather qualifying a statement with "I think", or "I believe", they basically assume some reality to be true and then describe it. And that's ok, as readers we assume that the author is giving their opinion. So "this is the correct take" should be read as "in the reality that I believe is true, this is the…

Except [I believe] it should be called out to help the author become aware of the rigidity in thought of they are unaware of it. Perhaps they truly believe something is the only truth., and then they can defend their authoritative statement if they wish.

It becomes tiresome to always phrase things with "I believe" or "my opinion".

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#808

Post by acatton »

sciurus wrote: post #800
markphip wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been involved with open source since 2000. I have been a member of the ASF for many of those years and worked with Apache licensed projects throughout. I have been in the position Elastic is in where I managed the employer-sponsored team working on an employer-sponsored Apache licensed project, though thankfully not against a behemoth like AWS. I have some sympathy for Elastic, but I just do not agree that AWS…

> If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve. How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?

Some ideas:

* Since their license is Apache (most likely because they have an Open Core business model) instead of AGPL, they could offer extra services on Elastic's managed service. Amazon wouldn't able to offer since these parts are proprietary.

* They could partner up with other Cloud Providers (Microsoft, Google, ...) to offer a managed Elastic on these clouds, before these cloud providers do it themselves.

* They could offer other proprietary products that run on top of elastic (managed by them), that would force customers to use their managed service.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#809

Post by waheoo »

pydry wrote: post #751
lmm wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were…

ES has to provide a much better service to win. Amazon can use their market power and vendor lock in to drive adoption of a worse service and squeeze out a better ES. Network effects are great for behemoths but not so good for consumers.

This is a job for antitrust, not licensing.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#810

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

The amount the dialogue has been moved to open source and "who's in the right" is a bit scary. These are billion dollar companies making decisions and writing Mean Girls-type blog posts about each other in the hope of chasing profits, but their use of the term "open source" repeatedly makes the community act like this is what matters to either of them?
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