AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#811

Post by IgorPartola » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

budlightvirus wrote: post #803

IgorPartola wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The quality of the service you get depends on if AWS makes a profit?

Also, do you think they make a profit on the bare EC2 instance? If so, why do you think that running a few management scripts that manage ES running on it would add up to more than $0.094/hour?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#812

Post by terryf » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

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…

Yes, the license allows it. So, technically they can. But you have to admit that it's a bit of a dick move.

The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist.

How many other new interesting products will no longer be built as open source, because they know that AWS can just co-opt them and then their business will be effectively over.

The laws and licences cannot possibly cover all the details of the real world, there needs to be some humanity involved, some "let's try to not be assholes" attitude.

I prefer to live in a world where I'm not required to be a robot. Following all the clauses and laws to all the details will end up with that. It's not a great path.

We all need more empathy.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#813

Post by SquishyPanda23 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

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…

> exploit gaps in Open Source licensing

Allowing others to fork for profit and give nothing back is entirely the point of permissive licenses.

"Permissive" means exactly that developers are permitted to give nothing back. Licenses without this permission are generally copyleft.

> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together"

Not at all. That's the spirit of copyleft. The spirit of permissive licenses is that "I don't want developers to have to give anything back."

Usually this is done to deliberately allow private companies to profit off of the work without having to disclose their proprietary improvements. That is, presumably, why MIT and Berkeley licenses are permissive: they moved IP out of the university system into silicon valley as a type of indirect economic stimulus.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#814

Post by cmiles74 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

ryukafalz wrote: post #443

cwyers wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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? The gap in that case was that the GPL was not sufficient to ensure that software remain free software when companies started using SaaS for software that previously would have been run locally.…

Amazon doesn't need to use a proprietary license, the product they have built around Elasticsearch is itself proprietary. They have produced and are selling Elasticsearch-as-a-service for their AWS environment.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#815

Post by esrauch » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #433

cwyers wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close? Yes, because ES didn't use any GPL license even when they had every option to; they used the Apache license which is explicitly incredibly permissive.

I don't think this is a fair critique: they have a pragmatic goal of running a business while being as unrestrictive as possible.

With their Apache choice a pragmatic balance was met where developers could use/modify it as they please or use a managed solution from EC or even a managed solution from another company. The ecosystem thrives and their company can thrive.

But a managed solution from AWS ends being materially new and different: AWS is able to undercut them on every front, and people end up viewing AWS ElasticSearch as the canonical ElasticSearch.

Maybe trademark infringement aside, Amazon didn't break the law but they created an unprecedented situation that changed the effective balance of power which changed whether Apache was achieving their EC's goals or not.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#816

Post by hanniabu » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #764

hanniabu wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are better alternative licenses that also wouldn't deter contributors?

So you're looking for a license that would give you all the benefits but still encourage people to contribute - so only you get their work for free?

Yes and no. I think I remember hearing about a license before that would require anybody that forks your project to create a PR for any changes they make.

While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project, but it would at least force them to pass on any of their changes.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#817

Post by t0mas88 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

robhu wrote: post #768

t0mas88 wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a slideshare about their networking approach for VPC somewhere it's quite clever. But I can't find anything for EBS and what features it might have that make Aurora replicate the way it does.

I'd be interested in seeing that slideshare if you have it to hand?

Edit: I found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St3SE4LWhKo it uses the slides I mean but looks like there are a few versions from different events. Google for "another day, another billion packets"

I remember what it looks like, tried to Google it but can't find it. The gist of it was that they didn't create any tunnels or VPN like infrastructure to create VPC, because it wouldn't scale to large numbers of nodes. Especially because your servers can be on completely different hosts all of their internal network.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#818

Post by cmiles74 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

klintcho wrote: post #632

sokoloff wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as “there are a variety of licenses from which to choose, depending on your goals”. BSD, Apache, and MIT all represent different points in space, as do GPL and AGPL. When I choose Apache or MIT, I do so for a reason and if you or Amazon use code in compliance with that license, I’m happy and you’re not “exploiting a gap” but rather “complying with the terms I offered”.

Fully agree with this. Free is free, you could always argue that there is "a spirit to open source"; but as with everything there's always going to be people exploiting and using it, that comes with the free. To me it boils down to if you think that it's worth it: whenever I put MIT or Apache 2.0 on my public Github projects, I don't mind anyone going out making millions on them. Other side of the coin; if I make mil…

It's worth keeping in mind that we don't always know which projects will truly become successful. The precursor to Elasticsearch, Compass, wasn't hugely popular. When I started looking hard at Elasticsearch, with plans to actually use it, I had to spend a lot of time explaining why I didn't want to use Solr, which was much more popular at the time.

In my opinion, the bottom line is this: if Amazon's exploitative behavior is continues then we're going to see more and more open source products shift towards janky-kind-of-open-source or entirely closed licenses. Small or experimental projects will have open and permissive licenses, their authors will have plans for shifting licenses should the product become really successful.

I think it marks the end of this idea that you could have an open source project and then build a commercial offering around it. No matter who you are, odds are good Amazon will get such an offering off the ground faster and they have a built-in market of AWS customers.

Elasticsearch has made their motives clear: they have real concerns that Amazon is diluting their brand and they feel that Amazon is costing them too many customers with their proprietary AWS product. We can quibble about the morals of Amazon's move (they have none, corporations have no morals) but let's not lose sight of the outcome: Amazon has forced another OSS project to switch to a closed license[0].

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/redis-labs-changes-its-ope...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#819

Post by disposablethrow » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

Elastic is a for profit business.

Steven Schuuman [1] was CEO before Shay Bannon. Schuuman (who made 450MM from selling SpringSource to VMWare) is a billionaire. Stop pretending this is about "OSS" and not 'hey, that's my mad money Jeff!'.

If Elastic was a company that was fully owned only by "OSS Developers", then fine, this would be an opportunity to support that sort of enlightended for profit corporation and fellow developers.

But the stakeholders here are Billionaires and millionaires. No doubt Elastic took very good care of software developers (lots of perks) but since this is about money (lest we forget) it would be interested to see a breakdown of just who made what from this "OSS" "project".

(And yes, not even a fan of Amazon.)

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/profile/steven-schuurman/

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#820

Post by jrochkind1 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

alphager wrote: post #710

ywei3410 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world in an adjacent field and using that to fund an open source SaaS is a demonstration of a financially viable open source business; we're in trouble.

Going from the frankly insane pricing for managed ES on AWS (we tried it, were happy with the service and massively disappointed in the pprice, now manage our own on AWS), Amazon makes enough money from the SaaS to fund it.

How does the price compare to other managed ES including from the ES founders?

If it's super non-competitive high, it is even more curious they seem to see it as such a threat. I'm becoming increasingly unsure if they actually see it as a threat, or if it's just like "nobody should be able to make money from our open source without giving us a cut".

Or is it just that all managed ES seems too expensive to you?