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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#831

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…

People also seem to miss a point when trying to invoke the "Spirit of the Open Source License": The only reason why Elastic is changing their license is because they want to profit from it. So, isn't that exactly against the "Spirit of Open Source License"? If they truly cared about that, they should be angry about it at all.

Choosing sides here seems to be choosing between two profit seeking companies. Why, as a developer, you should take a side?

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IANAL and I am pretty sure they will need to be involved in a serious way to iron all this out. I have my understanding of the intent, which I would not invest money in at this point trying to prove, and that's as much as I can offer. It seems that you can have users search your data in your Elastic+Kibana instance. What they're precluding is you offering an Elastic instance for your customers to load their data into and then search or offer for search to their users.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#833
post #809
post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sure would be nice if the DOJ in an administration sponsored by Amazon can be relied upon to prosecute an antitrust against Amazon.

I'm skeptical though.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#834
post #424

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…

CentOS and Fedora are both trademarks owned by RedHat and staffed by RedHatters.

RedHat was never worried about CentOS, the people/companies using CentOS never had the budgets for RedHat anyway and the companies using RedHat often need certification and support contracts (due to regulations). So CentOS never was seen as a competition I would argue.

However, once Oracle started "repackaging" RedHat, and making indents RedHat acted quickly and essentially made using their patches much more difficult (https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-turns-on-oracle-and-ot...).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#835
post #766

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.

I agree but I am a firm believer that all things between people are highly situational, including when to inform, when to explain, when to suggest, when to ask, and when to listen. Correcting people can be considered impolite. In discussions marked by conflict, it's often more useful to get the other person to arrive at your conclusion themselves, by simply presenting the information and your evaluation of its meaning. It depends a lot upon the audience, the prior conversation, the circumstances etc. People are marked by a great deal of hysteresis (not to be confused with hysteria lol).

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know. I've worked for a couple of companies who open source their software and they don't open source because they believe it's good for the world (they may or may not, but it isn't the driving motivation), they open source because it's a near requirement for building a profitable business. It's easier for a no-name company to convince enterprise clients to use your software when the code is open source - it'…

I think you’re right that OSS is a customer requirement in many domains today. But I think the consequence isn’t that companies will open source despite the AWS threat — it’s that tremendously valuable software will never be built in the first place.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients. I wouldn't necessarily say AWS' ability to use ES as a loss-leader for their Data Transfer charges is better for AWS's clients in the long-run. I can certainly see the argument for calling it exploitation.

For me, exploitation has always required the exploited party not having a choice. Customers of AWS ES vs. Elastic ES definitely have a choice in this matter and have done so deliberately.

But do they really, in all cases?

Due to the market share of AWS for many potential customers it will come down to a decision between

a) click here in the aws marketplace and have my service added to the invoice my company gets every month anyway

b) start the painful process of onboarding a new vendor, get a quote, have procurement haggle with them for months etc etc etc. (overstating it a bit, I know)

And that is where to me it becomes a question of using/abusing your position in the market to a certain extent..

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#839
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…

I like FOSS and even just OSS and I have good arguments, largely borrowed from others, for why it's good and why we should often use it. It's not a panacea, though. I'm about to write some things that RMS would not endorse.

If the code is your original, differentiating product, go ahead and make it proprietary if it helps you. If there's some code that supports your product, that helps make your product possible, or that complements your product but doesn't really differentiate your work or create a bespoke advantage for your users, then seriously consider making that Open Source or Free Software.

For example, let's say you have a new, great music recommendation technique and that's why people would choose your music player or music web site or whatever. You could build that with an OS DB on the backend, on an OS operating system, using an Open Source language and Open Source libraries and still close the source for your recommendation engine. However, you could still offer a F/OSS client to an API for that for various languages. You could contribute to the projects underlying yours. You might write a whole new configurable data wrangling system that's not specific to your recommendation code but is really useful to populating your database, and you could release that as F/OSS for the community to use. You might make your own front-end toolkit for the browser, or your own websockets code on the backend, that can be used by any application. You'd be able to contribute that to the community as F/OSS without undercutting your main differentiator, too. I kind of think of this model akin to open core, but in this case it's a "Closed Core" with open everything else. Improve everything that's in common with others in a common space, and differentiate your offering in your own different, compartmentalized space. Just make sure the bindings between the parts are at the appropriate level so the licenses don't clash.

Does this mean some competitor could come along, tie all of your F/OSS together, and plug in a different core? Absolutely. If that core's not your true differentiator, though, your plans have probably already gone awry. Making it easy to plug other code in the place of your proprietary code surrounded by an open platform is almost as good for the community as making the whole thing open source, and lets you compete on what you've decided is going to be your competitive advantage.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#840
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…

The reason Amazon is eating Elastic's lunch though, is because Elastic offered a eat-all-you-want buffet, a decision that was applauded by people who think food should be mostly free, but they didn't expect a guest to arrive who had unlimited appetite. They asked the guy: please sir, would you care to have just one last serving of rib-eye and then we'll offer coffee and desert and then perhaps you could leave? But th…

Software costs nothing to duplicate, Amazon isn't taking advantage of ESs resources (as someone losing food might). It's leveraging it's own resources, which it created at substantial cost.

People look at the money Amazon is making with ES, as if it's making money off ES, rather than off ES & AWS. The money Amazon would otherwise leave on the table wouldn't necessarily go to ES, I doubt ES has an claim to being worse off. It's "unlimited" service usage taps markets that might be out of reach for ES otherwise.

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