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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#881

Post by squeaky-clean »

spion wrote: post #871
zerocrates wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Amazon can do this is "the drawback" here.

They could also collaborate with Elastic as a customer. In fact, the model where a company develops a managed service and offers it on cloud providers infrastructure (i.e. "app store") would have everyone benefit: * Amazon, from the wealth of innovative managed services they could offer without fully maintaining them themselves * OSS companies, for the ability to financially sustain their projects and still offer it…

Commented on your earlier comment, but didn't see another user basically wrote the same thing, as I hadn't refreshed. Isn't Amazon just an "end user" in this case? End user doesn't have to mean someone who queries an ElasticSearch cluster, it could be someone who hosts one and charges for that.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#882

Post by random5634 »

kodah wrote: post #641
random5634 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES. In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license. https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...

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…

"At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring?"

Good lord - the views on HN are wild. I'm aging myself, but open source licensing (used) to not be that complicated.

The principles of open source are being violated by Elastic not AWS - just so we are clear. That is not so complicated.

If Elastic wants to make it so contributors to the software have FEWER rights than Elastic, that is fine, but that is not open source.

The principles of open source are normally that if I contribute to something that is open source licensed, that I can then use the code in the same way as anyone else. That includes hosting it for myself, doing a small consulting practice to build out some hosting for others, doing shared service hosting etc etc.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#883

Post by jasonlotito »

terryf wrote: post #812
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 cann…

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

Would the company and product be as popular as it is today if it was licensed this way from the beginning?

I see this as a type of bait-and-switch. I invest in this open source technology, and then after I invest money into the service, they change what is being sold.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#884

Post by mattl »

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…

The A in AGPL stands for Affero, which was a company that produced a version of the GPL (with FSF permission) -- that was AGPLv1, written by a commercial company in 2002 to fix the loophole in the GPL.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#885

Post by jasonlotito »

hanniabu wrote: post #816
eloisant wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project...

...it would deter them, which is what your original question was asking. Preventing and deterring are two completely different things.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#886

Post by g9yuayon »

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…

I thought Stallman created GPL so software can be "free as in speech". It's another dimensional of ideology, and respectably so. It, however, has nothing do with whether it is moral for AWS to host an Apache-licensed open-source package.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#887

Post by rstupek »

csunbird wrote: post #831
klintcho wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dev…

I as a developer take the side that allows me to use the open source code as I see fit based on the license terms provided. Elastic initially chose a license which would allow them to capture more of the market/mind space of developers and now that they've accomplished that they want to fully monetize those developers.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#888

Post by spion »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #881
spion wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could also collaborate with Elastic as a customer. In fact, the model where a company develops a managed service and offers it on cloud providers infrastructure (i.e. "app store") would have everyone benefit: * Amazon, from the wealth of innovative managed services they could offer without fully maintaining them themselves * OSS companies, for the ability to financially sustain their projects and still offer it…

Commented on your earlier comment, but didn't see another user basically wrote the same thing, as I hadn't refreshed. Isn't Amazon just an "end user" in this case? End user doesn't have to mean someone who queries an ElasticSearch cluster, it could be someone who hosts one and charges for that.

Are Amazon writing the software that transforms and loads the data into ES, as well queries ES? If yes, they are an end-user. If not, they are a managed service provider.

There is no ambiguity in this case, they are offering the exact same elasticsearch API.

But this is not even the point. I'm not interested in the legal distinctions here at all, thats for the lawyers to delineate in more detail. The point is that Amazon are practically throwing away a huge business opportunity that would also encourage more FOSS to be built in a sustainable way ("app store" / "managed service store") for some short term gain, by throwing companies such as MongoDB and Elastic under the bus.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#889

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#890

Post by whoisjohnkid »

kreeben wrote: post #830
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…

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…

Just have to say your analogy is amazing, lol made my day; thanks!
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