This is huge. We wrote "Why we picked AGPL" only a few weeks ago, discussing why ParadeDB (an Elastic competitor!) chose the AGPL. Glad to see Elastic is joining forces on the AGPL front.
Elasticsearch is open source, again
91–100 of 473 posts
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, the OpenSearch brand has more value now than Elastic.
I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead. What metric are you using to come to the conclusion th…
thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have.
I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story. I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.
Am I the only one not buying this reasoning? Seems like there's more than is being said, otherwise they would have said this by now. I'd reckon that ELv2 had friction that couldn't be easily overcome without OSS or at the very least DOSP [0]. I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so makes me curious. [0]: https://opensource.org/dosp
You are not the only one, that's a ridiculous story.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#94If Amazon's OpenSearch plateaus, and everyone wants to host ElasticSearch, but on their existing AWS infra/sales business inertia, this issue will fundamentally reoccur. Nothing actually changed except Elastic thinks Amazon will commit to their own fork. If Amazon doesn't, we're back to square one: Amazon hosts open source ElasticSearch, Elastic changes their license, another fork. "Amazon is fully invested in their…
I felt like that was implied by the usage of AGPL: if Amazon wanted to start using this and apply patches on top of it, the AGPL would require that they share those patches with their customers, which would allow Elastic to integrate them into main again.
Is that important, though?
Isn't the whole point that amazon doesn't care about source availability or openness, so long as they can extract profit from people running it?
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#95I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…
> to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product
Specifically, this is the text [0]:
> if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version
There are a few companies who try to make it sound like if you interact with an AGPL program over a network then your client code is now infected with the AGPL, but I'm not at all sure how they arrived at that conclusion unless it was willful misinterpretation.
Under the mainstream view, you only have to publish the source code for the AGPL work that you modified, which for 99.9% of users is fine but isn't great for a reseller.
The main barrier isn't the actual text of the license, it's that AGPL is still untested in court and there are companies who will try to make it mean something different than its apparent meaning, so legal departments are liable to get antsy. But lawyers are likely to get antsy about self-hosting under these other licenses as well.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead. What metric are you using to come to the conclusion th…
thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have. I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
> it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have
Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find.
Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#97Thank you, ElasticSearch!
I know the AGPL may be a terrible license and all, but it is allowed by Free Software purists. I hope more companies follow suit.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the legal jurisdiction but in the US you're allowed to use a competitor's brand name/trademark specifically to inform your customers. E.g. "acetaminophen, the stuff that's in Tylenol". You can also use the competitor's brand colors.
so if I create a website called other-Facebook.com that looks exactly like Facebook, I can even tell people I'm going to steal their time and information just like the real Facebook, and that's allowed?
I think “foobar.com, a Facebook with blackjack and hookers” would be OK, while “other-facebook.com” wouldn’t.
I’d say one is marketing, the other is misrepresentation.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you the one who makes the call, or are you getting hundreds of customers requesting OpenSearch over Elastic? If you're making the call then that's really one anecdote, not hundreds.
I let the customers choose by themselves. And guess what they choose every single time after checking license cost from Elastic.
Do you tell them that it's deploy OpenSearch or buy an Elastic license, not mentioning that they could also legally deploy their own Elastic?
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#100I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be…
Same applies to BSL and similar. Not being able to compete with the project owners is much less restrictive, for me, than AGPL/GPL.
But it restricts your ability to use a commodity product based on Elastic, provided by a third party who will compete on price or bundle it with other cloud services.