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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#901

Post by freeqaz »

unilynx wrote: post #776
freeqaz wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is really insightful. Thank you for the perspective! It's an interesting idea to think that "Free Software" creates a sort of "distributed code base". In the sense that "code will be eventually pushed to the main repo when the patch is created". That's an interesting perspective.

Not necessarily. "Just" making it free software (eg slapping a GPL v2 on Elasticsearch) doesn't require AWS to share any changes to the codebase, and wouldn't have prevented the current AWS/Elastic drama as it wouldn't have prevented AWS from monetizing Elasticsearch. Now AGPL might have, if it was used from the start... not because it would prevent any monitization, but because it might bring enough legal uncertaint…

Agreed! No silver bullet. AWS is able to extract value regardless of the license being used.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#902

Post by growse »

freeqaz wrote: post #892
growse wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES > AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market. > With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service. > That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for ever…

I think the "war chest" argument here is that AWS can out compete any other hosting solution by "slowly burning" their way to the top. AWS is a conglomerate and can afford to lose money on a single service. Companies like ES cannot without going under. It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

Plenty of businesses compete with AWS just fine. Looking at Elastic Co's financials, they also appear to be competing just fine.

If they tell you they're not, what they're actually saying is that they've chosen a poor business model.

In this case, it looks like they've got a perfectly reasonable business, but they're upset it's not even bigger, and therefore they'd like a monopoly over ES hosting.

> It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

The irony is strong here.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#903

Post by Grimm665 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #501
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…

Elastic wants to get the benefits of permissive licenses without the drawbacks. Having a permissive license is a massive asset for getting people to adopt your software, but it means you will have no control over what they do with it. They want the goodwill and other benefits of a permissive license without loss of control that these licenses bring.

Totally agree. I think you could also say a similar thing about Amazon however: they are benefiting off of the permissive license Elastic chose to use, without the drawback of having to spend developer time improving the open source project they are profiting from.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#904

Post by greatpatton »

MauranKilom wrote: post #216
choeger wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I watched too much of suits, but is that not illegal for publicly traded companies?

And that's why there's a lawsuit. Who knows when that will be resolved though. In the meantime Amazon could keep doing what they're doing and just ignore whatever Elastic is asking of them. So Elastic drew the consequence and have stopped extending goodwill to Amazon.

OK but AWS already had Elastic xxx named product before Elastic search even existed. So the trademark issue can go multiple way in front of a court.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#905

Post by greatpatton »

dinglejungle wrote: post #728
jrockway wrote: post #143

This is an embarrassing anecdote, but I thought I'd share. I started using Elasticsearch because it showed up in the AWS console along with all the other "Elastic" things ("Elastic Compute Cloud") and I figured it was a thing they made themselves. Only later on in the process did I realize that there was a company called Elastic that named it. Very unfortunate. Probably a lesson about naming your company after a comm…

The company Elastic was created 2 years after the release of ElasticSearch.

And 6 years after the release of Elastic Compute Cloud.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#906

Post by zepto »

pas wrote: post #769
rightbyte wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> revenue of $3.4 billion, and 13400 employees. By IT sector standards, that's decent but far from spectacular. That revenue is the budget of the police force in my country. Why would being bigger then that necessarily be a good thing.

Revenue is meaningless, profitability is the important thing. Amazon was net income 0, but it was always enormously profitable, it immediately spent that money on growth. RedHat wasn't really that profitable. Sure it also spent billions on growth, but Amazon spent hundreds of billions on growth. (Sure, Amazon is a conglomerate, from books to gadgets to groceries to basically everything and the biggest digital infrast…

Money spent on growth is not generally counted as profit.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#907

Post by hvdijk »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #874
hvdijk wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (b) they outright lied to the community when they claimed that future versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0 Where did they make this claim?

It is covered in the blog post if you read it. https://web.archive.org/web/20200120104750/https:/www.elasti... "We did not change the license of any of the Apache 2.0 code of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — and we never will."

Ah, thanks, somehow that completely slipped by me.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#908

Post by bccdee »

waheoo wrote: post #809
pydry wrote: 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.

Well, it's actually a job for Elastic, since their primary concern is ensuring that they continue to turn a profit. But I'm certainly not opposed to antitrust.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#909

Post by mrybczyn »

hodgesrm wrote: post #606
freeqaz wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL also harms adoption at companies because of the "invasive" nature of the license. Google, for example, bans the use of any AGPL software. It's too vague for the legal team to confidently understand the "bounds" of the copyleft license. Permissive licenses like MIT/Apache have historically been what companies prefer to have when evaluating free software. And, generally, it hasn't been a problem for companies like…

> What has shifted is that, where before, there was a "code of honor" that companies could use FOSS software and Elastic would benefit from the uptick in adoption via support contracts, community building libs + writing docs, and encouraging "network effects" for them. I've run a couple of COSS companies and have a few arrows in the back on this subject. The 'code of honor' is not enough to float even a small company…

"sell something sticky"

Amazon unsticks anything that isn't nailed down...

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#910

Post by tshaddox »

worldsayshi wrote: post #118
MisterPea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.

My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the ga…

I don't get it. I can understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about payback and with no expectation of reciprocity. I can also understand performing acts of generosity without saying anything about reciprocity while having some expectation of reciprocity (like, "I'll do someone a favor, and it sure would be nice if they return a favor one day").

But why would you very deliberately choose a software license which very explicitly distinguishes itself from normal proprietary software licenses by spelling out how it requires no payment and will always require no payment (and in some cases, explicitly prohibits anyone else from requiring payment!), and still maintain an expectation of payment?

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