Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 969 posts

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#921

Post by nenolod »

cmiles74 wrote: post #818
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…

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 beha…

Amazon's behavior may feel exploitative, but it isn't. That would be like saying Red Hat is exploitative.

Part of the whole concept of free software is that you have freedom of choice with vendors (this is derived from "freedom 0"). Amazon is providing the software and its support as part of the Elasticsearch offering as a managed service. Elastic is a competing vendor, both as a managed service and in a traditional sense too.

Elastic made this decision because they wanted to be the exclusive vendor for Elasticsearch. That's fine, but it's not in the spirit of free software.

If anything, Elastic has exploited the third-party contributors who contributed to Elasticsearch under a CLA by promising to not do what they did and then blaming AWS for doing it anyway.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#922

Post by germansm »

nine_k wrote: post #540
germansm wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is not about the license but the philosophy

Like, contributing back? AFAICT Amazon did contribute back to ES, in the form of code. Running a profitable business to service free software has nothing to do with the philosophy.

"When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#923

Post by titway »

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…

After all that twisting you're doing, not clear if you understand what the ALv2 is about. It is what it says, not whatever subjective "spirit"s you're trying to twist into it.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#924

Post by BillinghamJ »

sandGorgon wrote: post #869
BillinghamJ wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/peering/vpc-peering-b... > If the VPCs in the VPC peering connection are within the same region, the charges for transferring data within the VPC peering connection are the same as the charges for transferring data across Availability Zones. If the VPCs are in different regions, inter-region data transfer costs apply. There is no additional cost

Im a bit confused - could you disambiguate here. I checked with a couple of people and they read the above to mean that any peering data transfer costs the SAME as if you were transferring data across availability zones. This is not free. Inter region transfer is a different tier

Well sure, it's not free, but it's the same cost as if you were moving data within your AWS account, so they're not charging for the use of VPC peering specifically.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#925

Post by titway »

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…

It is what is says. Calling it a gap is your opinion for your own biases, however you got them. They knew what they were getting into.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#926

Post by shawnz »

swat535 wrote: post #864
jasonkester wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no reason for you to feel the need to justify building a business off of your software product, but I can completely understand why you do. Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad…

The OP is isn't ashamed but more frustrated because he wanted to do good for the world and is disappointed by the fact that he may not be able to now because gree corporations like Amazon will take all the hard earned work of contributors and profit from it, thus breaking the spirit of open source. At least that's how I interpreted his comment..

How is it contrary to the spirit of open source if greedy corporations like Amazon use their market forces to spread your work to a bigger audience?

That is exactly in the spirit of open source, which is what I believe the parent poster is saying.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#927

Post by petejohnson »

mvanbaak wrote: post #770
Closi wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though. Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUN…

'AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.' Well, they DID actually contribute patches as the whole ES project was 'upstream-first', this is mentioned in the post with proofs. From what I can find online, it looks like DocumentDB is actually a layer on top of the AWS Aurora PostgreSQL offering. This means they created a MongoDB compatible API, but are not offering a hosted…

> Well, they DID actually contribute patches as the whole ES project was 'upstream-first', this is mentioned in the post with proofs.

Elasticsearch has 35000 pull requests merged. Amazon did 9 of those giving them a contributor ratio of 0.026%.

Amazon's contributions to Elasticsearch and Kibana are purely symbolic. This makes their claim as new stewards of the projects even more laughable.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#928

Post by petejohnson »

caymanjim wrote: post #63

AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source. Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money…

> Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space.

That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll. You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic at the time of their contributions.

> The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source

Again, did you do a survey of any of these people? Seeing they are Elastic employees I guess they asked for more than just OSS glory... Probably lunch and and a pay check.

> But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.

What would you suggest, at this point in time, that Elastic did instead? They released the projects as OSS 10 years ago - there's no changing that. Now they need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company. I'm honestly interested to hear your suggestion.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#929

Post by mylons »

2bitencryption wrote: post #402
mylons wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the correct take. AWS and Elastic are both acting out of self interest with varying levels of gains for the customer in each.

I'm about to make a really petty and possibly off topic comment, so sorry for this -- "this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."

haha —- maybe i’ll add imo next time? good feedback though. i hadn’t considered the phrase to be taken that way

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#930

Post by rad_gruchalski »

temikus wrote: post #678
tim-- wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the code licensed as Apache 2.0 stays that way. The open code doesn't magically become closed source.

So AFAIK it’s not exactly so. One can actually change project license granted they have agreement of every single contributor to do so. Which they do since they had the CLA system from the start. So theoretically they can even unpublish all the code if they want. It’s just probably not worth the reputation as damage. IANAL though so I’d be very interested to hear a patent lawyer take on this.

If one wants to contribute to something under an Apache license but exclude certain part, one is expected to explicitly point the exclusion out as in “this part is not delivered under Apache 2 license”.
Post reply on HN