[HN Gopher] Amazon: Not OK - Why we had to change Elastic licensing ___________________________________________________________________ Amazon: Not OK - Why we had to change Elastic licensing Author : buro9 Score : 1169 points Date : 2021-01-19 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.elastic.co) (TXT) w3m dump (www.elastic.co) | onenightnine wrote: | i met someone who talked about how amazon aws appears bigger than | what it is | kache_ wrote: | It's the same deal with cloudant and IBM cloud. Rebranding | couchDB as their own. Putting on a web UI on top of it and | rebranding it entirely. | dustinmoris wrote: | I really like Elasticsearch. I run it myself hosted in a | Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes Operator developed by | Elastic, so I'm one of the people who uses Elasticsearch | extensively without being a paying customer, but to be fair that | is part of the reason why I opted for it. I think Elastic has | become victim of its own success if I may say so. Running | Elasticsearch self hosted is fairly easy, either on actual | hardware or VMs or in a container cluster. Their documentation is | exceptionally good and the wide adoption means that a lot of | issues people might run into have already been solved or answered | on StackOverflow and other online forums. If Elasticsearch wasn't | such a great product then Amazon would also struggle more with | providing a managed version in their cloud. | | I think trademark violations are pretty bad and a real punch | below the belt, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that is | actually happening. Amazon also offers Redis as a service, so | does Azure. They both have Redis in the name. They also offer MS | SQL as a service, however that has a proprietary license which | the end customer pays for so it's an unfair comparison. I wonder | if the monetisation strategy, which is basically Elastic Cloud, | is the best option for Elastic. They are essentially providing a | mini managed Elasticsearch cluster which is away from the rest of | the infrastructure which development teams are already | maintaining. Of course they will be competing with Amazon then | and likely going to lose, since Amazon has so much more. Other | OSS products have found more lucrative and less costly | monetisation models than operating your own cloud hosting | provider. I hope Elastic will find a way to sustain themselves in | a way which makes the owners happy, because their product is | really good. | hello_moto wrote: | > If Elasticsearch wasn't such a great product then Amazon | would also struggle more with providing a managed version in | their cloud. | | They do struggle a little bit on their AWS ES offerings if you | go across certain threshold. | | > I wonder if the monetisation strategy, which is basically | Elastic Cloud, is the best option for Elastic. | | Redis has RedisLab (cloud) and I can tell you AWS EC Redis does | eat some of their customers through various reasons. | runningmike wrote: | "Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking | our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly | as a service without collaborating with us." Change to AGPL was | imho the logical solution... | r-w wrote: | I wonder if you can send them a cease-and-desist. | blabitty wrote: | Sounds like Amazon did misrepresent their relationship with | elastic intentionally, which is abusive. It was also unnecessary | in my opinion because the AWS service is so much easier to use - | no licensing to worry about at all as an end consumer. Compare | with running ELK yourself where you quickly discover that you | will need to buy a license and possibly support to get any usable | enterprise features at all. | 0xmohit wrote: | This reminds of a somewhat recent instance: | | AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service | | [0] https://twitter.com/tim_nolet/status/1317061818574082050 | mcintyre1994 wrote: | > We collaborate with cloud service providers, including | Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud, and others. We | have shown we can find a way to do it. We even work with other | parts of Amazon. We are always open to doing that; it just needs | to be OK. | | I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into this but it sort of | feels like they don't want/expect to keep offering the proper AWS | integration that their elastic.co product has now. I know at work | we have something hosted by them in AWS and I assume that's | inside our VPC and we'd need that feature to keep using them. | | If they do still think that feature is important then saying they | "work with other parts of Amazon" feels like it's really under- | selling that collaboration/integration with AWS. | pronik wrote: | I'm not surprised, having had the exact same debate about MongoDB | a couple of years back. | | Elastic has iterated over and over, taking years to remove | obvious problems with their products, building heavily on the | community for input about their needs, but still managing to | ignore them for a long time. I still remember searching for | anything that's not Kibana since their interface has been | dreadful (and probably still is). I remember people turning away | from Logstash to Fluentd and others pretty early, but don't know | the exact reasons. I remember when pretty important and frankly | "core" stuff like authentication and authorization among others | moved into Shield and other specialized commercial plugins. | | They have leveraged almost a decade of developer good-will to | cope with their inherent architectural problems and to fight for | introducing "weird open source software" in their respective | companies and ultimately give them their street cred of "logging | aggregation == ELK". Now, after most of their stack "just works" | like people expect it to, they throw it all away, putting people | who fought for them in license jeopardy while pointing the finger | at Amazon? I don't have any sympathy for this. It's your | business, if it fails, nobody is at fault but yourself, | especially if you a 14B behemoth. May the exodus begin, it's long | overdue. | jbverschoor wrote: | Maybe microsoft and google would like to pitch in some legal | support | emphatizer2000 wrote: | Lots of hosts offer "Wordpress Hosting" - is that fundamentally | different from offering Elasticsearch? | | I don't think merely using the name of an open source product is | such a huge ethical issue? It's the same all those Wordpress | hosts do. | | The other things (claiming a cooperation exists, stealing from | commercial code) seem more questionable, but also unrelated to | the actual open source license. | Pet_Ant wrote: | > Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking | our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly | as a service without collaborating with us. | | I feel like I just said this a few days ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849 | | The main value of open source to businesses is that support is | truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. | ElasticSearch is trying to remove what makes open source | appealing to businesses. No one wants to build their | infrastructure on something with expensive IBM/Oracle-costing | support. Basically, from now on, ElasticSearch has removed that | benefit from their product and businesses are at risk. It's now | much less appealing... is the remaining niche profitable? Only | time will tell. | | Note, why businesses find open-source appealing is not why | developers find it appealing, or private individuals. | viro wrote: | >The main value of open source to businesses is that support is | truly commodified | | No, Thats not true at all. Most open source companies survive | off of support contracts. It's why companies choose rhel over | centos. | [deleted] | kemitchell wrote: | > No one wants to build their infrastructure on something with | expensive IBM/Oracle-costing support. | | What's stopping you from running Elastic without paying for | support under the new license? | richardwhiuk wrote: | You might need to open-source your entire service. | kemitchell wrote: | In a narrow set of use cases, yes. In the vast majority of | use cases---building applications with Elastic for data--- | no. | tw04 wrote: | I'll be honest, I've never heard a single business say the | reason they use open source is because support is commodified. | It's generally cost or functionality, and quite frankly they | want a go-to support expert, not a list of support options. | | Redhat didn't become huge because people had all sorts of | options for third party support. In fact, I can't say I've ever | come across a single enterprise who: uses third party support | for their RHEL installed base, has asked for third party | support for their RHEL installed base. | Pet_Ant wrote: | CentOS and WhiteBox Linux were 3rd party sources of RHEL and | to a large part Linux distros are interchangeable which makes | them commodities. Not perfect commodities, but still close. | RHEL with subscription vs Debian & burdening yours ops guys | are choices available. VMS has no such choice. | tw04 wrote: | But he didn't say: businesses use open source because they | can find compatible binaries from multiple entities. He | said it commodified support. CentOS and WhiteBox never | promised or offered enterprise support agreements that I'm | aware of. And if they did, I can't say I ever ran across | anyone utilizing it in the wild. | thayne wrote: | > We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we | see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon | | I am sympathetic to many of Elastic's complaints, but not this | one. If you make an open-core product, you have to expect that | others will attempt to make competing, possibly open source, | alternatives to your proprietary components. | pfsalter wrote: | Nice to see someone at least standing up to the behemoth that is | Amazon | StavrosK wrote: | Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license | becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that | companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into | creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into | their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as | a service? | | No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end- | users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could have released ES as | closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better | for it. They were hoping to make money off their product, which I | don't think anyone can fault them for, but instead Amazon came in | and took a bunch of that money while not giving anything back. | | Now Elastic is not happy, and I wouldn't be either. As an end | user, I'm grateful the circumstances exist that allow companies | to make a living from OSS, and I want to encourage that. AWS is | the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how blaming | Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is anything | other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is OSS at all, | and we should want an environment where companies that produce | OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for wanting to get paid | for the work that they release freely into the world. | | Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the | wrong here, I think Amazon is. | pjc50 wrote: | This is almost, but not quite, the "Tivoization" that prompted | the creation of the GPL3. | | The requirement to give something back and/or avoid taking | profit from the work of others is something the OSS world has a | complicated relationship to. GPL is quite clear that there's a | requirement to pass on source changes, if not explicitly to | give them back, and many people were outraged by even this | limited requirement and instead chose licenses which imposed no | requirements at all. | | Similarly, people want their work to be used for free by | everyone .. but haven't really considered that this results in | them working for the Bezos fortune, for free. Or the US | military, for free. | | There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a | slowly evolving discussion. | StavrosK wrote: | > There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only | a slowly evolving discussion. | | Certainly, and I think that if we want OSS to thrive we need | to move towards a future where it's easy for companies to | make a return on their investment by releasing OSS. I think | Amazon and all the "I provide your software as a service" | providers eat into that and hinder that future. | | Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, but it never | anticipated providers providing services on an OSS product | without contributing significantly, _in combination with_ the | companies that develop the OSS hoping to make money off the | same hosted service that the former undercuts. | | Basically, monetization strategies for OSS are few, and one | that is beneficial for both the company and the consumer is | providing hosted services. A third company that doesn't have | to develop the software is usually a good enough competitor, | but since the developer has the obvious support/knowledge | advantage, they can still compete. This breaks down when | Amazon comes in with its lock-in advantage and sucsk all the | money away from the developer. | | This is why we're seeing these new licenses, because there's | no way currently to be "OSS except Amazon". I think we do | need to figure out some way. | fakedang wrote: | I believe in a previous thread, someone suggested OSS | except companies having this much of a revenue (since | market cap is a bit of a variable metric). Why wouldn't | that be a viable model? | lacker wrote: | I wouldn't use software like that. Imagine you build a | company using some software, and it was free until you | hit $X in revenue. One day far down the road, your | company is doing well and you start to get close to $X. | You realize you have to acquire a license, ask them for | one, and now... you just have to pay whatever they ask | for? You're locked in to someone who could quote you | whatever price they want. Unless it's really easy to rip | out this software, it seems like a huge pain. | pydry wrote: | Easy to work around with "hollywood accounting". Amazon | could license the software from a shell company they own | that makes very little revenue. | StavrosK wrote: | I would love that, and think it's a great model | (basically "you don't have to pay us if/while you aren't | making money from this"), but as far as I understand it, | it's hard to enforce. Amazon can just make a subsidiary | that makes less than that amount (or no money at all) and | skirt that requirement. | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | It would be a much stronger restriction than they're | looking for. If no developer at Amazon, Google, etc. is | allowed to even _use_ Elasticsearch, that severely | impairs the viability of the project. (Depending on the | revenue threshold, it could end up being a problem for | Elastic too - they 're not exactly a small company.) | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | But imagine where we'd be if this discussion had happened | 30 years ago, in the days when the monetization model was | charging a distribution fee. How much of the modern | Internet would have had to be excluded from free software | licensing to protect that? I have no issue with tweaking | OSS licenses to respond to the circumstances of the times, | but tweaking them in order to ensure I can make lots of | money seems anti-competitive and anti-innovative. | StavrosK wrote: | I agree, but I think it's generally "tweaking the rules | so they can stay alive" at this point, ie not about | increasing an already big revenue stream. | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | That's certainly what it looks like Elastic is trying to | imply, but their revenue was over $400 million last year. | toomuchtodo wrote: | For comparison, AWS does about $40B/year in revenue. | jabl wrote: | > Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, but it never | anticipated providers providing services on an OSS product | without contributing significantly | | Well, the so-called "service provider loophole" was | certainly well-known when GPLv3 was drafted. That's why | AGPLv2 was created some years prior. IIRC early GPLv3 | drafts contained AGPL-style language, but several of the | companies involved in the GPLv3 drafting process (such as | Google) objected, and those clauses were withdrawn from the | final GPLv3. | ABeeSea wrote: | > many people were outraged by even this limited requirement | | It isn't a limited requirements. There is a very real legal | risk that using GPL software in an enterprise code base means | you have to open source of your entire code base. That is an | unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software | doesn't get used. | lacker wrote: | _That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so | GPL software doesn't get used._ | | Plenty of companies use Linux... this seems like something | people worried about in the 90's but have now generally | accepted. | ABeeSea wrote: | Linux system libraries are released under Lesser GPL | and/or have exemptions for linking that the general GPL | does not have. I worked at $bigtechco$ and anything | GPL/AGPL was expressly forbidden by the lawyers. | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | > That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so | GPL software doesn't get used. | | And this, right there, is how MySQL AB was purchased for a | billion dollars in 2008: you dual-license your software. | Release it under a copyleft license that bigco's don't want | to touch (AGPL3 is tempting today!), and offer a commercial | license that gives your customers the freedom to use it as | they need. | Blackthorn wrote: | So the companies can simply buy an alternate licence. | What's the problem? They end up giving back in terms of $$$ | then. | warkdarrior wrote: | Some projects do not offer alternate/dual licensing. | pydry wrote: | I'm pretty sure a lot of projects would be open to doing | it if offered $$$. | pjc50 wrote: | Well .. yes. That's the license fee. If you incorporate | Oracle code or Nintendo characters in your software you'll | get sued as well. So no you can't use GPLd libraries | without contributing forward. This is intentional and the | purpose of copyleft. | | GPL allows you to "use" but not "make derived works". | ABeeSea wrote: | And most companies have decided that the fee of opening | their entire code base to use a single GPL library isn't | worth it. That is heft license fee if you have invested | billions into creating your company's source code. | specialist wrote: | Amazon convinces investors to eschew profits. Unusual. Result: | lower cost of capital. | | Amazon benefits from extended tax holiday. Result: lower cost | of doing business. | | Amazon appropriates FOSS. Result: lower cost of development. | | Amazon knocks off successful products, competing with their own | partners in their own walled garden. Result: lower cost of | product development. | | Amazon allows counterfeit products, fake reviews, and other | fraud. Result: lower cost of operations. | | Amazon uses gig workers. Result: lower cost of labor. | | I'm sensing a pattern... | | Amazon's success, their prime (pun!) advantage, is built on | aggressively avoiding costs normally incurred by other | businesses. They perfected WalMart's strategy. | | Sure, they've done some clever stuff. Throw enough spaghetti, | some of it will stick. Free shipping with Prime membership is | akin to Tencent's freemium (genius). And figuring out how to | sell excess capacity was cool. | | I'm sure a lot of other leaders would share Bezos' tolerance | for risk, commitment to long term plans, if only they weren't | micromanaged by Wall St. | pjmlp wrote: | HNers praise how great Amazon is for product XYZ. | | HNers praise how great Amazon is for Graviton. | | HNers praise how great Amazon is for leaving Azure and GCP on | the dust. | | HNers praise how great Amazon is for FOSS project XYZ. | | HNers bash Amazon because yet another project made the wrong | assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses. | | Yep, I am seeing a pattern definitely. | samatman wrote: | This kind of critique is basically never valid. | | Any time I've seen it, it's glaringly obvious that HN users | come down on both sides of the issue. | | Pattern-matching detractors of your position as dominant in | a particular venue's discussion is a common partisan | failure mode. Doesn't mean you have to succumb to it. | johncena33 wrote: | Sorry I hate to disagree. HN has lost its way last few | years. The amount of FUD spread against Google on HN is | mind-boggling. Every single day there is at least one | anti-Google post on HN front page. Most of the content is | the old broken record. I simple hide these posts from | newsfeed. But the moderators have chosen to look other | way. | | On top of that, lots of discussion has become simply low- | quality. The comments on technical posts turn into | complaining about something not related to the technical | content rather about the product. The amount of | complaining and whining is through the roof. Mods should | look into "Whine Wednesday" type threads to keep the off- | topic whinings and complaining invading every single | thread. | specialist wrote: | I apologize. I'm simply trying to understand and explain, | if only to myself, to better calibrate expectations. | | I do not criticize or defend Amazon's parasitic | relationship with FOSS. Frankly, I don't yet see how it can | be any other way. I just merely acknowledge the plain | truth. And that Amazon is better at this than the other | belligerents. | | While I'm a very happy Amazon Prime customer, I'd never be | an employee or otherwise do business with Amazon. I just | feel like there's no way for me to benefit proportionally. | Per the parable of the lion's share. | | > _...the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT | /BSD style licenses._ | | Go on. | | I'm hoping someone, anyone will discuss Peter Hintjens' | (ZeroMQ) advice. | | I have three projects in my back pocket. Once seen, their | secret sauce is trivially reproduced. I can think of no way | to publish them as anything other than FOSS. Not even as a | service. Nor can I figure out how to pay rent working on | them. | | Which is a pity. These three tools are pretty neat. | remram wrote: | Any single entry on that "clever stuff" lists directly hurts | someone and destroy the ecosystem in the long run. | astrange wrote: | Getting investors to give Bezos free money for being Bezos | was actually pretty good for customers and got everyone | free one-day shipping. Amazon is an investor charity like | Uber, not a business. | peterwoerner wrote: | Right now it is better for the customers, but that | doesn't mean it will continue to be this. You assume that | once/if Bezos crushes the rest of the competitors he | won't start significantly increasing prices. | | We saw something similar in the 90s where health care | prices plummeted as the now winners developed and | convinced the public that their monopolies were good. Now | they are able increase prices by 15-20%/yr into the | foreseeable future. | | This is not a prediction (per se), but a statement that | we should realize that monopolistic might be good for the | consumer in the short term but bad in the long term. | specialist wrote: | Poor phrasing on my part. I mean decisions which weren't | obviously correct beforehand. | | I certainly didn't grok AWS for way too long. | | And there was plenty of concern trolling about free | shipping, eg "how long can they sustain this loss | leader?!". Very long when you have free capital, certainly | more than anyone else. It fortuitously parlayed into | amazing customer retention and upselling. What Prof G | (Scott Galloway) has coined the rundle (recurring revenue | bundle). Proved so effective, in fact, that everyone's now | doing subscriptions for everything. | ako wrote: | Yes, and we are all voting with our wallets by buying the | cheapest products. Just like with China. And just like with | Chinese production, we'll regret it when it's too late. | spullara wrote: | If you ask me, these license changes are bait and switch. If | they had started with this license it wouldn't have the same | adoption, now they are pulling it. | lacker wrote: | _Amazon came in and took a bunch of that money while not giving | anything back._ | | Amazon is giving a lot back to the community, though. They are | providing a really valuable service when they provide open | source software as a service. They aren't giving back to | _Elastic_ the company, but it 's important to note the | difference, because Amazon isn't being a bad actor here. I | think it's reasonable for both Amazon and Elastic to act the | way they do, and I think the competition between their | respective business models will end up in a better set of | products available to developers. | cmiles74 wrote: | I would bet that if Elastic disappeared we'd see this | offering stagnate. Amazon has put time and energy into work | making the service but little (AFAICT) into the Elasticsearch | product itself. | | In my opinion this is a short-sighted way for Amazon to do | business. If Elastic makes every new feature unusable by | Amazon, do to licensing restrictions, Amazon's product will | fall behind. | 7952 wrote: | Would anyone consider licenses the specifically exclude certain | companies? | Doctor_Fegg wrote: | WTFPL effectively does that. Big companies won't touch it. | tolmasky wrote: | I don't think there's "right" and "wrong", but bizarre | (entitled?) expectations. A natural part of Open Source is that | someone may come in and make way more money off of something | than you do. In fact, Amazon makes way more money off of Linux | than Linus ever did. But you don't even have to go that far, | many completely unrelated YC companies made way more money off | of Linux than Linus did, and could arguably have not pulled | that off without Linux being a free OS that you don't even have | to _think about_ since it 's so ingrained in hosting. But when | the _intent_ of Open Source is "to increase the quality of | software around the world", this is considered a _good result_. | However, when the _intent_ of Open Source is some nebulous | initial hyper-growth to then hope you can offer hosting, the | expectations just aren 't set correctly. Unfortunately, the | open source strategy does not magically offer the right result | based on the _intent_ of the author. | | If Linus all of a sudden woke up tomorrow and said "Hey, I just | realized that I'm not being paid a cut by literally every | single company in Silicon Valley, that is _NOT OK_ , I am going | to shift gears and remove non-contributor code and start | releasing Linux as closed source from now on", I feel people | would be less forgiving than they are to these _much less | impactful companies_. But Linus would be as "right" as they | are, arguably more so. | | Many of these companies are simply learning that maybe all | those "dinosaurs" of the 90s might have been onto something | with commercial licensing, which ultimately seems to be what | they actually want: to _charge_ money for their software. Sure, | it doesn 't get you free contributions and ready-made | communities, but it gets you money, which is what a company is | supposed to do. And that's fine! It's just not Open Source. | HotHotLava wrote: | Linus' original license did forbid making _any_ money off the | kernel: | | > - You may not distibute[sic] this for a fee, not even | "handling" costs. | | Also I think the GPL was pretty important to the kernel, | since many companies, especially in the 90s, probably would | have kept contributions private and their code closed without | that gentle push. | pjmlp wrote: | Without it, we would have all the big UNIXes still around, | adopting BSD code as they already were doing. | jabl wrote: | Maybe they would still be around in some form, yes, | although the mass market advantages of x86 would still | have killed of the traditional RISC Unix workstation | market etc. | | OTOH maybe eventually most people would have switched to | FreeBSD (or whatever free *BSD would have been the | "mainstream" choice), just like they switched to Linux in | our universe, since they thought that whatever value add | provided by some proprietary unix wasn't worth it | anymore. | | In a hypothetical copyleft-free universe, sure, there | would be a lot more companies using OSS to create | proprietary products without having to think about what | is a derivative work, linking and distribution | restrictions. OTOH all those proprietary companies | playing the "commodify your complement" game against each | other would ensure that the quantity and quantity of OSS | would continually be increasing as well, forcing those | companies to continually innovate lest they lose their | market to the free OSS alternatives. To repeat, | hypothetically speaking, as we don't have an alternate | universe to run such experiments in. | pythonaut_16 wrote: | > Amazon came in and took a bunch of that money while not | giving anything back | | Amazon took no money from them; they competed on potential | revenues. | | I think people are upset, not because they don't clearly | understand Elastic's motivations, but because Elastic is trying | to paint Amazon as the bad guy for using the license Elastic | offered. Amazon benefited from Elastic's open license, but so | did Elastic. Being open source has greatly benefited Elastic's | own business and growth. | | That isn't to say that Amazon's size and practices around open | source aren't cause for concern, just that Elastic come across | as very disingenuous when they try to lay all the blame on | Amazon while proclaiming how dedicated they are to "openness". | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | > companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into | creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat | into their profits by just installing and maintaining that | product as a service? | | Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of the | license that the ES developers chose? | | Software isn't born under the terms of Apache 2/MIT/BSD/a | similarly permissive license. The people who developed it chose | that license. | forgetfulness wrote: | Because while it's true that Amazon is following the terms of | the license, it's having real repercussions in that the | people actually maintaining the Software are seeing decreased | ability to grow the product because a huge company, belonging | to the second richest man in the world, is offering it as | part of their vertically-integrated oligopoly. | | Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is short | sighted, it's having negative repercussions on the software | ecosystem and it's a dimension that has to be considered | beyond merely a discussion on copyleft and the extent of it. | brabel wrote: | > the people actually maintaining the Software are seeing | decreased ability to grow the product because a huge | company, belonging to the second richest man in the world, | is offering it as part of their vertically-integrated | oligopoly. | | When you choose an OSS license, you're giving permission to | any company or person to exploit your product in any way | they want, this is how OSS works. | | Amazon is not the only one that can do this and I would be | surprised if other cloud vendors didn't also offer ES and | other popular OSS software to their customers. | | Do you expect that just because you created some OSS you | deserve some kind of exclusivity on profits made from it?? | If you do, you need to understand you need to use a non-OSS | license. This seems to be what Elastic has finally | realised, but a bit late. | forgetfulness wrote: | Yes but that's what I'm talking about. That's a core | principle in OSS so far but you can't sweep the issues of | fairness to the people doing the actual work nor the | issue of contributing to increasing the power of | organizations whose interests are more likely counter to | people's freedom and welfare. | | I know that prominent figures in FOSS have expressed the | sentiment that you have to suck it up, but you know, the | people actually living through this have a say. | | Thus, licensing changes and a conversation on their moral | standing. | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | You cannot release your software under the terms of a | permissive license, then when faced with a large company | following the terms of the license, complain that you | should get first crack at monetization. | | That seems to be the fundamental problem with this whole | tempest in a teapot: people have decided on an idea of | what "free software" means in their hearts, and many | people think it's about "fairness" and "protecting the | little guy". That is noble and good, but isn't extensible | to an existing large body of software with licenses that | clearly spell out how free they are or are not. | | But what is great is that if you don't like the state of | affairs you _don 't_ have to suck it up: you just have to | pick a license that is better suited to your goals. | | I have a handful of open source projects on my public | Github. They fall into two categories for me: | | * Software that is trivial, uninteresting, or easy to | replicate: these I've released under the terms of the ISC | license (2-clause BSD). I have no expectation it will | ever come to much, so I'm happy to free it - if it ever | turns up in the license file of the iPhone or a Tesla or | something I'll say "cool!" (but it won't because it's not | that good ;)) Hopefully someone uses it and it makes | their life easier. | | * Software that is non-trivial, interesting, or difficult | to replicate: I've freed it all under the terms of the | AGPLv3 and placed a "business use? contact me about the | license" note at the top. If I ever decided to work | towards building a product around the software (but I | won't because it's not that good ;)) I'd look at a dual- | licensing strategy, but in the meantime it's out there | for anyone to extend and carry forward and build things | on. But I know that the AGPLv3 essentially means FAANG | will never touch it because the risk is disproportionate | for the reward of using it. | | This feels right to me. Your calculus may be different so | you can license as you'd wish. | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | > Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is | short sighted | | It's really not: the license terms are the root of the | problem you are pointing out. We can either voice our | (righteous, but ultimately pointless) anger or we can try | to analyze what's happening and how to fix it. So let's do | the latter. | | Amazon offers a fully managed ElasticSearch service running | on the core ES code because ElasticSearch was, up to this | point, released under the Apache 2.0 license which _fully | supports Amazon 's right to do this_. | | Amazon offers a fully managed MongoDB _compatible_ database | called DocumentDB. It is _not_ based on MongoDB - Amazon | reimplemented the core functionality but maintained the | MongoDB API layer. | | MongoDB Inc. makes the forceful point that it is not a drop | in replacement[1] but a rather crippled product that lags | behind what MongoDB can do and continues to diverge. This | is likely very good marketing for MongoDB and probably | helps their company succeed :) | | Why did Amazon do this? Why would Amazon use the core ES | code but go through a more difficult reimplementation for | Mongo? | | Because MongoDB's core was licensed under the terms of the | AGPL3, but all the drivers that implemented the API | functionality were implemented under terms of the Apache | 2.0 license. | | Beginning to see the solution? | | [1]: https://www.mongodb.com/atlas-vs-amazon-documentdb | StavrosK wrote: | > Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of | the license that the ES developers chose? | | We shouldn't. But you can't have your cake and eat it too, | and say "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at | someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't | change your terms!". | | They're their terms, they can change them if they want to. | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | > But you can't have your cake and eat it too, and say | "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at | someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't | change your terms!". | | I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't | either. Have I missed something from them? | | You seem to be the only person passing value judgements: | | > Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in | the wrong here, I think Amazon is. | | This is incorrect: Amazon used Elastic per terms of the | license. Elastic didn't care for an infringement on their | business, so they've relicensed. No one is in the wrong | here. | StavrosK wrote: | > I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon | hasn't either. Have I missed something from them? | | I'm talking about the general sentiment here. Either | Amazon have been playing by the rules and Elastic is | within their rights to change those rules, so no problem | anywhere, or Amazon has been harming a part of the OSS | ecosystem and forced Elastic to make an unpopular change. | | > Amazon used Elastic per terms of the license | | Maybe I shouldn't have used "in the wrong" and said "is | the problem" instead. I don't so much care about whether | the rules are being followed as I care that more | companies are encouraged to release their software as OSS | because they can make money for it. That's a win-win | situation to me. | brabel wrote: | > I care that more companies are encouraged to release | their software as OSS because they can make money for it. | | But they can't! Tell me how many companies make profit | off purely OSS... RedHat maybe? What else? | | And even if they can, they shouldn't be surprised when | competitors use their OSS for their own benefit because | OSS explicitly allows for that. Making money off OSS is a | red herring, just because it works in a couple isolated | cases, doesn't mean it's a viable business strategy. | smichel17 wrote: | Fundamentally, there's no "profit" to be made in OSS, nor | public goods in general. If you try to charge for more | than "at cost", someone else can and will come along and | undercut you. | | Why the scare quotes? Well, I don't mean _all_ profit | according to definition, but specifically the "returns | for investors" type. _Company profits._ Technically you | can run a sole proprietorship, and make (say) $100k in | profit.. or you could structure as a corporation, pay | yourself a $100k salary, and make no profit. It 's all | the same money, but it's two ways of looking at the | portion that I would like to describe as fair | compensation to a human for the work they do. When I say | "at cost", I don't mean that it's fundamentally | impossible to make a living working on OSS; I mean it's | fundamentally impossible to _get filthy rich_ with it. | | And in my opinion that's a good thing. In my experience, | "getting filthy rich" / providing outsized returns to | investors almost always comes at someone else's expense. | Usually the little guy. It happens when the poor sod | paying you can't afford to switch to a competitor, so | you're able to wring them dry. The counter-argument goes | that we need the "filthy rich" incentive to motivate | people to make these things. I think it likely increases | the rate of innovation, but I think the amount of cool | and useful OSS written by people in their spare time is | evidence enough that profit is not a _requirement_ in | that area, only financial security. | | There is a problem, though, where it's currently very | difficult to even make a living wage working on OSS | (again, or public goods in general). I think can be | solved, and I am working on a project trying to solve | this (as a volunteer; we could use help). I'll cut it | here (I spent far too much time writing this comment | already...), but you can read more at | https://wiki.snowdrift.coop | tootie wrote: | From a purely utilitarian perspective, I can live without | Elastic far easier than I could live without AWS. From a legal | perspective, AWS are faultless in using OSS for their own | purposes. The only losers are Elastic's investors. And there's | no way they couldn't have seen this coming with their business | model as it is. | twobitshifter wrote: | I think Amazon infringed on the trademark. I'm not sure how | that didn't lead to an agreement between ES and Amazon. | Perhaps Amazon just had the better lawyers. | nenolod wrote: | Amazon contributed code to Elasticsearch. They are certainly | allowed to profit from their code contributions. | ryanmarsh wrote: | On the one hand I don't like the idea of a company like Amazon | exploiting (in the classic sense) open source. I've not seen | Amazon give much back to open source relative to what they've | gained. | | On the other hand if you open source something with a license | that permits selling the software, well... what do you expect? | You gotta hand it to Amazon. They've really hustled the | industry by hosting open source code. The code is free, | literally anybody else could have done this, but Amazon did it | especially well. | cratermoon wrote: | Amazon has become known for copying products and selling them | as Amazon Basics. They either kick the original product off | their platform or undercut the prices so drastically the | original seller goes out of business. | | https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ | judofyr wrote: | > Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license | becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that | companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into | creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat | into their profits by just installing and maintaining that | product as a service? | | Ten years ago I would be very hesitant adopting ElasticSearch | if I knew that they were the only ones allowed to maintain a | cloud solution of it. The fact that is was liberally licensed | made me less afraid of vendor lock-in. | | In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to | still be _perceived_ as the fully open source project (with all | of its good connotations) it once was. | | > AWS is the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how | blaming Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is | anything other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is | OSS at all, and we should want an environment where companies | that produce OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for | wanting to get paid for the work that they release freely into | the world. | | It's okay to release things as non-OSS. It's also okay to | release something as OSS first, and then regret later. But it's | super weird that they're painting this picture of AWS being a | big evil company when they're just doing exactly what is | expected. Can't they just say "we're not able to build a | company around the liberal license" instead of this "we're such | an open company and we love open source and AWS is ruining | everything" talk? | floatingatoll wrote: | The new license doesn't restrict others from operating | Elasticsearch as a service. It restricts others from | operating Elasticsearch as a service _unless_ they release | any source code patches, improvements, and /or functionality | extensions they make to it. | | To me, that's exactly what you're saying you expected from | liberal licenses, but it's delivered by a restrictive | license, using the restrictions popularized by GPL licenses. | This makes ElasticSearch _more_ open source, rather than | less, because now anyone who uses it has to "open" their | source code. That's the premise of GPLv3 in a nutshell, and | I'm hard-pressed to understand how it's a drawback here. | | Have I misunderstood and their new license somehow _reduces_ | the openness of their source code to the world? | judofyr wrote: | I think the term "more open" is a bit too vague in this | discussion. Sometimes people use it to refer to | permissiveness (e.g. BSD) and sometimes people use it to | refer to stimulating further open source work (e.g. GPL). | | (And if we're following the "definitions" then | ElasticSearch is no longer "open source" since that has a | strict definition, but it's probably not so relevant in | this discussion.) | | I also don't really object to their license choice at all; | what I object to is how they're framing the discussion. | This license change is all about business: They want to be | able to sell their cloud service without competition. | That's perfectly okay, but there's no need to hide this. | And certainly no need to "shame" Amazon for building a | business on top of something Elastic open sourced. | | > Have I misunderstood and their new license somehow | reduces the _openness_ of their source code to the world? | | I think their new license just shows that it's all about | business. If they _really_ wanted an open source license | which stimulates anyone to share improvements to | ElasticSearch they could have picked GPL. As of now, any | big company (Facebook, Google, etc) can create an improved | internal fork of ElasticSearch which none of the community | will ever be able to take advantage of. And why are they | fine with Facebook /Google doing this? Because it won't | jeopardize Elastic's cloud offering. | | In addition, their new license also makes it harder for | other people to build businesses on top of ElasticSearch. | Imagine that I invest a ton of time and effort into | creating a new management layer which is capable of scaling | ElasticSearch drastically better. Something completely | novel which looks at current trends of traffic and | automatically moves shards around. Non-trivial stuff. Well, | sorry, there's no way of building a business on top of this | idea. | [deleted] | Conan_Kudo wrote: | > The new license doesn't restrict others from operating | Elasticsearch as a service. It restricts others from | operating Elasticsearch as a service unless they release | any source code patches, improvements, and/or functionality | extensions they make to it. | | If this was AGPL, I'd agree with you. IANAL, but SSPL is so | broad that it could be construed to cover the Linux kernel, | which is a no-no. :( | h_anna_h wrote: | The license does not seem any different to AGPLv3 as you | are describing it, in that case why did they not just use | AGPLv3 which is FOSS? | tshaddox wrote: | > In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to | still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all | of its good connotations) it once was. | | That's my attitude towards most of these license changes or | "open core" pivots. These companies want all the good will | and community contributions of "open source" while still | being able to wield intellectual property protection laws | against other companies who dare compete against them on | unrelated, commoditized services like hosting. | treis wrote: | It's somewhere between bait and switch & dumping. It's very | hard to compete against free. And it's very hard to make | money when you give away your product for free. Cloud | hosting was a way out of that conundrum. But that window is | now closing as the big cloud operators move in + the rise | of Docker making hosting much easier. | tshaddox wrote: | > And it's very hard to make money when you give away | your product for free. Cloud hosting was a way out of | that conundrum. | | But surely it's only a conundrum if the primary goal of a | software project is for a single company that has the | same name as the software project to exclusively make | money by selling hosting and/or support for that software | _while still using an open source license to attract a | community of developers to work for you for free_. I 'd | argue that this conundrum is easily resolvable: either | have an open source software project for which anyone can | sell support and hosting, or have a software company that | develops proprietary software and sells it and related | services. | btinker wrote: | > In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to | still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all | of its good connotations) it once was. | | This. It is too bad they couldn't have satisfactory financial | success building on open source and it is their right and | perfectly fine to switch to a different model, but their | justification as well as the SSPL dual licensing muddle the | water unnecessarily. | | At least the blogpost clearly states it is no longer open | source, but then it goes "it's just definition, we're | actually totally free and open, just, you know, not OSI free | and open". SSPL software is not free software, it is not | FOSS. Calling it "free and open software" is misleading at | best. | pjmlp wrote: | Basically shareware with source available, we have come | full circle. | kemitchell wrote: | I don't have any problem calling SSPL software "open | source". Or AGPL software, for that matter. What's not free | or open about applying copyleft to network services? | stingraycharles wrote: | I think AWS is a case of someone ruining it for the rest. | Yes, they're allowed to do that and there's nothing wrong | legally, but in the end everyone will be worse off. | | I would be much more hesitant choosing an storage solution if | I knew the parent company has problems monetizing upon it. | Nexxxeh wrote: | "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD." | mbreese wrote: | _> more hesitant choosing an storage solution if I knew the | parent company has problems monetizing_ | | You should be hesitant about choosing any mission critical | product where you don't know how the vendor will make | money. This is even the case with stable vendors. How many | products has Google killed over the years because they | could figure out how to make them profitable (enough)? | johncena33 wrote: | > How many products has Google killed over the years | because they could figure out how to make them profitable | (enough)? | | HN never ceases to amaze me. This is a post on pattern of | exploitative and anti-competitive behavior of AWS. | Somehow HN crowd found a way to whine about Google. Every | single day multiple anti-Google posts on HN front page | was not enough. | babarock wrote: | What's the point of "open sourcing" if you get annoyed at | people redistributing your work? Honest question here. | | I'm really not interested to know who's in the "right" or in | the "wrong". I want to know, what's the motivation for | opensource if not "reuse my code please" | StavrosK wrote: | That question makes the wrong assumption. You assume "OSS" is | a given and "getting annoyed at Amazon" is the issue. In | reality, "getting annoyed at Amazon" is the given and "OSS" | is the issue. | | Then, you can ask "if they get annoyed at Amazon, why open | source?" and the answer is "indeed, and now that they | realized their mistake they're changing it". | growse wrote: | > Then, you can ask "if they get annoyed at Amazon, why | open source?" and the answer is "indeed, and now that they | realized their mistake they're changing it". | | Notably, they're changing it after building a business off | the back of many contributors, many of whom expected to be | contributing to OSS. Sure, there's a CLA so there's no | legal issue, but I'm not sure it's any more morally | virtuous than what Amazon's doing. Both are versions of | "trying to make billions of dollars off the backs of other | people's work". | | There's having cake, and then there's eating it. Either you | want to retain control over something so you can monetize | it to the max, or you want to particpate (and benefit from) | the OSS community and build something that benefits | everyone. | [deleted] | delfinom wrote: | Amazon is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody | sees it. | | They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with | elastic. | tootie wrote: | I don't see this at all. The "extinguish" phase is usually | done when a product is acquired by a direct competitor to | acquire it's customers. Amazon doesn't have a competing | product. And their platform is well-known for supporting | multiple competing software products (look at their array of | databases for example). And the fact that they are now | supporting their own JVM to protect users from Oracle's newly | aggressive licensing. | | This is, perhaps, exploitation but it seems unlikely they'll | kill Elastic ever. | ec109685 wrote: | Elastic is a 10B company and have the ability to write all | the proprietary code they want to compete with Amazon. | paxys wrote: | $15B actually | VoxPelli wrote: | They seems to be a lot better when it comes to cooperating | with eg Envoy and Kubernetes communities though? | | Not sure how good they are with eg MySQL and PostgreSQL, | anyone know? | detaro wrote: | _communities_ is the key word. Neither have one company | behind them whose income they are eating. | dayjah wrote: | Sorry, what is "EEE"? Brief search turns up a horse disease? | mden wrote: | Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Infamous strategy of Microsoft | esp in the 90s. | delfinom wrote: | One of the things Microsoft got anti-trusted for back in | the day | detaro wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingui | s... | cortesoft wrote: | > Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they | didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. | | Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic | even existed. They couldn't have released it as closed source | because they weren't there to release it at all. | | It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open | source code in Lucene. | | I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn't | like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work. | nemothekid wrote: | > _It was written by one guy and it was based on previous | open source code in Lucene._ | | That "one guy" is the CEO and founder of the company. You are | making it seem like some guy developed an open source | database, and a company later came around and built a | business out of it, when that wasn't the case. | iamsb wrote: | At least as per the wikipedia page[1], there is a lag of 2 | years between product and company, and there prior history | of him working on similar products. So I think it is | reasonable to give benefit of the doubt that open source | product was created in good faith and commercial interests | only got explored later. | | Most open source to commercial success stories like Kafka, | Mongodb, and Elastic do seem to follow similar path. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#History | cortesoft wrote: | No, but my point is one guy wrote it and has made a lot of | money from it. He has been more than compensated for his | work. | | Any money made from here on out is not based on the work of | creating the software, but on helping people use it. If | Amazon does a better job of that than Elastic, than they | should win the competition. | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | They actually _have_ their billion dollar company, if they | think they 're owed it - Elastic has a market cap of over $14 | billion. | cmiles74 wrote: | Elasticsearch offers _a lot_ above and beyond what you get | out-of-the-box with Lucene. For sure, the Lucene library is | used by Elasticsearch but this comparison is way off base. | eloff wrote: | > I am ok with them making money off their project, but it | isn't like they are owed a billion dollar company for their | work. | | Because no other companies build on a foundation of open- | source software today? I think that describes every company. | Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not | just components of it, but does that really matter? | | I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make | here. | cortesoft wrote: | My distinction is that I don't think they are being abused. | They want to build a business around an open source tool | just like AWS wants to also build a business around an open | source tool. | | I am happy to let them compete to see who can offer the | best value. | bcrosby95 wrote: | Complaining about AWS building off open source software | when you did too seems a bit awkward. I'd be willing to bet | AWS has spent at least as many person-hours developing | their service as has been put into ES itself. | | I don't really know where I fall on this subject. Companies | need a route to monetize when developing open source | products. It feels like AWS has been closing many ways to | do that. Short term it might feel good for us end users, | but long term it's probably bad for the ecosystem. | VoxPelli wrote: | I think both are at fault. Amazon for provoking this and | Elastic for over-reacting like this and totally break with the | open source licensing, when that isn't necessary to stop | Amazon. They could do like MariaDB rather than follow MongoDB: | https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ Would be much more | appropriate and alienate the open source community much less. | dhd415 wrote: | Notably, they are apparently considering that: | https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification | StavrosK wrote: | Hmm, what's the difference between the BSL and Elastic's | license? | detaro wrote: | Code converts to an open-source license after X (e.g. 4) | years in BSL. Time will tell how it works out, especially | for mature products it could just mean that everyone | targets the 4 year old version. | VoxPelli wrote: | Time will also tell how eg. SSPL will work if eg. Elastic | becomes bankrupt, what happens if I can't get a | commercial license for it anymore in 10-20 years? BSL:s | expire clause ensures that old code never gets | unavailable because the business entity has vanished. | Does SSPL have any similar protection? | iamsb wrote: | Is there a common theme that can be addressed by adding | restriction which can stop distribution as a cloud service in | MIT/other licenses? | | This is a question, and not a informed opinion/suggestion. | dumbfounder wrote: | And Elastic was built on top of Lucene. | | I slice it this way: as a company that is highly invested in | AWS it is easier for us to deploy AWS ElasticSearch service | than to use Elastic's cloud offering or set it up ourselves. | But that doesn't mean I like it. Or are you talking about a | different end user? | StavrosK wrote: | Your options are "OSS ES that you can set up on your own for | free" or "Closed source ES that you have to pay for". Not | "Use AWS" and "Use Elastic". | dumbfounder wrote: | I don't think of it that way at all. Nothing is free. The | servers cost money. It costs money (resources) to manage | servers. The cloud offerings appeal to us because we do not | want to manage servers. AWS ES appeals to us because it is | hard for us to sign contracts to buy software outside AWS. | The trajectory of the software is definitely something we | factor into the decision, but it is very often outweighed | by the other factors. To me it is AWS Elastic vs Elastic | Cloud vs hosting our own Elastic. Or use something else | entirely. | worik wrote: | The point of Free Software is, in part, that other people can | use it. | | That includes nice people like you and me | | It includes reprobates like Amazon | | The horrid games they were playing with trade marks is part of | why Amazon is a reprobate. | ignoramous wrote: | Elasticsearch became popular on back of being F/OSS. The "our | code" Shay talks about is community's too: All the evangelizing | through blog posts, talks; and the countless hours spent | reporting bugs or even fixing them. If anyone thinks a | community's contributions are any less than their own | company's, then they don't get to claim to be torch-bearers of | F/OSS (which Elastic is without realizing the irony). | | Shay keeps claiming "our users" aren't affected, but who's he | fooling? They say, AWS cornered them to adopting dual-license | SSPL, what's to say they woudln't do an Oracle in the future | (like Sun did with Java and continue to do with their DB | offerings?). Slippery slope, sure, but it is indeed _slippery_ | for a company struggling to compete with competition and | seeking predatory avenues as last ditch attempt to stay alive. | | I believe, in all my naivety, that Elastic could have created | an _Elastic Foundation_ (like Joyent did with NodeJS, who btw | didn 't throw a hissy-fit at AWS for Lambda) and invited | developers from all walks to shoulder the burden of the core | software (which they themselves commoditized by F/OSSing it) so | that they could focus on SaaS (like AWS). | | I'd like to think, Elastic's real problem is they have hard | time competing with AWS in terms of pricing for SaaS (of | course, AWS owns infrastructure and so it is a tough battle- | front), but if they were paying any attention, AWS | Elasticsearch Service was _very_ poor in 2015 and continued to | remain so for a long time (it sucks less now), but Elastic 's | own service wasn't up to the mark, either. I think they | misplaced their priorities (see GCP's flawless execution with | k8s, managed-k8s, and Anthos) and were caught asleep at the | wheel when they could have captured SaaS market away from AWS | in those interim years (2015-19) by focusing solely on | differentiated features and not on the core Elasticsearch | software (which was _libre_ and hence _undifferentiated_ ). | | Of course, Shay and Elastic know better than I do and I am | indeed a grumpy developer who's upset, but I want Elastic to | give up their misleading messaging viz. 'doesn't affect / | nothing changes for our users'. They're being hypocritical and | not doing anyone any favours. | | > _And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on | you, our users. And no effect on our customers that engage with | us either in cloud or on premises._ | | No, Shay. It does affect the community, who are also the users | of the software. | | > _We created Elasticsearch; we care about it more than anyone | else. It is our life's work. We will wake up every day and do | more to move the technology forward and innovate on your | behalf._ | | I see a lot of "We"s and "Our"s. And that's the problem with | CLAs and stealing someone else's work. Companies can't tell | anymore who's stealing from whom. | 0800LUCAS wrote: | > by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? | | You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by | "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a | service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking. | | You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers | working to keep those services up and make them talk to other | AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to | react to any failures. | | I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies | that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge | value in what Amazon offers. | StavrosK wrote: | I'm not saying "just" as in "it's easy". I'm saying "just" as | in "they can install and maintain _but don 't have to develop | it too_". | ignoramous wrote: | > _...they can install and maintain but don 't have to | develop it too._ | | As someone building distributed systems, I'd think you'd | appreciate that merely "installing" Elasticsearch wouldn't | simply cut it for the scale AWS operates at. | | I wish Elastic would have focused on their _differentiated | offerings_ instead and had let go of their iron grip on | Elasticsearch itself (perhaps by creating a _Foundation_ | around it). | tinyhouse wrote: | The core of Elastic-search is Lucene, another OSS. I'm sure the | ES team contributed a lot to Lucene, but do they share their | profits with all the Lucene developers? You can think about | Elastic as a hosted service around Lucene. | nrmitchi wrote: | I've said this elsewhere, but no. | | There are two main differences here. | | 1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that | Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it | in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. | The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and | running it as a drop-in replacement. | | 2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on | top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you | think there is so little differentiation between the product | you built and the product you built off of, that you are | better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made | any meaningful differences. | | 3rd BONUS difference: It is my understanding that a large | part of the core Lucene team works at (or at one point worked | at) Elastic[0]. | | [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene | tinyhouse wrote: | 1. No one says you need to modify/extend something in order | to sell a service around it. That's why we have licenses | that list exactly what you can do and cannot do with the | software. | | 2. Amazon adds value here by providing hosting solutions | for companies using the elastic search software. So it | makes sense to call it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" since | that's what it is. I think interpreting this as Amazon | built a new competing product but calling it the same name | is not the right interpertation. If that's confusing then | maybe modifying it to "amazon elasticsearch hosting | service" would be the OK thing to do. Not sure if that | would make Elastic happy. | | 3. That's nice of them (really!). Sounds like win-win. But | again, it doesn't make anything they do more justifiable. | cmiles74 wrote: | The only obligation that Easticsearch has to the Lucene | project is to donate back improvements to Lucene itself. I | believe the Elasticsearch project has done this in the past. | | No one is asking Amazon to share profits with Elastic. Many | people do expect Amazon to honor trademarks of other | companies. Many people expect Amazon not to package | proprietary features as if they were free and open source. | | Lucene is a library that makes it easier to provide indexing | and searching of "stuff". It's not a commercial product with | a sales and consulting team. I can't think of a more apples | and oranges comparison. | tinyhouse wrote: | I don't know anything about this story so cannot comment | about them packaging proprietary features. But here's my | thought about the trademarks claims from Elastic. The only | info I have is the blog post they shared. | | Elasticsearch is a name of an open source project. Why is | calling something "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" a | trademark issue? It's not Amazon's fault they called their | company after the name of an open source software (the OSS | came first btw). Also, IMHO calling it "Amazon | Elasticsearch Service" is fair since it represents exactly | what it is. Would it better if they instead took the code, | made some closed modifications and then released a service | around it with a new name? My thought is no. | acatton wrote: | > Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they | didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. | | A relevant question is "would they have been that successful if | Elastic were 'just another closed source enterprise product'." | | Elastic was successful because a lot of companies tried it out | for free and then purchased licenses, or because hobbiysts used | it on their personal project and then pushed for it at work. | ardy42 wrote: | > A relevant question is "would they have been that | successful if Elastic were 'just another closed source | enterprise product'." | | > Elastic was successful because a lot of companies tried it | out for free and then purchased licenses, or because | hobbiysts used it on their personal project and then pushed | for it at work. | | That model is not actually incompatible with closed source. | You can always distribute binaries with a liberal usage | license. And if your model is selling support, that might | actually be helpful, since it's even less practical for a 2nd | or 3rd party to support software when they don't have access | to the source code, so you'd sell more support contracts | | I think Amazon's behavior may end up just harming open | source, by punishing the idealism that leads companies to try | to make commercialized open source business models work. | vinay_ys wrote: | You would be surprised how many third party companies | support closed source software product of another company. | This is very common in enterprise world. It is also a | common way for a vendor to get their foot into an | enterprise entrenched with a competitor's product. | ardy42 wrote: | > You would be surprised how many third party companies | support closed source software product of another | company. This is very common in enterprise world. It is | also a common way for a vendor to get their foot into an | enterprise entrenched with a competitor's product. | | I'm aware of that, and have even worked with such | companies. However, IMHO it's way harder (and less | effective) than supporting an open source product. For | instance, it's way harder for a 2nd or 3rd party to | diagnose and patch a bug if they don't have the source. | Lazare wrote: | > No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end- | users, and Elastic is good. | | I don't think that's clear. I (and the team I work with) use | AWS, like so many of us do. (And the ones who don't very likely | use Azure or GCP.) | | Why do we give money to AWS (and their kin) every month? I'd | submit it's because we're getting value from it. If AWS was | _actually_ bad for end users then we, as end users, would walk | away. | | If you were right, and AWS was bad and Elastic is good, this | would be an easy problem. But actually, they're both good. The | issue is people who paid AWS to host ES instead of Elastic, and | you know who those people are? Us. And with reason! | z77dj3kl wrote: | "And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, | our users. It has no effect on our customers that engage with us | either in cloud or on premises." | | No, that's just not true. So many users, from small hobby side- | projects, to large open source projects, and mega-corps care | about the licensing of dependencies, each for their own reason, | and will not want to build on top of proprietary software that | imposes draconian licensing terms. | | It doesn't matter what they say, read the license. It's vague and | there is no legal precedent. It's a big risk for anyone who cares | about licensing issues for their projects. | api wrote: | The open source world needs to come together and create a | license that is well crafted. Otherwise we will keep seeing | these less suitable licenses. | | So far the FOSS world seems to be pretending this problem | doesn't exist. Pretending a problem doesn't exist doesn't make | the problem go away. It makes you go away as you become | irrelevant. | | There is the AGPL, but it's not quite right. It also has the | letters G-P-L in it, which spooks a ton of people still | influenced by Microsoft's billion dollars worth of anti-GPL | FUD. (I'm convinced you could just rename the GPL and all those | problems would go away.) | dragonwriter wrote: | > The open source world needs to come together and create a | license that is well crafted. | | It has created several. | | It hasn't created licenses well-crafted for purposes directly | contrary to the purpose of having open source software, | because that's not what the open source community is | interested in. | | > So far the FOSS world seems to be pretending this problem | doesn't exist. | | From the point of view of the FOSS world, the issue here is | not a problem; creators having an exclusive ability to | monetize software as a service isn't a purpose open source is | intended to serve; in fact, avoiding the lock-in that results | from such exclusivity is a big part of the point. | api wrote: | > From the point of view of the FOSS world, the issue here | is not a problem; creators having an exclusive ability to | monetize software as a service isn't a purpose open source | is intended to serve; in fact, avoiding the lock-in that | results from such exclusivity is a big part of the point. | | If the creators get nothing, then why bother? Why slave | away to make software just to give free labor to billion | dollar companies while you get nothing? Is free labor for | Amazon what open source is about? | | If open source refuses to adapt to the realities of today's | software ecosystem, it will die out... or at least | "serious" open source projects will die out and all that | will remain is hobbyist level stuff, abandonware, and half- | done academic projects. | | Personally I do think FOSS in its present form is going to | die _for most major projects_. You 'll still see FOSS | libraries, building blocks, academic projects, and some | major projects that really are large and old enough to have | enough real grassroots contributors to keep them going. For | major projects in the future you're going to have something | more like a shareware model but with source-available. | | Nobody creating a new large-scale project today is going to | give it a license that they know will result in somebody | else productizing it, making a fortune, and giving them | nothing. At least Amazon acknowledges where things came | from... in some cases the productizers even rename the | project and don't even give the author _credit_. | | FOSS and its gift culture ethos just isn't working in | today's world. The software market of today is a dark | forest. | dragonwriter wrote: | > FOSS and its gift culture ethos just isn't working in | today's world. | | It absolutely is working the same way it always has (to | which "gift culture" matters only around the edges). It | doesn't work for people who want to start a business with | a business model of using copyright law to extract | monopoly rents, but then, it never has, and that's always | been the point. | | And, yes, it's not, for that reason, a good fit for | narrow software entrepreneurship, but that's always been | the domain of proprietary software. | | What's new is startups building on OSS to build mind | share, and then trying to shift to rent extraction while | wanting to pretend to still be interested in OSS. | api wrote: | I don't think I totally disagree, but here's the problem: | if OSS is not a good fit for software entrepreneurship, | then it puts a really severe cap on how advanced, | polished, easy to use, or well supported OSS can be, | because pushing really hard on software development and | implementing tens of thousands of hours of fine-grained | polish is far beyond what the vast majority of people can | afford to (or are willing to) volunteer for free. | | It places really polished products beyond the realm of | OSS. If you're fine with that, then there's no problem. | Perhaps OSS has achieved its goal, namely creating a free | and open software ecosystem for nerds and by nerds. | | I can't think of a single OSS project used (directly) by | a large number of the general public that does not have a | company behind it. I think that says something. | dragonwriter wrote: | > if OSS is not a good fit for software entrepreneurship, | then it puts a really severe cap on how advanced, | polished, easy to use, or well supported OSS can be, | because pushing really hard on software development and | implementing tens of thousands of hours of fine-grained | polish is far beyond what the vast majority of people can | afford to (or are willing to) volunteer for free. | | Even if they start out as labors of love, OSS that gets | beyond the niche stage tends not to have most work done | "for free", it's done (or paid for) by people/firms who | are using the software in their business, but where the | software is supporting, not the thing being sold. | (Whether the OSS is infrastructure that is invisible to | customers, or whether what is being sold is support and | professional services tied to the OSS software.) | api wrote: | Very few OSS projects get popular enough and are | structurally amenable to that kind of group contribution | scenario. Of those that are, in most cases it results in | an unusable hodge podge of crap rather than a well | crafted product. | dragonwriter wrote: | > Very few OSS projects get popular enough and are | structurally amenable to that kind of group contribution | scenario. | | Yes, very few open source projects ever move out of the | fringes of relevance. That's always been true. The idea | that there has been some radical change making OSS less | relevant is just false; what has happened is that OSS has | gotten enough mindshare that people who want to use | business models that OSS has never been a good fit want | to use OSS as an early marketing gimmick, and then pivot | out of it without paying a price for not being OSS. And | are upset that people who do care about OSS are calling | them on their B.S. when they try it. | api wrote: | I think we have a very different view about the goals of | OSS then, and I think your idea of its goals is narrower. | | I wish all software could be at least source-available | and preferably available under even more liberal terms if | that could be made to work. That way we could see how | things work, learn from things, debug with the benefit of | source, port things to different platforms or fix | platform problems without waiting for the vendor, | contribute if for no other reason than experience, and | preserve software after vendors go belly-up without | having to resort to emulating old platforms whole cloth. | | I also wish there was mainstream adoption of open | software for privacy and security reasons. I wish people | could use operating systems, web browsers, messengers, | and so on whose source could be audited so people could | understand privacy implications. | | That would all give us more freedom and more | transparency, but it also requires a business model to | sustain those kinds of projects. As it stands nobody | outside geekdom uses open source software because there | is no business model to sustain OSS with the degree of | polish demanded by end users. | hodgesrm wrote: | > It doesn't matter what they say, read the license. | | I would love to but the terms within the ElasticSearch codebase | on Github are quite confusing. Here's the text of the | LICENCE.TXT file. Source code in this | repository is covered by one of three licenses: (i) the | Apache License 2.0 (ii) an Apache License 2.0 compatible | license (iii) the Elastic License. The default license | throughout the repository is Apache License 2.0 unless | the header specifies another license. Elastic Licensed code is | found only in the x-pack directory. The build | produces two sets of binaries - one set that falls under the | Elastic License and another set that falls under Apache | License 2.0. The binaries that contain `-oss` in the | artifact name are licensed under Apache License 2.0 and | these binaries do not package any code from the x-pack | directory. | | Aside from not showing copies of the applicable licenses, it | seems you have to read the code headers to determine which | source file has which license. There are a lot of ways to | respond to competitive threats from Amazon, but this approach | is increasingly chaotic the closer you look. | | [1] | https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... | pas wrote: | Does this even work? ES was considered 'one work' at some | point, right? It's developed together, not file-by-file. How | is it possible then to license it file-by-file? Wouldn't most | of those files be derivative works of the old 'one work' | anyway? (Meaning they have to keep the original license, | meaning "the default license, Apache License 2.0"?) | | Sure, at some point someone started to create a plugin for ES | (let's say the security/ACL thing in x-pack, used to be | called Shield or something like that), they used the ES API | and they used runtime linking. (I have no idea if that's okay | or not, has been tested in court or not. I know the US | Supreme Court will say something about that in June.) But | when developing any feature in that plugin nobody thinks of | just that plugin. Folks think about ES as a whole, indexes, | shards, documents, terms, maybe even in terms of low-level | Lucene primitives. | | I think it's practically impossible to wear the OSS and the | proprietary hat at the same time. (Or separately but on the | same project.) | jblwps wrote: | If ES is the sole copyright holder, they can license it to | whomever they wish under whatever license they wish. IANAL, | but it seems perfectly coherent to me that they can say "If | you build the software this way, we release it to you under | X license. If you build it that way, we release it under Y | license." | nitrogen wrote: | It sounds like everything outside of the x-pack directory is | Apache or compatible with Apache, so the -oss binaries are | Apache | studius wrote: | Open-source and free software licenses don't imply that the | source must remain served on some site, and it doesn't imply | that the license for the code cannot change for future | versions of that code _necessarily_ - as it depends on the | license and/or other factors. | | But if you have a copy of the license and the code and it | permitted use of it perpetually, then it can continue to be | used. That's my understanding. | xeraa wrote: | The license change to the dual-license with SSPL and Elastic | License hasn't happened -- this is the state so far and all | the code outside the `x-pack` folder is Apache v2 licensed. | | Going forward the repository will have a dual-license and the | top image on https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing can | hopefully explain that better. | | [Disclaimer: I work for Elastic] | signal11 wrote: | If you're a paying customer, you are probably fine. | | If you're using SSPL'd Elastic (or Mongo DB, the risks are the | same) for anything serious -- i.e. beyond a hobby, get legal | advice ASAP. | | SSPL isn't an OSI certified license; many would call it at best | a 'shared source' license because of the riders attached. | | [DELETED because, as user `gpm` points out, OSI doesn't own | 'open source' as a trademark, sorry about that -- the need for | legal advice doesn't go away, however.] In fact given their | kvetching about Amazon and their trademark, Elastic's | cheerleading of open source in this and the original blog post | seems to be a bit misleading and doing OSI's trademark a | disservice.[/DELETED] | gpm wrote: | OSI does not have a trademark on the term open source, they | tried and failed to acquire one. | ddevault wrote: | Trademarks are not a requirement for defining terminology. | The word "cake" is not trademarked, but if I sell you a | used car tire when you buy a "cake" from me, I still lied | and misled you about the product. | prepend wrote: | I think they need one. | | Comically, this is why trademarks exist to prevent people | from confusing the market with similar and reused terms. | | I think we need a CreativeCommons-like trademark for open | source software before it's too late. | signal11 wrote: | I think "OSI Approved Open Source License" could easily | be an OSI trademark, if it's not already. | | Ironicallly, like many other organizations, Elastic | themselves have used OSI's approval as a benchmark for | 'open source'[1]: | | > Is X-Pack now open source? | | > Updated on 2018-04-24 with a link to the Elastic | License | | > Open source licensing maintains a strict definition | from the Open Source Initiative (OSI). | | > As of 6.3, the X-Pack code is open under the Elastic | License. However, it will not be 'open source' as it will | not be covered by an OSI approved license. The | interaction model for open X-Pack will be identical to | the open source Elastic Stack, including the ability to | inspect code, create issues and open pull requests via | our existing GitHub repositories. | | [1] https://www.elastic.co/what-is/open-x-pack | gpm wrote: | > I think "OSI Approved Open Source License" could easily | be an OSI trademark, if it's not already. | | Something along those lines is trademarked | un_ess wrote: | https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines lists OSI's | policy for trademark usage. | | 3. Usage that Require Prior Written Approval 3.1. | Distributing software under a license approved by OSI | ("OSI Approved License") | colechristensen wrote: | I think there are valid differences in opinion in what | "open source" means and an organization with an agenda | shouldn't try to own the terminology. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | > I think there are valid differences in opinion in what | "open source" means | | Disagree. It's a well standardised term of art: it means | what the OSI define it to mean. It's pretty precise, and | is not a meaningless marketing term like _premium_. | Similarly _free software_ (and especially _Free Software_ | ) means what the FSF defines it to mean. | | When people start using these terms to mean whatever they | feel like it should mean, it muddies the waters for those | of us trying to have serious discussions about these | topics. Tellingly, such redefinitions are generally | broader than the accepted OSI definition, so as to | include whatever product someone is trying to push. | gpm wrote: | > Tellingly, such redefinitions are generally broader | than the accepted OSI definition, so as to include | whatever product someone is trying to push. | | I disagree. In fact I'll present the counter example of | "myself". I don't agree with the OSIs definition of open | source, I think it run contrary to the plain meaning of | the term, and is contrary to pre-OSI use of the term. | I've argued that numerous times on this forum (and I'm | going to avoid repeating these arguments in depth here, | just google "gpm Open Source | site:news.ycombinator.com"/"gpm Open Source | site:lobste.rs" and you will be able to find the | arguments). | | I have never pushed a product claiming to be open source | that does not meet the OSIs definition, nor do I | anticipate I ever will, since that seems to be a great | way to make discussions about the product devolve into | arguments about licensing, which is terrible advertising. | | The fact that these arguments usually only come up when | there is a reason to argue, i.e. someone has used the | term in a way outside of the OSIs definition, does not | mean that people only think the right definition of the | term is something else when it's for their own benefit. | xyzzy_plugh wrote: | Frankly I don't get why OSI proponents are so angry about | the use of the term Open Source, when they can just | unambiguously use "OSI Approved License" instead. | | It's borderline gatekeeping and it irks me to no end. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | > It's borderline gatekeeping | | No, it's a term-of-art. When people muddy the waters and | try to undermine the standard terminology of a field, | it's not some righteous struggle to liberate a term, it's | just an obstacle to clear communication. | | In aviation, _flap_ is a precise term-of-art, and is | never used interchangeably with _aileron_ , despite that | an aileron is plainly a kind of flap (in the colloquial | sense). If you adopt your own definition of _flap_ , to | refer to both flaps and ailerons, no-one is going to sue | you, but no-one is going to know what you're talking | about. Your use of the term will be considered not merely | different, but wrong. | | Similarly, you could try telling a physicist that you | consider the words _power_ and _force_ to be | interchangeable. They 're not going to sue you, but | they're also not likely to entertain your deliberate | misuse of standard terms. | | Are pilots and physicists gatekeeping by being so | insistent that you use their terms their way? | MaxBarraclough wrote: | I don't think we really _need_ that. The current solution | works relatively well: anyone using _open source_ in a | sense other than that described by the OSI, is reliably | met with a hailstorm of criticism on HackerNews for being | disingenuous. That 's as it should be. It's a term of art | in the software world, and we don't insist on legal | enforcement of every term of art. | | I tend to capitalise the term, _Open Source_ , to | emphasise that I'm using it an a precise way. I do the | same with _Free Software_. Not ironclad, but I figure it | probably helps. | | With all of that said, I don't think anyone should be | permitted to deliberately mislead people when they're | pushing a product. It's obviously right that false | advertising is forbidden by law. | prepend wrote: | That's what I used to think, but now more companies use | "open" with non-OSI licenses and they aren't run out of | town and told STFU. | | Personally, any project using "open" in the name that's | not OSI, I pretty much ignore. But it seems to be growing | (eg, "open core", "openai", stuff like this taking about | open with non-open licenses). | | It's getting hard to filter out. One of the benefits I | think to CCn is that it clearly lets users know what is | and is not allowed. Having OSIn might help with people | who don't read licenses for fun. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | OpenAI is a good example, see this comment from | yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25820080 | pas wrote: | It's especially ... ironic, that they think Amazonification | is not-ok, but Enterprizificaion (open core) is a-ok. | | That said hosting ES is basically the same as building a | carwash, or a gas station, or let's say a printing house. You | get the machinery and build your own support services around | it. | | Even the unit economics are not that different. AWS spent | probably millions of dollars to push the marginal price down. | The initial cost of procurement for machinery might be zero | for ES as opposed to buying a printing press, but none of the | aforementioned sectors are limited by the cost of machinery. | In case of brick and mortar services the cost of land, labor, | construction, and logistics are all a lot more important. | | Yes, okay, but what about AWS's advantage, their "moat"? | Elastic will never be able to match that. This is the same | problem that plagues the browser, phone OS (and other) | markets. Google can easily spend a billion USD each year on | fiddling with Chrome and Android. Mozilla, Canonical, KDE, | and others can't. | | AWS has the platform advantage, Google has money. | | It seems these market forces virtually force ES to become a | "public good" like the Linux kernel. (Or Elastic could try to | fork it and stop using any kind of free/open/available | license. And try to find business niches.) | | But at this point the cat is out of the bag. Likely no amount | of license engineering will be sufficient to overcome AWS' | advantage. | jacobr1 wrote: | The cloud providers would just build a competing service if | they couldn't co-opt an existing popular open source | solution. Or anoint an adjacent solution, like solr in the | case of elasticsearch. But what can be done and we really | haven't seen a "open-core" type infra component try this | yet: is require open-sourcing changes. The opendistro | approach sorta gets us there, in a hard-fork sense, but | seems in adequate and is really only being done for | connivence rather than licensing requirements. But we | already have a licensing solution: the AGPL. But no | enterprise or saas startup wants to touch AGPL software for | the fear of it contaminating proprietary code. So it seems | to me the solution is a hybrid APGL for cloud providers and | apache/mit for others approach. Such a license seems | feasible to write and would be superior to open-core for | most users. | pas wrote: | ... a bit theoretical, but how is the GPLv3 with the | anti-Tivo provision okay? | | OSI definition 10: License must not restrict interface, | and def. 9. License must not restrict other software it | gets distributed with. (So I can't put my encrypted | bootloader and verifier into the same thing.) | delfinom wrote: | "OSI certified" doesn't mean shit regardless in a legal | manner. It's just toilet paper. Always have your own legal | review by IP lawyers. | jameshilliard wrote: | Yep, it's also incompatible with virtually all copyleft open | source licenses. So if you were using any AGPLv3 code with | elastic you now have to switch to Amazon's fork. | alisonkisk wrote: | Is incompatible with non-Affero GPL? | jameshilliard wrote: | Yes, it's incompatible, although you might be fine if you | aren't distributing it or running it as a service. SSPL | requires re-licensing of all code to the SSPL, GPL has | provisions that disallow re-licensing. | | > the simple requirement that if you provide the product as | a service, you must also publicly release any modifications | as well as the source code of your management layers under | SSPL | | This provision is effectively impossible for anyone to | comply with in practice. Calling this a "simple | requirement" is a barefaced lie. | pas wrote: | Especially that no independent party with any authority | (ie. a court) determined what's covered under "management | layers". If I use a custom kernel (that's optimized to | run the JVM and has filesystem and block storage | optimizations for ES), do I have to provide the source | for that? (It seems trivial that it's not "management", | but naturally Elastic's interest lies in arguing that | yes, that are covered under management layers too.) | Proven wrote: | "with" Elastic how? | | I doubt that is true, in fact it seems like a completely | random FUD statement. At least GP tried to make heir FUD | ambiguous. | alex_young wrote: | This lack of clarity in law will likely result in huge issues | in the sale of your startup if you ever go that route. Who | wants to buy a potential lawsuit because of a database | selection? | alisonkisk wrote: | There are always "potential" lawsuits, and stripes already | use many many licensed dependencies with various proprietary | licenses. | alex_young wrote: | This is true, and there are entire categories of licenses | which are considered untouchable in an acquisition because | of the risk associated with them. | prepend wrote: | I find these kind of obscure, "don't worry" posts to increase | my worrying. Part of the simplicity of open source is that it's | available for easy audit. Having to hire lawyers to use a | product means I probably won't use it. | | I also think having people saying "we're open, but read the | fine print" is not good for open source collaboration as it | increases confusion and complexity. | | Elastic is moving the way of a commercial software company. | That's perfectly fine as it's their company, but it's just | different than open source. | colechristensen wrote: | Yup. If you, understanding your product, your users, and your | licensing, write a post for your users not to worry, it means | that you thought about your changes and came to a well | informed position that there was reason for worry. | greyhair wrote: | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts out with "Don't | Worry". By the end of the sixth book in the trilogy find it | was right to worry all along. | dragonwriter wrote: | Well, you try to make it sound unlikely, but it's exactly | like corporate messaging that there are no plans for | layoffs in the wake of bad financial news. | | The idea that a license change made to prevent competition | and enable a business model centered around extracting | monopoly rents from customers has no effect on customers is | ludicrous. It's whole point is to have an adverse effect on | customers. | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | Or you might have a history of people being mad at you (for | good reasons, like the story of security of the ELK stack). | They know very well everybody will get mad again, so they | precede all explanations by "don't worry". | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | So what would be your advice for them in this situation? They | are developing a product for Amazon for free, Amazon is making | tons of money on it and they don't receive anything back. | luisfmh wrote: | So what should we be using instead of elasticsearch for logs? | To mitigate that licensing risk? | mjburgess wrote: | https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Seagate+BarraCuda&ref=nb_sb_noss_. | .. | | & | | grep ( with parallel ) | | ...if it matches your use case, you'll find it trivially | outperforms elasticsearch. | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | Search speed is not the most important aspect at play here. | hodgesrm wrote: | ClickHouse. It's Apache 2.0 and will stay that way. | | Edit to add disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse. | pritambaral wrote: | Using an AGPL-licensed fork does not suffer from this risk. | corford wrote: | We're using Grafana and Loki to great effect. | technics256 wrote: | Loki and grafana are great, use it on all my clients eks | clusters. | franciscop wrote: | The problem of the known open source licenses (vs this no- | precedent one) is that they were made long time ago for other | situations and they do a poor job at protecting open source | authors from the abuse that we see from Amazon and similar. | acatton wrote: | I'm confused by the "abuse" part. If I think the author of | the GPLed project "foobar" is a jerk, and I fork it and | maintain it without colaborating with foobar's original | author, am I "abusing" the GPL? | | Personally, I don't think so, and I think I should have the | right to do so. I wonder how this is different from Amazon | behavior here. (I want to make clear that I'm not saying Shay | or anybody at elastic is anything. This is for the sake of | the example.) | | Now foobar's author can stop me from using his project name | by registering a trademark on it. But the GPL is working as | intented. | | At the end, "maintaning" a fork of Elastic is wasted | engineering effort and time, it would be better to | collaborate. But I personally think Elastic should just | ignore Amazon and keep doing what their doing, instead of | making their product proprietary. | franciscop wrote: | I never said forking is abusing. But if you fork it, | position it as an official product with the same name on | your platform and lie on twitter saying that your foobar | was a collaboration with the original foobar author then | yes, you are definitely abusing your power. | | On the other point: "the GPL is working as intented" yes | but not as the authors want, hence the change of license! | Nothing wrong with that IMHO. | acatton wrote: | As I said, foobar's author can sue me over trademarks in | the situation you've described. | sireat wrote: | Elastic has the same problem that MongoDB has with Amazon: Amazon | is commoditizing their product on a massive scale. | | "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements." | | https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ | | Not sure what other alternatives are there besides changing | licensing. | Seb-C wrote: | Given that aws just built DocumentDB, I am not sure if the | licensing changing anything. I would even say that this choice | actually hurts MongoDB because I am less likely to choose it | since they have less practical hosting solutions. | mrsuprawsm wrote: | I recently ran a project to compare AWS Elasticsearch and | Elastic-hosted ES. | | Surprisingly, we found that AWS did better for our use-case. | Better IaC - easy to set up clusters with Terraform, and | associated alerts. Better monitoring and easier setup. Better | price/performance. AWS is obviously lower friction from a | purchasing point too once you're already an AWS user. | | This makes me curious if Elastic are shooting themselves in the | foot a bit here. | mintplant wrote: | Why would they be shooting themselves in the foot? From their | perspective, Elastic doesn't get anything out of your going | with the AWS offering, and Amazon's behemoth-level resources | allow it to outcompete Elastic's own hosted offering, as you | found, while contributing nothing back to cover development | costs of the software itself. | donretag wrote: | I have been using Elasticsearch for over ten years and have | seen a few of the hosted versions. For many years, AWS was | running way behind. A few major versions behind, almost no | options. No one used it. The ES version was not great, but it | was way better than the AWS version. | | Fast forward to 2021 and the AWS version is as seamless as most | of their offerings. Works with the VPC, backing stores. You can | set it up with CloudFormation/CDK. ES has stagnated. | qalmakka wrote: | I don't understand why companies obstinately keep adopting the | SSPL when it's obvious it makes no legal sense and it is | unenforceable. The only reason why nobody has shut it down in | court yet is because the companies they are complaining about | have plenty of resources to maintain their own forks. By adopting | the SSPL they are just pushing corporate developers away and | weakening their offering. | samblr wrote: | What gets often never discussed in these debates is below : | | The sheer inability of OSI to provide a new-age license that can | counter AWS. | | Can anybody knowledgeable shed some light on this topic ? Like | what OSI license can counter AWS & if there are none why aren't | OSI doing anything. | LukeEF wrote: | AWS have recently invested in DevRel and open-source evangelist | type employees (to be found on twitter much of the time). I | assume they understand better than anybody that the dev and | startup dollar is enormous and crucial to their future success. | This type of thing - and their past willingness to leach off | open-source - has to have a marketing and sales impact - at least | at the 'startup' top of the funnel. Is it sufficient to push AWS | to change direction? Would be good to see a RocksDB, Cassandra or | the likes emerge from AWS. | phendrenad2 wrote: | Switching to SSPL feels more like retribution than a fix for the | problem. But sadly nothing can be done if Amazon is willing to | flagrantly steal your trademark. | | At least switching to SSPL might bubble the related trademark | issue up to a higher-paid set of lawyers within the Amazon | monstrosity, and maybe it'll get resolved. | lawwantsin17 wrote: | Go get em! | JCM9 wrote: | Elastic's arguments are problematic considering the history of | the codebase. | | They didn't invent "elasticsearch" from scratch, rather they took | someone else's codebase (Lucene) and made it better. | Fundamentally that's what AWS did too... they took open source | code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. | Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed | service front but aren't offering up strong reasons for this | being "NOT OK". Elastic was happy to use code and concepts from | others to build their product but seem annoyed when others did | the same to them. I don't get it. | | The brand name thing might have more weight but it will come down | to if they were truly enforcing the name the whole time they | owned it or are just annoyed with AWS. If the name fell into | common use they they likely won't have much luck protecting it. | Yeroc wrote: | Lucene is a pretty low-level search library. It has no concept | of clustering etc. etc. What ElasticSearch built on top is far | from trivial. Furthermore, ElasticSearch pays a number of | people to contribute back to the Lucene project. | | As far as I know AWS hasn't contributed any code of note back | to ElasticSearch or Lucene. | nrmitchi wrote: | I'm really starting to dislike this notion of "Oh well Elastic | deserves this since they build on an open source project, | Lucene!" | | There are two main differences here. | | 1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that | Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in | ways and for use cases that _Lucene was not designed for_. The | same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running | it as a drop-in replacement. | | 2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top | of Lucene, and then _decide to call itself Lucene_. If you | think there is so little differentiation between the product | you built and the product you built _off of_ , that you are | better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made | any meaningful differences. | josho wrote: | This is fine. | | No seriously. Hear me out. | | If you are a proponent of capitalism then this is how the system | works. | | The little fish grow into big fish. The big fish eat the little | fish. The ecosystem suffers. | | It has always been this way. Many of us remember Microsoft in the | nineties. Fewer will remember the phone or oil industry doing the | same. | | Don't fight this issue. Fight the system that tolerates this | pattern. Money in politics, high cost of litigation are both the | real concerns. | indymike wrote: | Capitalism is simply an economic system defined by private | ownership of the means of production. I'm not sure you are | using capitalism correctly here. | josho wrote: | You are right. I think it's that we allow companies to become | dominant in their industry and abuse their market position. I | incorrectly called out capitalism when it's really | unregulated markets combined with a legal system that makes | it possible for large companies to avoid consequences, or at | least defer consequences until they've wiped out their | competition that the consequence is merely a minor fine. | adamcstephens wrote: | Your examples from the past were all knocked down (MS) or | broken apart to keep the market available to competitors. Are | you saying we should do this or just get money out of politics? | josho wrote: | MSFT was broken apart. The DOJ trial only began after a | decade of microsoft abusing their market position and | destroying numerous companies. | | I'm saying large industry has undue influence over the | regulators and so action only comes when companies like | Elastic have gone bankrupt. | whitepaint wrote: | There are no better alternatives. | | And about the ElasticSearch, they should have just used a | different license. | josho wrote: | Reflecting on this more I think capitalism is the wrong word. | Completely unregulated markets is what is really the issue. | It leads to the incumbents extracting all the profit and then | using their monopoly position to extract rents for the next | few decades. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Would ElasticSearch have gotten as popular as it has if they | had used a non-opensource license from the start? | spinningslate wrote: | > There are no better alternatives. | | That's a strong claim - evidence? | | > And about the ElasticSearch, they should have just used a | different license. | | Hindsight and all that. Not saying I fully agree with | Elastic's approach, especially the license uncertainly it | creates as noted elsewhere in the thread. But Amazon seems to | have gone beyond "hey, this open source, nothing to stop us | offering it" here. From The CTO's suggestion Elastic was a | partner, to questionable trademark infringement, to potential | copying of closed source code. If you read the article, it's | notable that Elasticsearch continue to have working | relationships with Azure and Google among others. | | So there's more to this than just "should've used a different | license". | sn_master wrote: | Does Microsoft charge for using the Windows trademark for Cloud | providers, or does it charge only for the software license? If | they only charge for the software, then how is this situation any | different? | longhairedhippy wrote: | Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a | business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it | would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the | last version with a friendly license and then transition to the | Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open | license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a | business standpoint it seems like a reasonable insurance policy, | at least until someone else tests the waters in court. | | Amazon doesn't have any interest in making their version closed | because they want the money from hosting. Even if the product | isn't that great, it's super easy if I'm already 100% in on AWS | anyway (not necessarily reality, but it is an easy conversation | to have and the service should be big enough to warrant | investment from AWS). | | I applaud the stand they are taking and it will be interesting to | see how this plays out. | znpy wrote: | > Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? | | If they're dumb, yes. | | As stated in their blog, changes apply pretty much only if | you're either embed or redistribute elasticsearch/kibana. And | these are two specific use-cases btw. | | If you're already a customer, nothing changes. | paxys wrote: | Find me one lawyer who is going to be convinced by this blog | post. There is a blanket no for using SSPL software at every | company I know. | shawnz wrote: | Open Distro is not a fork but simply a repackaging of ES with | some additional modules. | | However there doesn't seem to be many options left now but for | Open Distro to become a complete fork of ES. | c0l0 wrote: | The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my | opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a | bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that | Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their | free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't | show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively | install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream release of | ElasticSearch, as published by Elastic. | | Also, if you take a closer look at Open Distro, you will | quickly come to the conclusion that you really do not want to | deploy what drops out of there. The RPM package does CRAZY | stuff that made me exhale audibly enough for coworkers to | notice - like spawning a postinstall shellscript that `wget`s a | .so for/from an optional library that the Open Distro release | team put into an S3 bucket, and then `mv`ing that downloaded | file (iirc even without any content verification; so the | content could be your proxy's captive portal markup, for all | they know) into (again, iirc) /usr/lib. That is from _WITHIN AN | RPM PACKAGE_ , mind you, where you could and should really just | carry that file yourself. | | That and other minor troubles with the tooling surrounding the | actual product (ES) made me abandon Open Distro fairly quickly. | Which is a shame, since a really freely licensed spin of ES | with "Enterprise" features would indeed be very nice to have. | ignoramous wrote: | You should consider opening an issue on their github [0]? | | AWS, from what I know, takes security seriously, and given | they themselves use OpenDistro internally, this should become | a top priority for them. | | [0] https://github.com/opendistro-for- | elasticsearch/opendistro-b... | kronin wrote: | Have you ever found confirmation that they use OpenDistro | internally? I've looked and have been unable to find such a | statement. | ignoramous wrote: | Though there's no confirmation I could find, there's an | indication that they may/are: | | _Let's take a quick look at the features that we are | including in Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Some of these | are currently available in Amazon Elasticsearch Service; | others will become available in future updates._ | | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for- | elastic... | ivlivs wrote: | Here's the issue for that. Fixed in July. | | https://github.com/opendistro-for- | elasticsearch/opendistro-b... | ec109685 wrote: | How would the captive portal intercept s3 tls calls | successfully? | [deleted] | c0l0 wrote: | TLS in enterprise settings is commonly intercepted by | TLS/HTTPS proxies that create trusted (by the OS's local | trust store) certificates for proxied peers on the fly. | Banks often do this - the one I work for, for instance. | [deleted] | toyg wrote: | It doesn't have to, can just serve anything - if the client | code doesn't check certificates... | mintplant wrote: | > Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? | | Um, about that... | | > When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch | fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third | party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the | Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our | community and drove additional confusion. | minhazm wrote: | It's interesting that they phrased it like that. If they were | confident about this, they would easily be able to prove this | in court and it would be a very simple case of copyright | infringement right? | paxys wrote: | Yeah I'm not sure how much weight this holds, especially | considering one paragraph later they transition into | accusing Amazon of being "inspired" by their commercial | features. | FireBeyond wrote: | They have a lawsuit open against the third party. I would | presume that "inspired" is covering themselves from libel | until they have a judgment that this happened (assuming | it appears). | mintplant wrote: | They're currently suing the third party mentioned. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | If IBM v. SCO taught us anything, it should have taught us | that "easily... prove" and "in court" do not belong in the | same sentence. The case SHOULD have been thrown out in 5 | minutes due to lack of merit, which ANY programmer could | see. Instead, it took FOURTEEN YEARS to decide, and is | STILL working through appeals. Microsoft funded the | litigation, and the scumbag executives of SCO continued to | get paid through most of this charade. It all still makes | my blood boil. | neilsense wrote: | Why does this read like a child wrote it? | sn_master wrote: | I agree, I felt it was written very quickly without much | editing or review. | netdur wrote: | emotion / hurt | quotemstr wrote: | > We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we | see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon | | The rest of Amazon's behavior aside, there's nothing wrong with | cloning a feature. Cloning features is in fact an essential part | of competition. | pabs3 wrote: | If Amazon violated their trademark and proprietary license, how | do they think they will be able to stop Amazon from violating the | new proprietary license? | CaptArmchair wrote: | I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: | putting an open source license on a product isn't a business | model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. | | A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by | directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code | out there without any further legal obligations on your part as | well as those who use that code. | | It also means that you have to find alternate ways of making | revenue e.g. by providing consultancy, building services or | licensing the trademark (which is an entirely different ball game | from open sourcing the code!). | | The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in | their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out- | competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to | consultancy, services, etc. | | To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging | the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just | rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way. | | Of course, the founders of ES could never predict how successful | their product would become after a decade. There are plenty of | open source products engineered by commercial companies that | never catch the eye of behemoths like Amazon. | rileymat2 wrote: | > The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in | their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out- | competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to | consultancy, services, etc. | | I kind of disagree here, the main reason it outcompetes is | based on the network of linked self serve services in the | ecosystem. We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I | would not tout thier consultancy as being anything but ok if | not underwhelming. | StavrosK wrote: | > The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch | with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, | etc. | | I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, | rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they | offer an ES service so why not just use that". | ako wrote: | Correct. Customers are looking for a cloud platform to run | their apps, all the services are just features. | | Elastic is a feature, event bus is a feature, database is a | feature, compute is a feature. | spinningslate wrote: | true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a | repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party | provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the | friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with | $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always | going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering. | sammax wrote: | I wouldn't exactly call that "competition" though. | nicoburns wrote: | Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to | society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or | otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous | to it. | julienb_sea wrote: | Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? | Because they are careful with their data and legal | obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no | joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem | to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this | which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal | requirements, but even then you might argue its better | for a large organization to pay attention to other | companies' licenses instead of stepping on them. | spinningslate wrote: | spot on. The lesson for would-be companies formed around | open source is pretty stark: if your stuff is any good, | then assume the clould vendors will offer it. If they do, | it's going to be _really hard_ for you to compete with a | separate commercial offering. | | Not only has the cloud vendor already gone through the | hoops of getting an enterprise agreement in place. | They're also big, and recognised, and know how to deal | with Procurement. And Risk. And Compliance. And Legal. | | Not saying I like that situation. It does seem unjust | that the big guys can just cherry-pick good products and | monetise them without giving anything back. It offends my | sense of fairness. But that's commercial reality, at | least in today's markets. | vinay_ys wrote: | The whole reason I would choose an open-source tech | against closed source is so that I can go to whoever I | want for support and future enhancement, that I'm not | dependent on this tiny company for my business | continuity. Sometimes that tiny founding company may not | be the best to offer the kind of support and enhancements | I need. | | A real personal example I experienced: at one time, the | founding team behind a project I happened to use at work | actually told me they didn't want to do the enhancement I | was asking for because my particular scale-out needs were | too niche and none of their other paying customers need | that and they didn't have the engineering bandwidth to | build my feature (the opportunity cost for them was too | high to abandon building features needed by their other | customers). | | So I had to solve this scale-out problem by myself - | which was painful (we had high opportunity cost too). | | In that situation, if my cloud vendor were to say they | would solve that problem for me as they would be willing | to invest whatever engineering bandwidth required to make | it happen, then I would go with them. | | Now if that happens a few times, the cloud vendor's | service offering will be much superior to the original | project founding team's offering. | | Over time, the cloud vendor's offering will also be | cheaper. | | Of course the trick here is to be watchful of being | sucked into a lock-in by the cloud vendor. You will have | to insist that all of the features they are doing for you | are actually open-source and portable to another cloud. | Many companies define such requirements as part of their | procurement process and audit for it. | | As more companies start to push for such guardrail | requirements to prevent cloud lock-in, the open-source | commercial support model may still have a chance - but | unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean the project | founding company will do well. | ethbr0 wrote: | The key enabler here is IAM and data (at rest and | moving). | | If we want to encourage free markets, the GDPR et al. | need to be very careful to disincentivize "traffic within | different parts of the same entity." | | As is, _if_ my regulatory compliance is satisfied through | AWS 's data and IAM handling, then _if_ an Amazon-hosted | service better integrates with those components, it | strictly dominates competition. | | That's a pretty unregulatable quality, and one easily | optimized by Amazon (for itself), and impossibly by | everyone else (on Amazon). | | This weaponizes data protection regulation into a moat | around large everything-and-the-kitchen-sink I/PaaS | providers. | | There needs to be balance between (a) protecting data & | (b) ensuring a competitive ecosystem with multiple viable | solutions. | nicoburns wrote: | The other way in which they are detrimental to society is | by taking revenue away from companies such as elastic | that are actually developing technology. In general there | is economic hazard with any large company. There are also | benefits and I don't think they should be eliminated | entirely. But I do think they should be curtailed and the | economy biased towards smaller companies. | the_reformation wrote: | How is increasing consumer choice and offering a cheaper | product detrimental to society? It's beneficial to | everybody besides Elastic's shareholders. | j3th9n wrote: | The problem here is that Amazon is infringing on copyright, | using the "Elasticsearch" trademark and lying about a | partnership in a tweet. | | > A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain | revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to | put the code out there without any further legal obligations on | your part as well as those who use that code. | | Open source doesn't mean you can infringe on its copyright and | use trademarks everywhere you like. | | > It also means that you have to find alternate ways of making | revenue e.g. by providing consultancy, building services or | licensing the trademark (which is an entirely different ball | game from open sourcing the code!). | | You didn't read the whole article?: "I took a personal loan to | register the Elasticsearch trademark in 2011 believing in this | norm in the open source ecosystem." | spzb wrote: | You don't fix trademarks disputes by changing software | licenses. Elastic appear to have a sound argument on the | trademark front but to conflate that with changing the | license of their product is disingenuous. | ethbr0 wrote: | I read their argument as 'suing Amazon in the courts for | trademark infringement is an insufficiently expedient | remedy.' | | It does OSS no good if Elastic prevails on merits the day | after they go out of business from lost revenue. | spzb wrote: | And what remedy do they have to a copyright license | infringement? The same glacial pace legal system. | chippiewill wrote: | The damages and ramifications for violating software | copyright are much clearer than the nuanced world of | trademark infringement. | | The change in ElasticSearch license here is well | publicised. If AWS were to continue to incorporate new | changes to ElasticSearch it would be obvious they had | deliberately violated the terms of the license and it's | much easier to pursue a legal case. | rjmunro wrote: | Please don't confuse trademarks and Copyrights - they are | entirely separate things. Using a trademark is not infringing | Copyright. It may or may not be infringing the trademark, but | that's a whole different thing. | | In general, anyone can use your trademark as long as they are | using it about you or your product. I can say "I like Coca | Cola, it tastes great" or even "Coca Cola is disgusting" but | if I put Coca Cola on the menu but give you Pepsi, that's | infringing. | | This is why some projects have generic names and brand names | for the commercial version. PhoneGap and Cordova, RedHat and | Centos, etc. Amazon can offer a machine and say "This is | Centos, it's mostly the same as RedHat", but they can't say | "This is RedHat" unless they pay for actual RedHat. | sammax wrote: | Don't you need permission to advertise your product with | Coca Cola(tm)? | | Or in this case, would Amazon not need Elastic's permission | to say "we use Elastic" to advertise AWS? | mbreese wrote: | Trademark law is very different than copyright law. You | are allowed to use trademarks in certain circumstances. | You can't imply a relationship that doesn't exist, but | AWS saying - this is a hosted version of Elasticsearch | would probably be okay (but IANAL). | | Where they'd get into trouble is if they said they | offered a hosted Elasticsearch, but under the hood it was | something else. But, even then they could probably say | that their offering was Elasticsearch compatible. | | The real question is: was AWS misleading customers? I | don't make any claims one way or the other about this | specific case. But I wanted to point out that you don't | always need permission to use another's trademark. | | From [1]: | | _> Nominative use permits the use of a trademark - even | in commercial contexts - if it is the most accurate way | to refer to a good or service without misleading | consumers as to its source._ | | [1] | https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#fair- | use-d... | jopsen wrote: | > if it is the most accurate way to refer to a good or | service without misleading consumers as to its source. | | But if you're buying a service from AWS the source is not | Elastic. | | You might be able to say compatible with elastic search. | But using the name in your own product name seems | unlikely to hold. | | I think this is shortsighted on Amazon's part, because it | probably wouldn't cost all that much to make a joint | offering. | | I would be curious to know where those lawsuits went. | Because it seems like something that should have been | resolved, and for which you could get an injunction. | | The problem is clearly that people think they are getting | a service supported by ES, when they are getting a look- | a-like copy service. Which is what trademarks are | intended to resolve. | | In hindsight, maybe it would have worked better for ES, | had they called the open source product something else, | like how centos isn't called RedHat. | M2Ys4U wrote: | > Don't you need permission to advertise your product | with Coca Cola(tm)? | | Not if what you're selling _is_ Coca Cola | rossmohax wrote: | Genuine question: why Amazon EKS and not Amazon | Kubernetes then? I noticed every single managed | Kubernetes doesn't call it Kubernetes. | mbreese wrote: | Huh? | | EKS => Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service | | Kubernetes is a little different here... it seems a bit | more nebulous from an installation/instance point of | view. It's a bit like saying we use "Linux". Which Linux? | Debian? Ubuntu? RHEL? SUSE? | ZiiS wrote: | Because that Trademark is owned by the Linux Foundation | who are very well positioned and financed (AWS themselves | are Platinum members) and published clear usage | instructions. | ecnahc515 wrote: | As someone else said, what constitutes "Kubernetes" isn't | well defined, and so the CNCF put limits on using the | terminology in product names. | dang wrote: | This subthread was originally a reply to | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523. We sometime | prune these when they get too top-heavy aren't tightly | semantically coupled. | speeder wrote: | I interviewed at Amazon, and researched their offerings to | better prepare. | | Until reading this news, I never realized ElastiSearch wasn't | an Amazon product, I always believed ElastiSearch was Amazon's | invention, because of how Amazon employees talk about (always | "Amazon ElastiSearch" phrase, often dropping the "service" part | of it, so is easy to assume it is "Amazon's ElastiSearch" like | "Microsoft Windows") | | So it is not just... "a few times too many", if I am | interviewing for the company and got extremely confused, how | other people wouldn't be confused too? And that is the whole | point of trademark laws! | inssein wrote: | Agreed. | | We actually were customers of Elastic's offering for a while, | but they went down 3 times in a quarter, which was simply | unacceptable. We had to switch, and have been okay since. Our | bill is also more than half of what it used to be. | | The AWS implementation is quite limited in many ways, and there | could be a point where we switch back or host it ourselves. | nrmitchi wrote: | > Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own | product when it comes to consultancy, services | | You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS | just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses | AWS. They don't _really_ out-compete, they just use their | existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by | using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage | elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area. | | > To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of | leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways | that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way. | | You're phrasing this in a way like Amazon "leveraging the | ElasticSearch brand" isn't a trademark issue. Is "leveraging | the trademarks of another company" suddenly okay (as long as | you don't do it 'a few times too many') as long as you're | Amazon? What if Amazon started selling smart thermostats by | "leveraging" the Nest brand? | chippiewill wrote: | I think there's a subtlety in the way Amazon as a company | markets what they do and leverages the brand that's important | here. | | Take for instance Amazon RDS which is a family of managed | relational database services. I don't think "Amazon RDS for | MySQL" is an unfair use of the "MySQL" trademark, even if | Amazon haven't asked Oracle's permission. The reason here is | that it's much clearer in the way RDS is branded that it's | not endorsed by the database engines it supports, it uses | their trademarks to describe the engines they integrate with | which seems reasonable in my view. Amazon RDS is still its | own independent brand. | | "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" crosses the mark in my opinion | because it blurs the line between the two brands and in many | ways implies that Amazon actually made Elasticsearch | themselves. | ardy42 wrote: | > You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that | AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that | already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just | use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And | really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an | advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey | area. | | I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty | sure leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete | in another is illegal anti-competitive behavior. Isn't that | what the whole Microsoft antitrust case was about? It's too | bad the government pretty much gave up on enforcing antitrust | law for 20 years, since it feels like similar practices | became normalized due to lack of enforcement. | notatoad wrote: | > leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete | in another is illegal | | Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is | illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn't and Amazon is a | long ways from a monopoly. | ardy42 wrote: | > Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is | illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn't and Amazon is | a long ways from a monopoly. | | That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted | over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent | interpretations of some types of anti-competitive | behavior have been rather literal and required something | very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the | effect of neutering antitrust law in all but the most | blatant of cases. | | My understanding is that it's arguable that it's anti- | competitive to leverage market share advantages more | broadly (e.g. antitrust law could be used to | constrain/break-up a _duo_ poly). | [deleted] | [deleted] | [deleted] | M2Ys4U wrote: | That depends on jurisdiction. | | In the EU, it _is_ "dominant market position" (and | explicitly so) that's the threshold for the Commission to | take competition action, for instance. | notatoad wrote: | would AWS be considered "dominant" though? they are the | indisputably the market leader, but there's plenty of | competition | | (not trying to argue they _aren 't_ dominant. just | curious) | CRConrad wrote: | Presumably they could. I mean, if the EU legislators had | intended for a monopoly to be necessary to be considered | "dominant", then they could have _written_ "monopoly", | couldn 't they? They didn't write that, so it seems safe | to presume they didn't intend that. And if anyone is | dominant, then who, if not the market leader? | M2Ys4U wrote: | I don't see why not. | | British Airways only had a 38% market share when they | were sued for abusing their dominant market position in | 1998 (which was upheld by the Court of Justice in 2007) | nrmitchi wrote: | The grey area here is more about what the "market" is | defined as here. It's not entirely clear that the existing | dominance that AWS has is different enough from "hosted | search services" to be considered a different market (from | an anti-trust point of view) | waheoo wrote: | Yes, thats all this comes down to in the end. | | Open source works fine, and does quite well as a business | model (use it as free advertising). | | What has happened here is a plain old case of monopoly. | | Once markets are no longer efficient, the model breaks | down. Amazon can use its resources to extinguish | competition with their own product. | | This is why we need antitrust law. | | It's not a failure of capitalism, its not a failure of the | businesses involved its just what happens when you run a | freeish market. That is, things get out of whack to the | point we the people feel it is unjust, it would eventually | right itself but this would take a long time and likely do | more interim damage than its work allowing, so we fiddle | with it, hopefully not breaking anything in the process. | benjaminjosephw wrote: | > its just what happens when you run a freeish market... | it would eventually right itself but this would take a | long time | | If we think of the system as a delicate natural balance | that we should try our best not to disturb too much I | think we've immediately taken a very specific stance | which itself shouldn't be above critical examination. It | is, after all, just a social system and _all_ social | systems involve some level of design whether we like that | fact or not. | | In theory, we could conceive of the possibility of an | economic system that both preserves the autonomy and | independence of its actors while also preventing | monopolies from emerging in the first place. Its a hard | problem to wrestle with but its preferable to acquiescing | to the blind faith in the invisible hand. We should never | give up on an effort to understand how we could evolve | our current systems into ones that work better (imagine | if we took the same stance with technology). | srockets wrote: | > They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing | vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. | | For the customer, the biggest advantage of AWS' SaaS | offerings over a 3rd party's (hosted on AWS) is the billing. | AWS Marketplace negates that. Maybe at some cost to the | provider, but I just found ScyllaDB and RedisLabs there, so | it must be working for some. | hello_moto wrote: | > but I just found ScyllaDB and RedisLabs there, so it must | be working for some. | | No, it doesn't work for RedisLabs. Amazon offers managed | Redis called AWS EC Redis and recently someone I knew | decided to move their entire Redis (multiple) clusters from | RedisLabs to AWS EC. RedisLabs lost hundred of thousand | dollars. | srockets wrote: | I would like to think there are other definitions for a | successful business than it being a single vendor. | hello_moto wrote: | RedisLabs is probably the vendor that foot the bill for | Redis software development end-to-end. | | While I understand that some people viewed a successful | OSS project is akin to Wordpress: lots of hosting | providers, rich ecosystems, _and_ Wordpress main company | is still making good money out of it; this is not apple | to apple comparison (can't compare Redis and Wordpress). | | Redis belongs to the group of MongoDB, ElasticSearch, | etc. | suncherta wrote: | >> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own | product when it comes to consultancy, services | | > You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that | AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that | already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just | use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. | | Can't client run his own Elasticsearch inside AWS? By | installing and maintaining it yourself (or contracting | someone to do it for you). | | Then I don't see vendor lock-in sense: "We choose AWS to host | us, now we have no real choice but to use Amazon | Elasticsearch Service". Am I missing something here? | taormina wrote: | They don't outcompete. AWS's ES is a steaming pile of crap | and everyone I've ever met with a real usecase that needs ES | on AWS rolls their own on their own EC2 instances. | jeffasinger wrote: | At my job, we evaluated moving from AWS hosted ES to several | of the Elastic offerings. Many of them were more expensive | than AWS was before taking hardware into account (as in | comparing cost of Elastic licensing vs the whole cost from | AWS). This made it exceedingly difficult to justify the move. | It's not only the headstart with the client (billing | relationship in place), but the cost that hampers them. | michaelmior wrote: | But isn't a big part of the reason Amazon can offer better | pricing because of the scale of their existing client base? | I'm not saying that they are doing this, but they could if | they chose operate on very thin margins or even at a lost | to keep their hold on clients and make up with it on other | products in their ecosystem. | notyourday wrote: | In my experience it is that Elastic does not understand | the market. | | About four years ago we have attempted to get their | software . It felt like I was dealing with Cisco sales | people circa 1998. They were _clueless_ on how to do a | multi hundred thousand dollar deal - think slow, | inefficient, inflexible, unwilling to compromise on extra | $500 add on that would have ended up being a rounding | error. | lovehashbrowns wrote: | That's how it is for a lot of companies, not just | Elastic. We have to deal with jfrog, who has separate | billing teams for SaaS and on-prem so for us to switch | from on-prem to SaaS is a pain in the ass. If AWS ever | offers artifacts storage with more artifact types, then | obviously we're switching. And that's just 100% so we | don't have to deal with jfrog's dumb ass contracts | anymore, never mind pricing. | | ugh the pain that comes from negotiating our contract | every year. Or the pain that comes from trying to get | trial licenses. Or the pain we're seeing now from | switching to SaaS. | ethbr0 wrote: | Hmm. Operating on thin margins to gain market share and | drive competitors out of business, then making up the | difference by creating sales in related businesses in | their ecosystem doesn't sound much like Amazon... | dv_dt wrote: | In a way it's hinting at the need for anti-trust barriers | similar to how India barred Amazon from both running a product | marketplace and offering it's own products in the same | marketplace. | | I can see both sides of it though. If there are an anti-trust | barrier between running AWS and offering major services on top | of it, there would be a better overall segregation and likely | more innovation overall. On the other hand, putting up a | barrier there would be both complex and leaky, and cause | missing out on sorts of efficiencies from close integration of | cloud platform + services. | holstvoogd wrote: | Since AWS implies that Elastic is involved in the offering, I'd | sue AWS for defamation. Having your name associated with a AWS | service, and such a shitty service at that, cannot be good for | your business. | colechristensen wrote: | Well they are using elastic code freely given away with a few | small additions, is that not involved enough? | mcdoker18 wrote: | Interesting, how many there are such 3rd party's products that | AWS offers as a service? Who will be the next for license | changing, Redis? | sub7 wrote: | AWS is basically just rebranded open source on a centralized | admin dashboard, there's an infographic somewhere breaking it | down. | | True genius is always making someone else's blood and sweat into | a package that gracefully solves a big pain point and Amazon | building up AWS has been nothing but genius. | hallqv wrote: | Open source provider complaining that it's software is being used | openly. Am I missing something? | sjg007 wrote: | Elasticsearch has to enforce their trademark otherwise they will | lose it. This is crucial. | | Preserving their trademark will forbid Amazon from advertising | their service as elasticsearch which may help them find and | retain customers. | | Elasticsearch should lobby for an antitrust investigation into | AWS. Here the market is cloud computing is AWS. This is similar | to antitrust in the mainframe market or the PC market etc... | However, right now it's not clear what the antitrust remedy will | be. In those markets things evolved, most recently from desktop | PCs to cloud delivered web apps etc... | | Beyond that Elastic needs to innovate or join up with someone | bigger. | hallqv wrote: | Why antitrust? The cloud market is highly competetive and AWS | only have about 1/3 market share. | sjg007 wrote: | You could read the Senate report: https://fm.cnbc.com/applica | tions/cnbc.com/resources/editoria... | pyb wrote: | This is tangential, but, speaking of intellectual property, was | MongoDB entitled to strip the FSF copyright in the SSPL ? (as per | https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compare... | line 5) | gpm wrote: | The FSF gives people permission to modify the GPL as MongoDB | did https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL | | They do not require in that license to modify the GPL license | that you keep the original copyright attribution around. | | (IANAL - not legal advice, etc etc) | pritambaral wrote: | Given that the text of the SSPL amounts to a minor edit to that | of the AGPL (at best): no. | | The SSPL text is still a derivative of the AGPL text, which is | copyrighted and licensed under the following terms (from | https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html): | | Copyright (c) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. | <https://fsf.org/> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute | verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is | not allowed. | pyb wrote: | I thought so. IANAL, but it looks like a blatant copyright | violation to me. This indicates that the SSPL may not have | been written by a lawyer. | wolframhempel wrote: | In a more general way, the Elastic/AWS case proves a more | fundamental vulnerability of Open Source as a business model. A | couple of weeks ago, I wrote this article called "Why I wouldn't | invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one." trying | to make this case and point out a couple of systemic pitfalls in | OS as a business model (Apologies for the self-promotion, but I | felt this might be relevant): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why- | i-wouldnt-invest-open-sou... | alextheparrot wrote: | In your post you talk briefly about licensing -- effectively | (1) MIT/Apache are common and very permissive (2) AGPL | sometimes gets shut down by legal (3) Changing licenses is | hard. | | Given these primitives, do you think one solution to the | problem is just what we see here, a new licensing structure for | some types of open source? Elastic's move here, attacking the | issue through licensing, is one way that this sort of business | model is becoming more robust over time and would be | instructive for other founders looking to create revenue | generating software that is also open source. | | As a developer, the main reason I _love_ open source is that I | help patch issues or inspect the code to get a better | understanding. Which is great because the changes Elastic are | making to their license are orthogonal to the value prop for | your average developer. | wolframhempel wrote: | I wouldn't assume Elastic-style licenses to be a solution | going forward. Elastic can use this license model now that | they've already achieved considerable popularity and success | - but I doubt that they would have gotten to where they are, | had they started out with this license. | alextheparrot wrote: | I think your historical assessment is fair, as usually | legal has an allow-list of licenses and anything else is | non-trivial to integrate. Moving forward, though, with | multiple companies trying to solve issues via licensing | (Mongo, Elastic, Confluent), I think we could see some of | the new licenses become legal allow-listed (Which allows | for some of the moment open-source can give as you | mentioned in the link). | | Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Elastic-style | licenses moving forward is API compatibility. It is just a | question of how much money is at stake for a company like | Amazon to go from just operationalizing ElasticSearch to | running and maintaining an API-compatible fork, just as | they've done with Mongo. It would actually be a bit | hilarious if Amazon open-sourced said fork with a more | permissive license, given that their buck is usually made | off of ops. | picodguyo wrote: | This blog post strikes me as poorly written, overly emotional, | and light on reasons to care. While not Amazon-sized, Elastic is | itself a rather large company. Am I supposed to be upset that | you're having difficulty getting even larger because of Amazon? | Considering you're the experts on this product, shouldn't you be | confident in your ability to differentiate from someone offering | it as an afterthought? If anything, Amazon's poor support of | their Elastic offering amounts to lead gen for a properly run | solution. Finally, feel free to change your license now that your | original license is no longer conducive to your growth | aspirations, but whining that "not OK" Amazon forced you to do it | just comes across as sour grapes. | Vaslo wrote: | I have to agree and came here to say this - the "Not OK" thing | feels like we are all being lectured. This is an (one) | unfortunate side effect of social media. The author doesn't | hear how he sounds, and can't see the cringe on some of the | audiences to realize it's an awful (cringeworthy) tactic. | | Could have come across better, but otherwise I support the | authors assertions. | netdur wrote: | he tool a loan to register trademark, he is speaking | personally. | [deleted] | jjeaff wrote: | They probably aren't worried about not becoming larger so much | as getting swallowed whole by AWS. AWS has the economies of | scale to severely undercut pricing. Especially considering they | aren't spending anything on development cost. They can just let | elastic search deal with that. | StavrosK wrote: | > shouldn't you be confident in your ability to differentiate | from someone offering it as an afterthought? | | They are. What they aren't confident in is their ability to | differentiate from someone who offers it moderately | competently, while not having to pay a single cent in | development costs, unlike Elastic, which have to pay for almost | all of them. | rkangel wrote: | I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems | like the most blatant trademark violation ever. | bluelu wrote: | Is it really so easy? | | Doesn't elastic also use Amazon trademarks in their code and | documentation? (e.g. ec2, etc..)? I'm not a licence expert, but | maybe if you have a have a legal licence to run it, you | probably can also name it like that? | kmeisthax wrote: | Trademark law is complicated enough that I can imagine several | scenarios where owning "Elastic" does not allow you to | prescribe Amazon's use of "Elasticsearch Service", or at least | where there's enough of a question of law as to allow the | matter to proceed to rather expensive litigation. | | Also: | | >Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing | us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK. | | This and several other sentences alleging illegal behavior on | the part of Amazon seem suspicious to me. When I hear someone | say that they had to sue another company, but provide no | further details of the suit, then I can only assume that their | lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge. Otherwise, they'd | talk about the litigation - there is no legal condition I could | think of where you would be allowed to disclose the existence | of a lawsuit and make general allegations about a company, but | not disclose the existence of at least a settlement agreement, | if not a legal judgment. | | Does anyone know if Elastic's Amazon lawsuit went anywhere? | edoceo wrote: | Against the huge wallet of Amazon? Litigation isn't free. How | much "justice" can Elastic afford? | exhilaration wrote: | A few people above have said that Elastic is worth $10-14 | billion. This isn't a one-man OSS project we're talking | about. | edoceo wrote: | Valuation and available Cash are very different. | ironmagma wrote: | On the other hand, as a result there are probably tens of | millions to be made off a successful suit. | edoceo wrote: | Works on Contingency? No. Money Down! - L. Hutz | sokoloff wrote: | It seems to me (not a lawyer) that "Amazon Elastic Search | Service" would be OK in a way that "Amazon Elasticsearch | Service" would not. | | (AWS had EC2 before Elastic's trademark was registered.) | brlewis wrote: | I'm not a lawyer either, but as I understand it, a trademark | is violated if it's likely to confuse people into thinking | the product/service is from the trademark holder when it | actually isn't. If Amazon's CEO experienced such confusion | himself, that does sound like a slam dunk to me. | | FTA: _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._ | DougBTX wrote: | It does seem tricky. On on hand, they want to stop AWS | using "Elasticsearch" in a product name because it isn't in | partnership with Elastic co., but on the other hand AWS's | product really does contain Elasticsearch, which is why | they are changing their license. If AWS had a product | called "Elasticsearch Service" which didn't contain | Elasticsearch, then it would be pretty clear cut as that | would be very confusing, but a product called | "Elasticsearch Service" that really does contain | "Elasticsearch" seems pretty self-explanatory. | brlewis wrote: | In general, yes, it can be tricky to determine what will | and won't be confusing to people, since different people | see things differently. | | In this specific case, it doesn't seem tricky to me. When | you have concrete examples of people getting confused, no | speculation is needed. | sokoloff wrote: | But what are they confused over? "Amazon RDS for SQL | Server" seems no more and no less confusing to me than | "Amazon Elasticsearch Service". | | As a user, I don't care in the least about the business | relationship behind the product. I care about whether | Amazon RDS works like SQL Server and whether Amazon | Elasticsearch Service works like Elasticsearch. What | financial arrangements, if any, are behind the scenes are | not a concern to users. | dumbfounder wrote: | Does it really contain ElasticSearch? It is a fork right, | so can you still call it ElasticSearch? I don't think you | should be able to use the name in this case, and you | definitely can't say you are "partnered" with a company | when you most definitely aren't. | richardwhiuk wrote: | I think the original link and the CTO disagrees with what | "colloboration" means. | | From Amazon's perspective, if they contributed a single | fix, or asked a single question of ElasticSearch on the | issue tracker, then this is a product born from | colloboration. | | It's difficult to think anyone is going to think that | Amazon ElasticSearch is by anyone other than Amazon. | toast0 wrote: | What else would you call the Amazon Elasticsearch Service? | | Isn't that just Nominative fair use: referencing a mark to | identify the actual goods and services that the trademark | holder identifies with the mark? | | Especially when it launched and there wasn't a fork. | bmurphy1976 wrote: | It was a bad choice of name by Amazon. They should have | created "Amazon Search Services" and ElasticSearch would be | one of multiple available options ala RDS and its many | database options. I'm no lawyer but it appears to me that | they are blatantly in violation of ElasticSearch's trademark. | tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote: | I am interested to see how long or if Elastic sticks around after | this. If people will just move on to another AWS product or if | they'll keep using Elasticsearch. | prepend wrote: | I think it depends on whether Amazon wants to start funding | development of their fork. I think under this new license, | Amazon can't just bring over changes from elastic any more. | | If Amazon commits to dev work then their project might be the | one that survives since it's actually OSS and more capable of | being used in more products. | | But if they don't then it will drift and not be very useful any | longer. | yrgulation wrote: | The cringe on this thread is appalling. | | Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still | open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing | hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. | | Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, | taking time away from their families and lives, only for | companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make | billions in profit. Time for this to stop. Starve them of your | hard work and make them pay if they want to use your software. | For sharing knowledge, code can still be freely readable, but | should not be free of charge. | marcinzm wrote: | >Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. | | And we owe them nothing. They have a right to relicense and we | have right to complain about it. | | If you have an argument then make it but trying to kill | discussion is in bad form imho. | R0b0t1 wrote: | Agree, the amount of people who license things as MIT is | terrifying. There has been a couple of posts/rants on HN about | this. A large company doesn't care about you, and licensing | your code as MIT doesn't mean they're going to pay you. GPL | actually gives you some teeth. | babarock wrote: | Is it possible that people licensing things as MIT don't mind | that a multi-billion company makes money off their work? | | I don't mean to make generalities about "open source", but a | serious chunk of the community genuinely don't care. | sn_master wrote: | We're in the era of big platforms that can pick and choose | the winners, and the winners have to play with those rules. | | see: GPLv3 ban on Tivoization. It makes anything v3 | radioactive to any company seeking to make $$$. | pietrovismara wrote: | The impression this thread gives me is that most commenters are | shills hiding behind a concern for "open source values", which | are not being touched in any sense. | | Actually, moves like what elastic is doing are necessary to | preserve the FOSS ecosystem. | literallyWTF wrote: | Yup, pretty much the life story of open source. Some people | always tend to get upset that individuals/companies either | don't spend every waking second on a project or want to get | paid for their work if used in commercial products. | | It's honestly no different than a leach | sn_master wrote: | What does the term WAANK stand for? | superzamp wrote: | I guess FAANG + wankers = WAANK | danShumway wrote: | > The source code is still open source, but you should pay for | re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have | salaries to pay. Period. | | That's not what Open Source is. | | What's actually happening here is that people disagree with the | goals of the FOSS movement, which is fine, but then instead of | going out and joining any of the many other movements around | software licensing that are better suited for them -- instead | of releasing products as source available or shared source or | noncommercial-reuse/creative-commons or just under any | generally permissive license -- instead they act like this is | our problem to solve. | | The point of Open Source is not to share knowledge, it's to | allow people to reuse/share _code_. There are other movements | that are better equipped to solve your problems if your goal is | primarily just to share knowledge. But we 're not going to drop | everything we've worked to build just to accommodate you. | | Nobody is forcing you to be a part of this movement. Nobody is | forcing you to release your software under MIT or GPL licenses. | You can do whatever the heck you want with the software you | build, just leave us alone and stop acting like it's our | problem that our movement isn't accommodating your goals. | throw8932894 wrote: | I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but | consulting fees cover my living. | | Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version | is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and | no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I | extensively use code generator which is also not public. | | It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is | bit more difficult for me (backport stuff to code generator). But | it works great and nobody noticed anything. | | Practically any serious use of my library has to go through me | now. And I am the hero because my code is virtually without bugs. | Magic!!! :) | | I become disillusioned long time ago. Also people told me several | times unit tests do not matter... but in reality they are most | valuable part of know how. | fuball63 wrote: | This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the point of | it being open at all if it is prohibitively difficult to | develop on without tests? | | To me it seems like a happy medium of being accessible while | still protecting your livelihood. | BossingAround wrote: | > This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the | point of it being open at all if it is prohibitively | difficult to develop on without tests? | | Personally, I wouldn't use a proprietary library/framework | unless absolutely necessary. I think it's a great strategy, | actually; OP is sacrificing outside contributions while | making it much more difficult for someone to just fork the | project and bypass them entirely. | throw8932894 wrote: | I am not sacrificing much. Project was fully open for a | while, bot no coauthor emerged. I only get minor patches. | Contributions are happening outside core project, some | people build pretty awesome stuff on my library, I also get | connectors etc... | | I would say this approach fits great for one-men projects. | rsstack wrote: | That's fine but that's not "Open Source" as the open source | community sees it. That's just source-available. It's great: | when I choose proprietary software, I'm much happier when I get | the source code along with it since it can help with | diagnostics and advanced cases. But it isn't "Open Source". | BossingAround wrote: | > That's fine but that's not "Open Source" as the open source | community sees it | | It's Apache 2. It's as "Open Source" as you can get [1]. | | [1] https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0 | rsstack wrote: | But the actual source isn't Apache 2. It's just a build | artifact that's licensed this way. It's "Open Package" not | "Open Source". | | I can take a screenshot of Windows 10 and publish it under | an Apache 2 license, but that doesn't make the Windows 10 | source code "Open Source". | zokier wrote: | > And I extensively use code generator which is also not | public. | | 2. Source Code | | The program must include source code, and must allow | distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where | some form of a product is not distributed with source code, | there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source | code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, | preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. _The | source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer | would modify the program._ Deliberately obfuscated source code | is not allowed. _Intermediate forms such as the output of a | preprocessor or translator are not allowed._ | | (emphasis mine) | throw8932894 wrote: | I distribute output from code generator. It is fully readable | with comments. I also receive some patches on generated code, | which I port back to generator. | | I agree it does not fit strict definition of OS, but it fits | Apache 2 license. | pabs3 wrote: | It is definitely not compliant with the GPL family of | licenses, so this could block GPL licensed projects from | using your library. | fabianhjr wrote: | That applies to licensees not to the copyright owner (a | person or other entity), though the copyright owner would be | wise on requiring a CLA for contributions. | ccmcarey wrote: | I think the author means he is the developer/license owner, | in which case he can do whatever he wants, it's just other | people that have to follow the license. | brainzap wrote: | why not make a license that requires to pay | pritambaral wrote: | Then they'd lose customers. Many people use their Open Source | products because it's free (as in beer). The fact that the | products are also free as in speech is merely co-incidental to | them. Elastic Co. does not want to lose those customers. | | On a broader note: Elastic Co. used Open Source as a marketing | point for their product, but now no longer want to be held to | the same standard. | perfobotto wrote: | Amazon's version of sherlocking | RVuRnvbM2e wrote: | Elastic is a 14 billion dollar company[0] with 43% revenue growth | YoY[1]. Amazon may be eating into their SaaS market share but | Elastic are hardly struggling. Relicensing for competitive | business reasons is absolutely fine, but it's silly to pretend | that they are doing this for any motive other than making more | money. Certainly this is not some altruistic move on the behalf | of the open source community. | | I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source project | proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users will flock | to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the end of | Elastic unless they reverse this decision. | | [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/ [1] | https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/... | retzkek wrote: | > Elastic is a 14 billion dollar company | | I believe this is the real driver of this decision. $ESTC's PE | is -100 and PC is -2500, they need to drive a lot of business | to their hosted cloud or sell many more licenses to support | their valuation [^1], and they're not getting the subscriptions | they need from the platform add-ons like Machine Learning, APM, | and SIEM (43% YoY revenue growth is great, but I don't believe | it's sustainable, and this licensing decision suggests neither | does Elastic). | | Base Elasticsearch and Kibana are sufficient for a large | portion of use cases, including mine. Many other of the | "ecosystem" tools they sell have other, established commercial | or open-source options (e.g. Splunk vs SIEM, Jaeger/OpenTracing | vs APM), and these options won't tie you into the Elastic | environment. | | > I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source | project proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users | will flock to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the | end of Elastic unless they reverse this decision. | | 100% agree. We're going to see an open-source fork, whether | from Open Distro (which may have too much baggage) or a new, | rebranded project, and many users who don't need Elastic's | value-adds will flock there. | | ^1: Admittedly everything tech is severely overpriced right | now. | whoisjuan wrote: | It's really hard to have sympathy for anyone here. On the | Amazon side, they of course are pushing on that ethical gray | line by using Elastic's name and track record to build their | own offering based on Elastic's Open Source software. | | On the Elastic's side they simply seem to be mad that Open | Source is working exactly as it's supposed to work in favor of | a big company that happens to be a competitor. It's like they | want to have discretionary control on who benefits from Open | Source and who doesn't. | pluc wrote: | The license changes are described here: | https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change | StreamBright wrote: | I wish there was something better than Elastic for indexing large | volume of text. | lun4r wrote: | https://vespa.ai/ | lovelearning wrote: | Better in what ways? | woof wrote: | Apache Solr? | | Maybe not "better", but useful and with a Apache 2.0 license :) | k__ wrote: | Yes. | | AWS should build a real serverless alternative to it or buy | Algolia or something... | lovelearning wrote: | Kendra is their Algolia-like service. | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/dg/in-adding- | docum... | StreamBright wrote: | Yes, I would be much happier that. I do not even understand | why to do this whole dance with Elastic. | jokethrowaway wrote: | Same. But there is nothing preventing doing that and | running a fork of Elastic, it's cheap enough. | | I would do the same if I were AWS. | lnsp wrote: | A lot of people have adopted the Elastic stack over the | years, I guess Amazon just wanted their share. | brodouevencode wrote: | They do. They've done similar things with Redis and | MariaDB, both of whom also offer commercial solutions. | The SAs all insist that "no it's a partnership". I don't | fault them they're parroting the marketing line. With the | new Grafana stuff that seems more like a real partnership | because you have to purchase the enterprise features and | support from the marketplace. What they've done to Redis | and partiularly Elastic is pretty shameful. | | The Elasticsearch Service has problems: you can't join | the cluster like you can with the normal version, | permissions are janky at best, it's slow, and it's | expensive. For those reasons the projects my team used it | on opted to roll our own elasticsearch cluster which | proved a better solution long term beyond the initial | annoyances. I say that to say it's not a one to one | product, which will probably be their defense. | uncledave wrote: | I think most people just wanted Amazon to take the | administrative overhead away from them. Amazon saw that | gap. | k__ wrote: | Sure thing. That's the reason for many services they | created. | | But they usually tend to build their own alternative that | integrates better into their eco-system. | buro9 wrote: | https://grafana.com/oss/loki/ | uncledave wrote: | That's absolutely not the right tool for indexing large | volumes of text. It's a time series database with very | rudimentary labelling support. | nautilus12 wrote: | This is a better alternative to ES strictly for log analysis | application. Not for search. | nova22033 wrote: | This isn't about the product itself. If I use AWS ESS, I don't | need Elastic Professional services. That's probably where they | make money. | jrochkind1 wrote: | I don't think most of Amazon's behavior actually violates any | norms and values of traditional open source communities. | | I think instead we are finding that norms and values of | traditional open source communities are in some ways | contradictory/inconsistent; that there can be competing interests | where it isn't true that either one of them is the one that | "opensource norms and values" privileges; or that the traditional | "norms and values" don't necessary lead to the world that | enthusiasts had fantasized about. | | In a lot of these discussions, I think the underlying basic thing | is that some are alleging, often implicitly, that included in the | "norms and values of open source" are that if anyone is making | money from value provided by open source, it should be authors of | that open source, or at least they should get a cut. | | I don't think that is in fact one of the traditional norms and | values of open source community. In some ways it's even counter | to the tradition. | | The actual world/ecosystem around open source has evolved to be | very different than the one imagined by traditional norms and | values though. Compare to how apache httpd was originally written | -- 6 or 8 people, each from a different organization, | collaborated on company time each getting paid by their employer, | to produce something of value to all of their employers, where | the only desired 'profit' was the thing being available for all | to use. | | That is sort of a stereotypical traditional fantasy of open | source. It is of software being created _without a profit motive_ | , in an ecosystem where people would contribute to such things on | 'company time' (they had a steady salary from some company | already). The more people using the software you wrote, the | _better_ , and you never wanted a cut of their profits -- that is | the fantasy of traditional open source norms and values. | | That is not the world we ended up with though. | | So the problem is that now it is "obvious" to some people that if | we wrote the the thing, and then formed a company _around_ that | thing we wrote -- it 's not "fair" if someone else is making | money from it without giving us a cut. | | But this isn't a value encoded into open source licenses at all, | and that wasn't an oversight, it was intentional because this | wasn't in fact a traditional "norm and value" of open source at | all, and in fact it is in some ways _counter_ to the actual | traditional norms and values, one of which I would say was: Your | desire to make a profit from this code should not in fact be | allowed to prevent anyone else from using it. It is ElasticSearch | which is acting contradictory to norms and values of open source | in believing nobody should be able to use their software without | giving them a cut of profits from it. | | These disputes will keep happening, not because some companies | are violating the "norms and values" of open source, but because | the actual traditional norms and values of open source are | increasingly unable to power a sustainable economy where people | can get paid (in the manner they think they deserve?) while | producing open source. | shiftpgdn wrote: | Amazon doesn't give back to open source maintainers at all. | They take and take with no return. This isn't normal in the | open source community. | jrochkind1 wrote: | SO many people and companies make money off of ("take") open | source projects like apache httpd, postgresql, or even linux | itself, without "giving back". So many companies have stacks | based on these software, stacks they make money from, who | never would even consider sending a patch back to postgresql | or apache httpd or what have you. | | Is this considered against typical open source norms and | values? | | If not, what makes this situation different? | | So one difference people talk about is that your stack might | be based on postgresql and you might sell a service, but you | aren't actually _selling postgresql as a service_. OK... but | I suspect there _are_ people selling (especially) postgresql | or mysql as a service, without ever sending patches back; | say, a traditional kind of PHP web host, right? This hasn 't | to my knowledge led to much controversy; or the idea that | their entire webhosting/dashboard/management layer has to be | open source if they provide postgresql. What's the | difference? | | I am not saying there can't be a difference, there are all | sorts of differences always. But in elucidating what the | pertinent/meaningful difference _is_ , we actually are clear | about what we think, instead of just a gut-reaction "I don't | like amazon and I don't think they should be able to profit | off of elasticsearch" -- cause _that_ IMO doesn 't have | anything to do with "opensource values and norms". | | I think, again, is that the real problem is that the | traditional models of open source, the traditional norms and | vlaues of open source, are becoming less and less capable of | supporting sustainability and proper income for open source | development. (Which reminds me of the OpenSSL problem of | course. Is everyone who uses OpenSSL, which means like | everyone, violating "norms and values" if they don't send | patches back? Obviously not). | prepend wrote: | I'm not sure if this is true. It looks like Amazon makes lots | of contributions to open source [0][1]. They don't literally | contribute to every project they use, but think they add lots | to the ecosystem. | | But even if they contributed nothing at all, that's part of | open source in that it's free for everyone to use regardless | of anything else, depending on the license. | | I think it's a virtuous byproduct that all this free, allowed | use leads to people contributing more open source. Not | because of compulsion, but through a shared philosophy. | | [0] https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ [1] | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358843 | orestis wrote: | As an AWS user, it bums me out how much vendors don't integrate | better with the marketplace and cloud formation stacks etc. | | What I'm after is being able to pay a 3rd-party vendor to do all | the work of setting up a cluster of machines, deal with HA, | backups, upgrades, support etc - but stay out of my data, so that | I don't have to force all our enterprise clients to sign updates | to our DPA. | | I would gladly pay elastic.co for such a service. The only vendor | that I'm aware that does is Cognitect with Datomic Cloud: | https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/index.html | softwaredoug wrote: | Does this mean Elastic has withdrawn its legal actions wrt it's | trademark and alleged use of proprietary code? | kureikain wrote: | From time to time, I see some cool application and I really want | to see how they done it. It's ok if it's "truely OSS" I just want | to see how they did it, what trick they made. | | An example, a few years ago I saw a few mac app that show you | network metered in status bar and little snitch. I don't know how | they did that. I wish I can read their code, even if it's truely | OSS. | | To me, the value that ElasticSearch give to us is great. And when | I do some cool thing, I myself want to share too but I don't want | other to take my code and make money off it without contributing | back to me. | | I think Elastic, as a company, doing a good thing here, and AWS | is the bad actor here, they even lie about their collaboration | between them and Elastic. | prepend wrote: | So I guess the options are now to use the "OpenDistro" [0] or the | SSPL distro maintained by Elastic. | | It's too bad that Elastic is no longer open source, but respect | the companies choice to close source their stuff. | | Will be interesting if Amazon just maintains their fork or | abandons it to make something else. | | I'm not familiar with elastic as a project and not sure how many | community contributions they have, but expect that to shrink as | I'm not sure many OSS developers will freely contribute to non- | OSS projects. | | As for trademark stuff, I expect a renaming like Hudson/Jenkins. | | [0] https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch | dannyw wrote: | Elastic is still open source for anyone but Amazon or other | cloud providers trying to resell their work. | pietrovismara wrote: | The source code is freely accessible and you can use it for | free. | | What's the difference to you as a user? Or are you simply | concerned about Amazon? | prepend wrote: | I make products that use that package. I want all the | packages I depend on to be compatible with my license. I | don't want to run into an audit years from now during due | diligence that I have some liability from an incompatible | license. | | I can't afford lawyers to determine compatibility today. And | I suspect that they would say "not compatible, pay to be | safe." | | That's the difference to me as a user. | pietrovismara wrote: | This sounds more like an issue with the licensing world | itself than with this license, which by itself is pretty | simple and won't affect you except in the case you offer | your products containing Elastic as a service to third | parties. | thecleaner wrote: | I think you are grossly over estimating the contributions that | the general community has to open source. Theres a company | behind this project and they do most of the maintenance work. | delfinom wrote: | Yep, this happens with alot of open source. Either a big | company maintains a project through paid engineers. OR some | poor guy gets burnt out because everyone is demanding free | changes to some OSS package constantly without providing | PR/MRs. | thecleaner wrote: | Exactly, which is why I hope Elastic manages to beat Amazon | wih this tactic since it then can be a playbook for OSS | companies. In general OSS is fantastic whether free or paid | and I genuinely want companies like Elastic to succeed. | This whole free software thing is stupid and it is sad to | see talented devs getting burnt out because people are | cheap to pay for software. | ralmidani wrote: | As mentioned in another discussion, I used to be a Copyleft | Zealot, but I've come to realize an absolutist insistence on | "Free as in Freedom" and the "Four Freedoms", without allowing | businesses a viable path to profitability, is an obsolete | attitude. It has become incredibly easy and cheap to distribute | copies of large programs, even as a service over the internet. | | Sure, hobbyist projects and foundations for FOSS software still | exist, but important infrastructure projects like Mongo, Redis, | and now Elastic have all recently changed their licenses from | "true" FOSS to "some rights reserved". | | One might argue that the point of FOSS is not to make money. But | GNU/FSF have said repeatedly that it's OK to "sell" your | software. How do you do that when a FAANGMO can easily out-scale | you and put you out of business? | | If I were to start an actual software company, I would give very | serious consideration to licenses like Polyform[0] over "true" | FOSS, at least for the important, money-making parts where it | would be impossible to compete with a FAANGMO. | | [0] https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ | VoxPelli wrote: | If they just wanted to stop AWS they would just put the BSL on | top of their previous license: | https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ | | That way Amazon couldn't use their code to provide a SaaS until | after 4 years and after that time it would be business as usual | and be proper open source. | | The license they used now is forever non-opensource, which is a | much larger change than what's merited here I think. | tibbydudeza wrote: | Amazon is the new Microsoft. | richardARPANET wrote: | *Oracle | jnsaff2 wrote: | I've been at the receiving end of Elastics selling tactics | and pricing. Elastic is the new Oracle was my conclusion. | IIRC the pricing was along the lines of $12k per CPU Core or | GB of RAM. Straight from the nineties. | aprdm wrote: | In my experience it was that by Node regardless of how many | cpus or ram the node had. | | Regardless very expensive. | wg0 wrote: | And Mongo is something similar as well. Just running single | instance (on infrastructure that you pay for) might cost | about 3k or more per month. | nautilus12 wrote: | I was told many of the more predatory players from Microsoft | left to join Microsoft in the last few years. I need to look | into this though. | jbarberu wrote: | "...players from Microsoft left to join Microsoft in...", | wat? | edameme wrote: | Interesting, especially in comparison with other motions for Open | Source via AWS. Mongo is the other big name that comes to mind, | as well as Redis. | samfisher83 wrote: | It seems like Amazon is using their retail strategy here. It is | basically white labeling the product. Just find a popular | product. Copy the apis and call it amazon x. Open source license | make it even easier. | sn_master wrote: | Which is fine as long as they respect the license e.g. keep the | result software open source. Amazon is selling compute hours, | not software. | ryan_j_naughton wrote: | Can someone help clarify something: the ES license change only | affects future releases, right? The previous releases under the | previous license are still valid, right? | | If so, then my bet is Amazon will begin to treat ES like they do | Aurora, namely, they will run their own fork of ES that from this | point forward will be a separate code base and will evolve | independently but will be "compatible" with anything that would | otherwise expect the server to be a normal ES server (like how | Aurora is compatible with MYSQL). | Isognoviastoma wrote: | In short, Amazon don't follow law of trademarks. Then, Elastic | instead of enforcing their rights in court, changes license in | hope that Amazon will follow law of copyright. How do they expect | it will work? I don't get it. | mrkeen wrote: | > We've tried every avenue available including going through | the courts | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | This is the huge issue with open source. The way to make money is | to offer support or hosting. However, many businesses would | prefer support and/or hosting from a big enterprise. For example, | a lot of CTO's would prefer Amazon Elastic Search vs a separate | agreement with Elastic if for no other reason than that there is | a single bill and a single entity to call for support. You don't | want Elastic saying it's an AWS issue and Amazon saying it's an | Elastic issue. | | In addition, the fact that API's are not copyrighted makes this | even more in favor of the big enterprises like Amazon, as they | can release something with the same API. | | Honestly, the problem of how to sustain an open source business | in this environment is an open question. | Karunamon wrote: | I don't understand how the SSPL is substantially different enough | from AGPL to warrant being called "non-OSS" as has been done | multiple times in this thread. | | It is literally the AGPL, with even stronger copyleft provisions. | It is anti-proprietary in the strongest conceivable way. How is | that not open source? It does not infringe upon, and goes out of | its way to protect, the four freedoms. | ensignavenger wrote: | https://opensource.org/osd | | See in particular items 5, 6 and 9. | Karunamon wrote: | That doesn't parse. The SSPL does not discriminate against a | person, a group, or a field of endeavor, any more than the | GPL "discriminates" against people who distribute modified | versions of a program by requiring them to distribute the | source code of the changes. Further, the requirement of the | SSPL does not cover "distributing with", so point 9 doesn't | seem to make sense either. | richardwhiuk wrote: | The main problem is that the license is bad, in the sense | that it's vague. | no_wizard wrote: | I never understood why its so hard for Corporations | (specifically, US Corporations) to just give back to these | projects via corporate charity contributions. I know, this takes | away from _other worthy causes too_ in some ways, however, I | think we could get massive boosts that help _all_ tides in the | long run. | | After all, US corporate giving, from a cursory search, in 2019 | alone was _21.09 billion USD_ [0] if even 1% of that made it | toward open source, that would fund an overwhelming amount of | projects overnight. Just 1%. And it would be _extremely effective | per dollar_ in terms of what society gets back in return. | | I don't know why tech companies don't see it this way in | particular. | | [0]: https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic- | resources/charitable-g.... | jahewson wrote: | Open source software development isn't regarded as a social | good (legally in the US), it has to be fulfilling some broader | charitable purpose. | | But such a system would completely change the dynamics of open | source, likely in undesirable ways. Keep the money out, I say. | paxys wrote: | Elastic is a $15 billion company. Its investors aren't looking | for charity. | patrickaljord wrote: | Their license literally says they have the right to use this code | as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. | | Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on | your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it | and then getting mad at them when they do so. | | That being said, I support their right to change their license to | whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business or for | whatever reason they see fit obviously, more power to them. | sithadmin wrote: | Glancing at the referenced lawsuits[1,2], the point of | contention is not that Elastic's open source code is being | used. It's that a.) Elastic feels its trademark is being abused | in a manner that misrepresents the relationship between Elastic | and Amazon, and b.) that Open Distro incorporates code in a | manner that explicitly violates Elastic's licensing. | | [1]https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/403 | ... | | [2]https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.347725 | ... | Waterluvian wrote: | That tweet about the partnership is a pretty damning exhibit | to a trademark infringement suit. | | And yeah, "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" completely fooled me | for about a week until Google searches revealed enough about | how elastic.co isn't just a site promoting Elasticsearch, but | was a provider of instance configuration. | motives wrote: | I don't believe the issue most are taking here is the license | itself that elasticsearch now has, I think its the relicensing | of existing contributions (ironically including those from AWS | and their employees) which were originally under a true, well- | accepted and liberal FOSS license. | | If elasticsearch had this license from day one, that would be | fair enough, but many people do not freely contribute time and | effort to improving something which is not freely available to | all others (whether individual or large corporation). | | Elasticsearch is self-victimising here when they are arguably | exploiting FOSS contributors good will (though due to the CLA | what they are doing is most definitely legal). | alisonkisk wrote: | Elastic is not and legally cannot change the license of code | contributed in the past. That code will always carry the | original license. | motives wrote: | You are correct, sorry my wording was clumsy and | inaccurate. I should have clarified that the project itself | is now under a different license, though I believe the net | effect is similar to relicensing the original code, as | forks are unlikely to be sustainable. | [deleted] | jjoonathan wrote: | > ironically including those from AWS and their employees | | Does AWS ever contribute anything that isn't an AWS | integration? I'm not asking rhetorically -- those are the | only kind of "contribution" I've ever seen from them. | motives wrote: | Quoting another earlier comment from an elasticsearch | thread here, credits to user _msw_ | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25783509): | https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 | https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 | https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 | https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643 . | | None of the above appear to be related to AWS specific APIs | and offer a small sample of total contributions from AWS | employees. | okl wrote: | I agree, and if they had a problem with it, why didn't they say | so 5 years ago? | indymike wrote: | Most of the issues in the article were about misuse of the | Elasticsearch trademark. This seems like a fairly simple | problem to deal with. AWS should not be competing with | Elasticsearch using it's own trademark. The licensing changes | really do nothing to solve the bad behavior by Amazon. | detritus wrote: | I'm just a bystander in this regard as it's not really my | domain, but have played around with AWS a bit and I must admit, | I didn't realise that ElasticSearch wasn't Amazon's own product | per se. | | Seems to me that Amazon has grossly overstepped fair play here. | blackoil wrote: | Another view, they opened/maintained a lawn wherein you can | come have picnic and may buy some drinks from the store, which | covers the cost. Now a super chain opens next to them and uses | park as free seating for its customer. So they are adding rule | against that. | eeZah7Ux wrote: | No. You are confusing between following FOSS licensing to the | letter and following the spirit. | globular-toast wrote: | It's more like having the sign say "feel free to do what you | like" then someone poops on the lawn and you sigh and have to | update the sign to say "no pooping, though". | | Most free/open source software licences come from a different | time. In most cases they are applied because the authors want | to do open source and it's expected that the licence is enough | to uphold that spirit. But it's not enough and hasn't been for | a long time now. The AGPL was created for this reason but oddly | developers have gone the opposite direction and "permissive" | licences have become the fashion. Many of them are now | realising there was a reason for licences like GPL and AGPL | after all. | pfsalter wrote: | The license for the main Elasticsearch is that, but they have | some proprietary features (Machine Learning etc.) which are | under a proprietary license. Amazon copied code from another | project which had stolen this proprietary code from Elastic and | resold it under their own banner. | https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users | kemitchell wrote: | > Their license literally says they have the right to use this | code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. | | Apache 2.0, section 6: | | > 6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use | the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of | the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary | use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the | content of the NOTICE file. | Havoc wrote: | >Their license literally says [...] | | Hence the license change yes? | vntok wrote: | Too late, licensing changes are not retroactive. | david_draco wrote: | Use the code yes, but not use the trademarks. And also not | publicly claim to collaborate when they actually do not give | back. That's what they complain about. | d3nj4l wrote: | That is not the point. There is legal and there is good - and | simply reiterating that something is legal is unproductive and | pointless. | danShumway wrote: | This isn't really the spirit of Open Source though. The point | of Open Source is that reuse and modification isn't just | technically allowed legally, it's _encouraged_. | | I fully support their right to change their licensing, and I | understand they may not have thought through the implications | of their license -- and I empathize with that. I also | empathize with criticism that Amazon isn't doing a great job | of supporting the ecosystem that supports them, it would be | nice if they did more. And it goes without saying, but I also | strongly empathize with the frustration about the borderline | trademark infringement that's happening here. That's a | completely separate problem. | | But I don't like the implication that Open Source licenses | are a legal technicality rather than a specific philosophical | choice to allow reuse. People don't need to feel guilty about | following Open Source licenses, the idea is to encourage | reuse -- even by corporations. | | We do harm to that movement when we try and backtrack from | that philosophy or say, "sure, you have the legal right to | reuse the code, but we're going to try and implement | social/technical barriers to you doing so." There are plenty | of decent source-available licenses projects can use if | that's their intent. They carve out exceptions for small- | scale reuse while trying to limit companies like Amazon from | capitalizing on the ecosystem. And maybe more projects should | use those licenses since they more accurately reflect the | outcomes that the authors seem to want. There's nothing wrong | with having projects that allow only small-scale reuse. | | But if someone releases their project as Open Source I'm | going to treat it like Open Source, because that's what the | movement is about, and trying to reverse the legal progress | we've made by constructing new moral barriers in front of | reuse is harmful to that movement. When we say that people | have a moral right to reuse, adapt, and share our code, we | mean it. | eropple wrote: | Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a | thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the | morality of a system for immoral ends. At some point, | whether you or I appreciate it, the open source world was | bound to have to reinvent a solution to that. | danShumway wrote: | There is a solution to that already, it's called using | source available licensing instead of Open Source. | | But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of | code/money/value is not required. That's literally the | scenario that many of us are trying to build. | | It feels like the difference here is that you're looking | at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of | our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying that's not | immoral, that is an acceptable result. | | It's obviously not the result Elastic wanted, and I | empathize with that, but... I don't know, maybe we need | to educate people more about what Open Source actually | means. Maybe we need to encourage more people to use | source available licenses if there's a disconnect in how | people understand the actual goals of the movement. | | We believe that people have an intrinsic, moral right to | share and reuse code. Not just good citizens who help | build up the system and support us -- everybody. | eropple wrote: | I will define _freeloading_ by those with the capacity to | do otherwise as immoral any day of the week (and AWS | functionally does a lot of that), yes, and I will define | it in those moral terms regardless of the legal letter of | a license. There is an implicit social contract that open | source software absolutely and without question relies | upon--and yes, large actors owe more in response than | small ones in that calculus. When the social contract is | abrogated by an actor who is beyond the capacity for | shame or for criticism to change their ways--that 's | absolutely a problem. This shift of what open source | means away from "Amazon, please co-opt and strangle at | your leisure" is inevitable, and I don't really think | it's wrong. | | (I also don't like Elastic as a company, to be clear, and | wouldn't shed many tears if they disappeared tomorrow, | there's just a hierarchy of dirtbags and they're not near | the top.) | | As far as encouraging those source-available licenses-- | that sounds great, except that, in my experience, people | with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get | treated like shit anyway _because_ they aren 't giving | away the farm. So I don't know where we go there, either. | danShumway wrote: | Reusing code is not freeloading in the Open Source | (capitalized) movement -- at least, not the kind of | freeloading that we'd like to discourage. | | I don't know what else I can do as an Open Source | developer in my projects and my terminology to imply that | when I say, "you can reuse my code for any reason" I | actually mean it. I guess traditional Open Source | advocates could abandon the entire term and go off and | create a brand new movement where we try to make that | even more explicit, but people are just going to follow | us there and then try to coopt the term again. | | > people with the temerity to offer source-available | licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't | giving away the farm | | I will call out people who are doing that. | | But really, the only comments I have about source | available products are: | | A) they don't offer all of the advantages of Open Source | (although they offer many more benefits than fully | closed-source software), and I think that pointing that | out is not a moral judgement, just a statement of fact | about what the licenses do and do not allow. | | B) people who offer source available licenses need to | stop saying that they're basically the same as Open | Source, or that they're just a subset of Open Source, or | that they exist because Open Source has lost its way. | | Because the licenses are not the same. All other debates | aside, both us at this point in the conversation | recognize this, right? You and I are disagreeing about a | fundamental philosophy on what rights and moral | responsibilities people have around code. You | fundamentally disagree with me about whether or not large | companies have the right to completely freely reuse | permissive code, or whether they have an obligation to | pay for it. That disagreement is so large that it affects | our attitudes about whether offering large-scale | commercial hosting of an Open Source product is _moral_. | | And it's fine that you and I disagree on that point, but | we can look at that disagreement and say that clearly | your goals when licensing software are different than | mine. So to me, it seems pretty reasonable that people | who have this fundamental disagreement with the OSI | should acknowledge that instead of acting like the Open | Source movement is broken. It's not broken, it disagrees | with you about the goals are in making code available to | other people. | | It's not people being stubborn, it's not that the OSI | doesn't understand the consequences of Open Source, it's | that it _does_ understand the consequences of Open Source | and it disagrees with you about what consequences are | desirable. The Open Source movement doesn 't need shared | source advocates to 'save' us, we need them to | acknowledge that their goals are different than ours. | osdev wrote: | What's your stance on Dual licensing? I honestly have had | mixed Opinions on this, but I finally settled on Dual | licensing and/or BSL 1.1 as a nice compromise. I think | open source developers create a lot of value, and should | have the facility to be compensated and have their | passion become their job. Plus this whole Re-Licensing | trend toward SSPL/BSL/Dual is IMHO the natural evolution | of open-source strategies. | danShumway wrote: | Dual licensing (using the GPL and a separate proprietary | license) is kind of a hack solution that takes advantage | of the fact that business hate the GPL. It can introduce | some problems (it effectively bars you from accepting | contributions unless you use a CLA, which many | contributors won't do). However, while community is an | important part of Open Source, the most important part of | Open Source is the lack of restrictions on how people | use/modify/share the code, so while people can debate | whether or not dual licensing is a good idea, that | doesn't mean the GPL stops applying. | | Any code that is GPL licensed is Open Source. It might be | distasteful to some people to force contributors to sign | a CLA, you might get some criticism from some segments of | the community, but it's not problematic in a way that | means it's fundamentally non-FOSS. | | BSL on the other hand is not Open Source, but becomes | Open Source at the point where the BSL license expires | and is replaced by an Open version. | | ---- | | Personally, I might get some pushback on this, but I | actually kind of like BSL more than dual licensing. Dual | licensing relies on the fact that people find the GPL | toxic. It feels much more to me like a temporary | solution, and one that only works by kind of dragging the | GPL through the mud. Even among people who don't hate the | GPL, it encourages them to think of it as a tool to | enforce 'fairness', rather than as a complicated way to | use copyright to push towards a world where every user | has the rights guaranteed in the GPL for every program | they run. | | TBH, I vaguely suspect that some of the movement towards | SSPL is an evolution of people's attitude towards dual | licensing, where they thought that the un-attractiveness | of the GPL was the point of the GPL, and now feel like | it's not living up to it's 'promise'. The fact that | Amazon is able to use GPL code to provide commercial | services is seen by those people as a bug, not a feature. | | Many of the downsides and restrictions around community | contributions with BSL are also present in dual licensing | because of the implicit CLA requirements in dual licensed | projects. So it's not clear to me that BSL is more | harmful to community-built software than dual licensing, | and given the above trend, it seems a bit more honest | (for lack of a better word). | | Because dual licensing doesn't really affect companies | like Amazon, it kind of encourages people into these arm | races where people say that the GPL has failed in its job | because some companies don't hate it (again, the point of | the GPL is not to be impossible for companies to use). | BSL on the other hand is very straightforward, and | because it's upfront about its goals, it's not subject to | the same kinds of weird arm races and escalations. You | release software as proprietary, we all recognize that | it's proprietary and that you want compensation for it, | and then at some point it becomes Open Source. That's a | really simple model to think about and build around. | | ---- | | But all that being said, code that is licensed under the | GPL is Open Source, period, regardless of what other | licenses it is simultaneously offered under. | | BSL licensed code _before it expires_ is not Open Source | or FOSS: it 's proprietary code that later is Open | Sourced once a certain amount of commercial value has | been extracted from it. | shawnz wrote: | What's the immoral end? That more people are taking | advantage of the technology offered in Elasticsearch? To | me that seems like a moral and intentional end. | | Or is the problem that Elastic can't effectively | monopolize that technology which they purposely offered | to the world for free? Well, of course not... how can | both of those be true at the same time? The choice to | release a product as open source is to intentionally | prevent it from being monopolized. | shawnz wrote: | I don't think the person you are replying to is making any | kind of argument about legality. | | I think they are saying that when you tell people something | is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is | acceptable to you. | patrickaljord wrote: | Exactly, what Amazon did isn't just legal, it is explicitly | specified as OK by the license that the elastic search team | selected for their code. | NeutronStar wrote: | "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their | service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it | Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a | pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK." | | Is that legal by your standards? | Pet_Ant wrote: | > I think they are saying that when you tell people | something is acceptable, then they can only assume it | actually is acceptable to you. | | I think that is false. Most things that are said assume | that the listener will self-moderate. If I have Crohn's or | IBS and I post a sign on my front-lawn saying "bathroom | free to use for those in need" I'm not expecting you to | pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use | it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks. I mean, I | should clarify my sign, but honestly if you don't meet me | half-way with self-moderation, you are the reason we can't | have nice things. | | Above all, make sure you always leave money on the table, | _especially_ if you are the bigger party. | matz1 wrote: | >I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of | tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex | den for turning tricks | | But you should expecting that, you can't assume the | listener will self-moderate. | Pet_Ant wrote: | Really? If someone comes over and you say "help yourself | to anything in the fridge" you shouldn't expect that | someone will take a snack and not clear out your fridge | and load up there car with groceries for the week? | shawnz wrote: | Sure, there is something to be said for reciprocating the | generosity offered to you by taking only what you need. | | I think this can become a complicated game of accounting | though. Did Amazon take more than they need or did they | just build a useful cloud service on top of a widespread | open and free product that was released intentionally | under those terms? | | When Elastic chose the Apache license, what was the goal? | Was it to allow as many people to benefit from the | software as possible? If so, Amazon is clearly advancing | that goal, not hindering it. | | Or is the idea that Amazon is somehow blocking Elastic | from competing in the cloud search space? Elastic is | growing quite rapidly and Amazon's use of ES seems to | have only accelerated that growth, so I don't really buy | that either. | | Furthermore consider this: Is Elastic reciprocating the | generosity offered by Apache and the Lucene project, to | which they basically did the same thing that Amazon did | to them? | Jonnax wrote: | These things seem like Amazon went beyond just selling their | hosted version of Elasticstack: | | "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." | | "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in | 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch | Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark | violation. NOT OK." | | "When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch | fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third | party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the | Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our | community and drove additional confusion. " | patrickaljord wrote: | > "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." | | This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department | would have never allowed that tweet. | | > "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service | in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon | Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty | obvious trademark violation. NOT OK." | | This is a trademark violation indeed though IANAL, it doesn't | require a change to the license to attack them for that. | Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon though, completely not | ok as they don't care about paying a fine for that, they have | all the money in the world. But again, not related to the | license thing. | | > "When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch | fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third | party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the | Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our | community and drove additional confusion. " | | Elastic was known to mix proprietary and open source code and | it got to a point where few people knew what was open source | and what was not. Many people were not happy with this | situation and elastic.co was abusing the situation to charge | paid licenses as people were scared of using proprietary code | without knowing. The work amazon did to remove all | proprietary code from they fork was actually welcomed by the | community though I'm not surprised they missed some as it was | really hard to tell. | blackbrokkoli wrote: | > This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal | department would have never allowed that tweet. | | Sure, but we are not talking about "the intern tweeted | something incorrect, gather your pitchforks until they | delete it". | | We are talking about a prolonged time span where AWS | completely abused their massive size and market tower to | basically do the legal and PR equivalent of laughing in the | face of another company they were using and abusing. | Details aside, that is a pretty grim view for the world of | software, no? | [deleted] | ignoramous wrote: | > _This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal | department would have never allowed that tweet._ | | But the tweet is still up: | https://twitter.com/Werner/status/649738362086027265 | (archive: https://archive.is/0py42) | | Pretty sure legal has reviewed it like a 100 times by now: | AWS' taking no prisoners here. | richardwhiuk wrote: | It's not completely wrong. Using an open-source code to | make something new is, to some extent, colloboration. | RIMR wrote: | >This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal | department would have never allowed that tweet. | | Surely the legal department would have issued some sort of | retraction. Can you find it? | | >Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon | | Yeah, that's what we're saying. | | >people were scared of using proprietary code without | knowing...I'm not surprised they missed some as it was | really hard to tell. | | Amazon is a trillion dollar company that has every | capability of doing their due diligence. Sloppy | communication, abuse of trademarks and stealing proprietary | code are all inexcusable behaviors by a company with the | size and power that Amazon has. | | You're describing the problem as if it were the excuse. | Amazon abused their power, stole proprietary code, abused a | trademark, and violated the culture of the open source | community whose code they were leveraging for profit. | There's no excuse for it, even if it was somehow legal - | and I don't suspect it was. I suspect that Amazon knows | it's not legal - they just figure they can get away with | it. | mikepurvis wrote: | > This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal | department would have never allowed that tweet. | | And Elastic tried going the legal route: | | https://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/252471650/AWS-faces- | El... | | It sounds like their whole issue was about confusion in the | marketplace, though, and when someone does an oopsie that | results in that kind of confusion, it may not be enough to | take care of it quietly, on the side. So it seems now | Elastic is making more noise, in an effort to clarify | things more publicly. | eznzt wrote: | > "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service | in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon | Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty | obvious trademark violation. NOT OK." | | I don't understand. If I have an ISP and I offer mysql | servers, can't I call that offering "Eznzt MySQL Service"? | marcosdumay wrote: | Is it exactly MySQL (but hosted by Eznzt) or is it | something mostly like MySQL but different? | sithadmin wrote: | IANAL, but my understanding is that including the software | package in the product/service name this would potentially | open your company up to a trademark suit, because it | potentiates customer confusion regarding the things that | Elastic is complaining about w/r/t Amazon's offerings of | Elasticsearch. | | Personally, I find that thinking about this issue seems | more intuitive when imagining tangible physical products. | Imagine that Amazon decides to enter the Cookies as a | Service market, and starts launching service offerings with | names like 'Oreos by Amazon'. At a glance, would one not | assume that this was some sort of collaborative effort | between Nabisco and Amazon? I think the average consumer | _would_. And the same probably applies in a situation | involving a software product. | prepend wrote: | I'm confused too. IANAL but this seems like it's a clear | use of trademark. | | Amazon sells Hershey bars through its site. I don't think | it needs to get permission to say "here's the subscribe and | save service to buy Hershey bars." | | I think the confusion is whether ElasticCo is endorsing or | part of the service offering. So it should be clear that | the offering isn't by ElasticCo. | | Back to the chocolate example, as long as Amazon doesn't | make it seem like Hershey is endorsing their site or | offering the product they should be clear. I've seen this | tucked into the fine print on stuff where it says that just | because they are selling Hershey it has nothing to do with | Hershey the company. | | It seems odd that the company wouldn't want it to be called | AWS ElasticSearch as that's what it is. ElasticSearch | software sold as a service by AWS. Calling it something | else is more confusing. | Yeroc wrote: | It's a bit more muddled then that since AWS isn't using | the true ElasticSearch bits but rather an OpenDistro fork | of it that they created themselves. So is it still | ElasticSearch? Mostly, but it's not exactly the same | thing either. But of course AWS would want to leverage | the name recognition of ElasticSearch... | fipar wrote: | I checked again, and the guidelines with Oracle are similar | to what they were with MySQL AB: | https://www.oracle.com/legal/trademarks.html | | Specifically to your example (I think), see "Company, | Product or Service Names ", where it states the following: | | > Do not use Oracle trademarks or potentially confusing | variations as all or part of your company, product or | service names. If you wish to note the relationship of your | products or services to Oracle products or services, please | use an appropriate tag line as detailed above. For example, | "XYZ for Oracle database" not "OraXYZ or XYZ Oracle" | fipar wrote: | Last time I checked, no, you couldn't. You could instead | call the offering "Eznzt Service for MySQL". | | A long time ago I had an open source project to manage | mysql replication topologies, and I called it mysql-ha. At | some point, they reached out to me about the trademark | infringement. | | They were nice about it, I did not get a legal notice or | anything, just a contact from a MySQL employee pointing me | to their policy (as in my response to your example: I could | have called it ha-for-mysql), and requesting that I changed | the name to make it compliant. I ended up with a full | rename (called it highbase) and they were kind enough to | give me a one year free subscription to MySQL Enterprise as | a token of appreciation for my change. | | In way that I think is interesting regarding the AWS and | Elastic situation, what MySQL's trademark policy intended | was to avoid the situation in which a third party could be | confused by a product or project name (mysql-ha in my case) | as to believe that MySQL, the company, was behind the | offering. So any use of the trademark that made it clear | they were not involved (as in the "X for MySQL" vs. "MySQL | X") was ok. | Macha wrote: | Given that Elastic are describing that they've tried every | option, I including legal ones and Amazon elasticsearch | service is still named as such, it would seem it at least | isn't as clear cut as elastic believes | indymike wrote: | Or they have not had their day in court. Trademark | litigation is usually pretty straightforward. | [deleted] | nrmitchi wrote: | > Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk | on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel | like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. | | I mean, sure. Someone can poop on the lawn. | | There is a difference between that, and some business coming | along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the | lawn, and I'm sure you understand that. | signal11 wrote: | While the imagery is evocative, scale of usage isn't a factor | in open source licenses, so the metaphor sort of breaks | apart. Sun found that out the hard way -- IBM probably | profited off Java way more than pre-acquisition Sun. | whoknew1122 wrote: | > "There is a difference between that, and some business | coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then | dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that." | | Is there a difference? The sign never said how much shit | could be deposited on your lawn. | wokwokwok wrote: | This is meaningless analogy; no one is pooping here. | | Whats happening is they're selling the same product; legally | they're entitled to do so. | | They're selling it in a deceptive (perhaps even legally | dubious way), and thats not ok; but forget that, this has | nothing really to do with being the good guys for open source | and amazon being the bad guys, thats just the _narrative_ | that the elastic PR folk are putting out. | | What's happening here is being out-competed by people selling | the same product, because despite being technically inferior | (in my view) the competition can sell more of it more cheaply | and not really care about the margins. | | So... yes, I'm sympathetic, but this PR dance we go through | every time pains me. | | Just say it: we're struggling. We cant compete with Amazon on | equal terms, so we're changing the license to force them to | pay us royalties, or stop selling it. | | You're _not_ doing it from the goodness of your heart, and if | amazon wasn't kicking your ass, you wouldn't care, you'd just | be laughing at them "trying to run a cloud version of | elastic, ha!". ...but amazon is very very good at that, | actually, and very good at selling it. | | Who's going to judge you for not having amazons scale? No | one; but they're not being dicks, they're doing their jobs, | very successfully. | | If you don't like losing, that's perfectly ok, no one does... | but it doesnt make them bad, it just means they're better at | it than you. | | Changing things to preserve your competitive edge is totally | ok; but I don't think its right to spin this us-them AWS is | the evil empire narrative; youre in this situation because of | the decisions _you made_ , take a bit of humble pie and | acknowledge responsibility for it as well. | alisonkisk wrote: | Why do you feel the need to to free PR work for Amazon? | Amazon has no respect for its business partners, let alone | competitors or employees; why should the Elastic team have | an obligation to not be mad? Mad is a human emotion. | drm237 wrote: | "and thats not ok; but forget that" | | Why do we need to forget the trademark infringement? | | If Amazon is engaging in trademark infringement, lying | about their connection\collaboration with the trademark | holder, and including commercially licensed technology in | an open source fork of a project, they are acting very | poorly. Your argument of Amazon just being able to execute | better falls flat if these facts are true and it means | they're cheating, and that deserves some recognition. | prepend wrote: | Imagine the sign says "(and that includes businesses with | giant dump trucks, please bring it on)" | | Because that's what the license they used said. | dhd415 wrote: | Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent | license change is also interesting: | https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification. | Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as | MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for | anything other than offering the product itself as a service but | becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That | makes it pretty clear that it's meant strictly for competition | with AWS. | granzymes wrote: | Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. | Maybe we can change the link to this post? | twobitshifter wrote: | > hack the source code to grant yourself access to our paid | features without a subscription, or the use of modified | versions in production. | | I think the change that you can't modify the code and use it | yourself in production is a big change that is glossed over. | ES is now free as in beer. You can look at the code but you | can't touch it or change what it does. | | Edit: I was wrong about this. The license itself does not say | this, but the blog post seemed to indicate that it was a | change. I think it's an exclusive inclusive or problem. | amenod wrote: | This is false. License [0] clearly states the conditions | under which you can do it and they seem pretty reasonable. | Nothing that a normal user, faced with an issue they want | to fix, wouldn't accept. I imagine Amazon would have | trouble accepting those and other terms, but that's the | whole idea. | | [0] https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public- | license | elliekelly wrote: | I read the whole linked article and was disappointed there | was no explanation of the license changes they made - only | justifications for the change. | rovr138 wrote: | I think the title covers that this is "why" the change | occurred. Not the explanation of the license they changed | to. | elliekelly wrote: | That's fair, if perhaps a bit pedantic. I suppose I was | expecting some explanation of why the language of the new | license would address these "whys" as opposed to just a | list of grievances. | the_local_host wrote: | I kept feeling like I was reading the same thing over and | over and just not finding out what exactly Amazon is doing | now that it won't be able to do in the future. Skimming the | links to the blog post and FAQ didn't help much. | | Whatever it is it's pretty deep in the weeds. It looks like | the intent is for most users to be unaffected; non-AWS cloud | providers to be unaffected; even AWS's Elastic Cloud to be | unaffected; but AWS has to stop doing something with specific | regard to Elastic Search and I can't figure out what it is. | elliekelly wrote: | > Then after a period of time, typically 3-4 years, but not | more than 5 years, the restrictions lapse, and the source code | automatically converts to an Open Source license, in our case | Apache 2.0. | | I'm not familiar with this type of license. Any idea how/when | this time frame is decided? Is it 3-5 years from software | release? | | I guess I'm confused by the use of "automatically converts" | with a vague timeline. If it's automatic why isn't the time of | "automatic" conversion more definitively known? What's the | event that triggers the change? | VoxPelli wrote: | Good explanation here: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ | | It's from the day that the code is released under the license | and the four years is the max under BSL (so that people know | roughly what the "worst case scenario" it a BSL licensed | software would be) but can be specified to be shorter by the | one releasing code under it. | fencepost wrote: | Not sure if it's still the case but Ghostscript is or was | like this - a licenseable current version possibly with extra | commercially relevant features (e.g. PCL) plus an open source | older version. | | Edit: https://artifex.com/licensing/commercial/ notably this | lets you avoid concerns about integrating GPL with your | commercial offering. | alisonkisk wrote: | https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/ | | An individual instance of license will say "the covered code | is usable under Foo license from Year-Month-Day" | mariuz wrote: | Related article Uproar: MariaDB Corp. veers away from open | source https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109213/open-source- | uproar... | dehrmann wrote: | That's pretty ironic considering MariaDB's history. | VoxPelli wrote: | Great post, thanks, had totally missed that, great that they | are evaluating BSL as well, this should really get up there on | the HN front page as well. | say_it_as_it_is wrote: | "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." | dang wrote: | Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working | on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More | at the bottom of the page, or like this: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781&p=2 | wazoox wrote: | Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon | illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do | people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very | obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? | | More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why | people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, | morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and | everyone loses in the end but the handful of plutocrats that | control Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc. | ydlr wrote: | > Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. | | If we accept Elastic's interpretation of trademark law, all | retail is illegal. | | I bought some break cereal at Walmart this morning that clearly | displayed a "Kellog" trademark. Walk down any isle of the | store, unauthorized use of trademarks as far as the eye can | see. NOT OK. | Spivak wrote: | If it ends up being ruled that Amazon infringed on Elastic's | trademark (their case here is pretty flimsy) or copied | Elastic's proprietary code then Amazon deserves to get raked | over the coals for copyright infringement. | | But Amazon offering hosted Elasticsearch and forking the | project is something that I think is okay. It sucks for Elastic | but it's good for customers. Amazon is driving the cost of | hosted Elasticsearch down closer to its real costs which will | always out-compete Elastic who's trying to use their margin to | fund development as well. So many businesses fall into the trap | of not charging for their actual value and get eaten when | someone else is better at their paid complementary services. | Elastic's value is the software, not their hosting abilities. | wizcaps wrote: | The entitlement in this thread is staggering. | | > It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers. | | Everyone is seemingly happy with ES not being able to | monetise the product they build for the community, to | subsidise the thousands of developer hours spent on it, so | their company can save a few dollars. They (you) would rather | than money go to Amazon for providing.. nothing to the ES | community. | Spivak wrote: | No, I would rather ES built a sustainable business selling | their software with a normal licensing model that makes | sure they're getting paid no matter who's hosting it. In | that world it doesn't matter if AWS or Google or Microsoft | or anyone else want to offer hosted versions of it because | ES still gets their cut. | | But co-opting open source to grow your user-base and then | switching your license because you don't like the reality | of what open source actually entails leaves a bad taste in | everyone's mouth. | dd_roger wrote: | Neither of these issues have anything to do with the license. | | Either Elastic's code used by Amazon is indeed stolen | proprietary code and no licensing change is needed to obtain | reparation, or Amazon is making lawful use of FOSS source code | and the question boils down to "if I publish code under a FOSS | license, can anybody use it?", to which the answer is obviously | yes. And if you'd prefer it to be "no" then don't publish FOSS. | | Regarding the trademark, this indeed seems (to my non-lawyer | eyes) to be an infringement (or extremely borderline at the | very least) but isn't related to licensing. | FemmeAndroid wrote: | The trademark has to do with licensing insofar as if a major | reseller of your OSS licensed product will infringe on your | trademark, the easiest solution might be to modify the | license. Especially when the alternative is lengthy trademark | disputes with a huge company with a lot of lawyers. | | At the end of the day offering an OSS license becomes less | viable when it seems like major players aren't playing | fairly. | richardwhiuk wrote: | IANAL but I don't think this is infringing. | | Your allowed to sell Apple Macs and advertise them as "Bob's | Apple Mac store" without paying any royalties to Apple. | | Similarly, Amazon can deploy the open-source ElasticSearch | product, and deploy it, unaltered using the trademark. | nwallin wrote: | > Your allowed to sell Apple Macs and advertise them as | "Bob's Apple Mac store" without paying any royalties to | Apple. | | I don't think you can name your store "Bob Apple Mac | Store". You can advertise that you can buy an Apple Mac at | "Bob's Computer Store". | [deleted] | jaaron wrote: | Amazon's poor behavior doesn't excuse Elastic's poor behavior. | | Amazon's violation of Elastic's trademark is an issue between | two companies: Amazon & Elastic. Elastic has the courts | available to them to pursue their case. | | Elastric's change of license affects the larger open source and | technical communities and it's understandable that contributors | who supported the open source project are upset when Elastic | changes the nature of the relationship. | kstrauser wrote: | > Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon | illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. | | Those are interesting and specific accusations. Got any proof? | patch_cable wrote: | There is a link in the article to a separate post: | https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users- | includin.... I think this is what it is referring to. | nenolod wrote: | I read that article and it is very redolent of what SCO | argued back in the day. If they had actual proof, they | would take legal action against the author of that plugin. | bonzini wrote: | They did in September 2019. Is literally the first | sentence of the linked article and it links to | https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users. | | I am not sure of the outcome. | joshuaissac wrote: | > I read that article [...] If they had actual proof, | they would take legal action against the author of that | plugin. | | The first sentence of that article: | | > Back on September 4th, we filed a lawsuit against | floragunn GmbH, the makers of Search Guard, a security | plugin for Elasticsearch | nenolod wrote: | Yeah? SCO sued a bunch of people too. They haven't won, | though. | wazoox wrote: | That's right in the article. | sm4rk0 wrote: | Not defending anyone here, just adding another (AWS) perspective: | | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... | cactus2093 wrote: | What's the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch | vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Or what | every hosting provider including AWS does with the Linux kernel, | sell access to a service that is running that software. | | I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I | really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released | open source software and now are mad that it is taking on a life | of its own that they don't 100% control. That's the whole point | of open source as far as I'm concerned, other people can do stuff | you might not have expected with your code. | | Now they're making it more closed going forward, which is fine | and is certainly their right to do. But this argument is so | bizarre, instead of saying that we tried to do this open source | but unfortunately it makes it too difficult for us as a business | so we're closing things off, they're trying to spin it as they | are the true, good defenders of open source fighting against the | forces of evil by closing off their licensing further. | anticristi wrote: | This. Elastic produced a product that is popular _because_ it | 's open source. (The closed source version of ES is called | Splunk or DataDog.) Now they are pissed off that they can't | profit from its popularity. I feel their sadness, but I don't | think Amazon is the problem. Even before Amazon many non- | Elastic hosted ES offers appeared (logz.io ?). | | I would hate to be in their shoes, but it brings a valuable | lesson to future entrepreneurs: Do fill the "unfair advantage" | box in your business canvas. | viraptor wrote: | > The closed source version of ES is called Splunk or | DataDog. | | No, these are services which probably use some kind of | search/indexing service in their implementation. They don't | provide a database interface. | | The closed alternative would be something like Algolia or | Azure Search. | jamra wrote: | Did you read the blog post? They are mad about trademark | violation and an allegation that their commercial code has been | ripped off by Amazon through a third party. They have | Elasticsearch trademarked and you can't use their name with | your name on it. In their mind, it is a violation. | cactus2093 wrote: | Yes but how does changing their license affect a trademark? | If they are legally in the right and this is a violation of | their trademark they should win their lawsuit about it | regardless. | | Also my initial question was not purely rhetorical, I would | assume "Linux" is also trademarked so I'm wondering what is | the difference there and why Redhat selling RHEL has not been | the same problem. | Omie6541 wrote: | I think it's not the same problem because Red Hat | contributes heavily back to Linux kernel | richardwhiuk wrote: | I think they'll lose the trademark case. | hvis wrote: | Because Linus has no problems with Red Hat? And because Red | Hat employs a lot of the key contributors to the Linux | kernel? | | Also: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets- | tough-o... | [deleted] | cactus2093 wrote: | I don't think Redhat could have built their whole | business on the just the implied understanding that Linus | is cool with it. I'm more talking about the trademark | issue, did they legally get the right to use the Linux | trademark in some way that Amazon Elasticsearch didn't? | Just curious if there is any substance to what Elastic is | claiming here or if it's purely a PR stunt. | | Edit: based on the Linux Foundation link in another | comment, it seems they have a clear process for | sublicensing the trademark. So I guess Elastic is | claiming AWS just launched their ES service without their | legal team ever having bothered looking into the | trademark? That seems very strange for such a large | company. | jrv wrote: | See https://www.linuxfoundation.org/the-linux-mark/ | fieldcny wrote: | These are not comparable situations. | | In addition to redhat employing a large number of kernel | contributors, ElasticSearch is a complete product the Linux | kernel is just a piece of the overall redhat product. The | kernel in and of itself is useless. Also redhat provides source | rpms for every non-proprietary app/utility that makes up the | redhat product. | | A more comparable situation would be redhat and centos, and to | the point that Elastic is making, redhat is very protective of | their trademarks with regards to the CentOs project, they have | never stood for and would never stand for a situation like | this. | BossingAround wrote: | > What's the difference between what Amazon does with | Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux | kernel? | | Red Hat is a top 2-4 contributor to the Linux kernel though, | depending on what source (and year) you take a look (e.g. [1]). | | The big difference is that Amazon doesn't contribute back. The | comparison seems misguided at best. | | [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux- | Gi... | [deleted] | thefreeman wrote: | The real problem that Elastic doesn't like is that amazon | reimplements features as part of their core offering that ES | tries to charge for. I'm sure they would have no problem | contributing back but Elastic doesn't want these features to | become part of the core offering. | anticristi wrote: | This sounds like the Docker Inc and Red Hat dance again. | Red Hat wanted tighter integration with systemd, Docker Inc | not. The debate ended with Red Hat doing: | alias docker=podman | viraptor wrote: | One of the debates ended. But since it's not a complete | replacement, or started some more debates. | blackbrokkoli wrote: | A lot of comments here are discussing the greater implications of | OSS and the like - which is appropriate. But can we take a minute | to talk about AWS' specific, egregious behavior? | | Blatantly stealing the trademark, not even entering negotiations. | Lying on Twitter about being in a partnership with a company when | they are not is the kind of behavior I expect from a shady | sneakers reseller on Reddit, not AWS. In my book, this is | shockingly unprofessional and indicates some serious rot as a | company... | alexkidd wrote: | Waiting for some FAANG employee saying that "Elastic didn't | understand the open source ideology" | [deleted] | nenolod wrote: | Incidentally, the fact that it is OK to use Apache-2 licensed | components inside projects licensed as SSPL is probably a net | negative for free software moving forward as there will be more | of these companies which do this in the future. It doesn't end | with Elastic. | dd_roger wrote: | I have a hard time understanding the point of the author. | | If Amazon is infringing a trademark (which indeed seems to be the | case in my non-expert eyes), reparation should/could be obtained | before a court regardless of the license of the code. | | If the author has a problem with his FOSS software being used by | an entity he doesn't like then he is in disagreement with the | FOSS ideal at its core, this is a perfectly respectable opinion | but don't blame it on Amazon. | tardyp wrote: | So what happens with https://sematext.com/ ? Outside of AWS, they | use open-distro and do compete with elastic.co. Will they just go | out of business by not being able to upgrade elastic? | 015a wrote: | The SSPL is a sham of an open source license. Its written (and | named!) in a way to convince shallow readers that its just a | service-oriented version of the GPL, but its practically | impossible to fulfill the terms of this license in a way which | enables third parties to legally host the so-called "open source | software". That's the point of the SSPL; to make sure the company | who created the so-called open source software is the only | company that can monetize it. Does that sound like the state | Linux is in to you? | | The core legal requirement the GPL puts on distributors is that | modifications must also be made open source. That's powerful, and | attainable. The core legal requirement the SSPL puts on "third- | party distributors" is the requirement that all the source code | for that distributor's service must be made open source. First: | It doesn't even apply to Elastic. Second: Binaries are discrete; | services are networked, often involving many pieces, and there's | no strong legal definition for what "service" means in the SSPL. | | MongoDB invented it, submitted it to OSI for approval in 2018, | then withdrew the application in 2019. Its still not an OSI | approved license. Every major linux distro ceased distributing | MongoDB upon the relicense, under concerns that its not actually | an open source license. | | Elastic wants to keep the conversation focused on AWS. Look, I | like AWS, but they can be pretty icky, I get that. However, this | is not a dichotomy. Elastic betrayed the open source community. | They started with open source as a major selling point of | elasticsearch, used that selling point to gain traction and | users; many of whom did not pay elastic for the service, to be | sure. When they had secured a moat of success, they flipped the | license to one that is not open source, and now those users are | forced to come to elastic for support. | | Elastic should be able to make money. In the spirit of that, we | just need to be clear: They're effectively no better than, say, | Algolia. Yeah, I can read the source code. I can't really change | it in a meaningful way. I can self-host (which I can do with many | closed-source products). I can't sub-contract a specialist like | AWS to manage it for me. Them switching to the SSPL is "fine". | They're just not an open source company anymore. This is not an | "AWS is evil, Elastic is great" situation; this is a "they're | both companies who do some good things and some evil things, but | above all else they care about money" situation. There _are_ true | open source projects which aren 't like this; elasticsearch was | one of these, it isn't anymore, and we should focus on supporting | products which support their users back, not ones which are built | to support The Company. | tareqak wrote: | I remember there being a few posts about companies/foundations | relicensing their code in about the last three months. Their | approach was relicense to be AGPLv3 for their OSS license and | allowing interested parties to pay for a commercial license. | However, contributors had to license their code as both AGPLv3 | and BSD if I remember correctly. | | Does anyone using the above approach have any comments about how | well this approach is working for them? | nickjj wrote: | Thank you for writing this up. | | It kind of hit home for me because I recently had an issue with | an unrelated company that has gotten 100 million+ in funding take | advantage of my work by removing my name from the content, openly | discredit my work under false claims and attempted to steal money | from me multiple times while I've done nothing but help grow | their business and ask for nothing in return other than our | agreed upon compensation. | | What I got from this write up is there's always going to be | people and corporations out there who do their best to take | advantage of you for the sake of profiting off your work using | whatever means necessary, even if it's maybe illegal. I pity | companies like this, especially the people who are making the | decisions because that's the legacy they are leaving behind and | if they happen to have children, they are probably forcing that | mindset onto them as well. | brodouevencode wrote: | They kinda do the same with Redis. | rsstack wrote: | Redis itself is proper open source. There are a few modules, | completely separate from the Redis code base, that aren't open | source (even though Redis Labs will claim they are, like how | Elastic claim Elasticsearch is open source). | | The other non-open-source-but-wants-open-source-clout is Mongo. | brodouevencode wrote: | I think it's more about the source of the revenue stream. | Redis (from what I know, which is minimal) relies more on | support - they have a hosted solution but support/licensing | of modules is where they really make money. Elastic relies on | hosting - they've invested a lot in infrastructure. | rsstack wrote: | This isn't true. Modules are free (unless you're a hosting | competitor) so there is no licensing revenue there. They | might be charging a handful of enterprise customers for | special module support, but that isn't their main revenue | stream. Their revenue is from Redis Enterprise which is a | Redis hosting solution (managed cloud, unmanaged cloud or | on-prem). Redis Enterprise is entirely closed-source, but | it's an infrastructure management system and not a data | store (it isn't Redis). | kristoff_it wrote: | Redis Labs only supports Redis Enterprise. They're not in | the business of offering support for Redis. | paxys wrote: | No, the difference is that Elastic is a massive $15 billion | company which needs more revenue to survive, while Redis is | still largely run by one person. | rsstack wrote: | This isn't true. Salvatore retired earlier this year. | Redis is run, more or less, by Redis Labs which is valued | at $1 billion. | antirez wrote: | That's incredible. After two years and many other databases | really going non opensource, Redis, the only one that really | stayed BSD, is still victim of this misinformation that claims | it is no longer open source. Folks, we are supposed to be a bit | more informed than the average person here. We can do a little | better. | jrochkind1 wrote: | I have never seen the Redis maintainer(s) complain about it | though. | | Would be interesting to compare/contrast, what leads to the | difference. | | They do the same with _lots_ of products really. Postgres and | MySQL too for instance. Also never seen postgres or mysql | maintainance teams complain about it. | | What are the contextual differences that make it a point of | conflict with authors/maintainers in one case but not others? | ddevault wrote: | Elastic was an open source project, and now it's not. This was | done because they believe it will be more profitable. It _does_ | affect you, especially if you contributed to the project, in | which case they 're basically spitting in your face as thanks for | your hard work. This is not materially different from when Oracle | infamously killed OpenSolaris, something they were rightfully | crucified for by the community. | | They're not wrong about Amazon misinformation, use of trademarks, | and so on, and should have pursued the legal remedies for this | more deeply. Called them out publically, and shamed them like | this post attempts to do. But, if it didn't work, tough shit. It | has nothing to do with the license. They made a contrat with | their community when they choose an open source license. | | >We created Elasticsearch; we care about it more than anyone | else. | | No, you didn't. Elasticsearch is the combined work of _thousands_ | of contributors. | | Aside: using "Free & Open" in your messaging is a pretty low | move, deliberately designed to mislead users. | aprdm wrote: | There's still an oss license elasticsearch, they packed a lot | of extra features to compete with Amazon distro and that bundle | has a different license | jrochkind1 wrote: | I think you are mistaken and have missed the recent news | which OP is about, but I'm not totally sure what you are | talking about. | | Which license do you consider an OSS licensed elasticsearch? | aprdm wrote: | The apache license, https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearc | h/blob/master/LICENSE... | | If you don't use any of the x-pack features (which used to | be paid) you're all good. | lovelearning wrote: | Not quite. Elastic is removing Apache licensing | altogether for ES and Kibana from 7.11 and switching them | to SSPL (or alternately the Elastic license based on | user's choice) [1]. | | [1] : https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change | aprdm wrote: | Oh okay, missed it, thanks! | Proven wrote: | Earlier you didn't say OSS - you said open source | literallyWTF wrote: | This seems really hyperbolic. | [deleted] | supernihil wrote: | this post from a year ago: | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/launching-open-distr... | | sums up amazons stand pretty much, they talk about how they are | suffering from "Elasticsearches bullying behavior" but in reality | Elasticsearch were abusing Elasticsearch in their marketing | ("partnering with ES.." lies), they created their own fork | instead of offering back to upstream, they partnered up with a | company that were stealing enterprise code from ES and selling it | as their own product, i mean AWS does not have the privilige to | express themselves as opensource evangelists. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-19 23:01 UTC)