[HN Gopher] AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana ___________________________________________________________________ AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana Author : ke4qqq Score : 169 points Date : 2021-01-21 22:07 UTC (52 minutes ago) (HTM) web link (aws.amazon.com) (TXT) w3m dump (aws.amazon.com) | [deleted] | PradeetPatel wrote: | >Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the | Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server | Side Public License (which has requirements that make it | unacceptable to many in the open source community). | | I'm a bit out of the loop here, can someone please tell me why | Elastic decided to enact this seemingly Anti-OSS license? | jawns wrote: | The announcement: https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change | | The "Why" behind the change: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why- | license-change-AWS | | tl;dr Elastic alleges that Amazon is infringing on their | trademark and is offering Elastic's products as a service on | AWS without being a good partner. | | From Elastic's summary of the license change: "The SSPL allows | free and unrestricted use and modification, with the simple | requirement that if you provide the product as a service to | others, you must also publicly release any modifications as | well as the source code of your management layers under SSPL." | __blockcipher__ wrote: | > The SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, | with the simple requirement that if you provide the product | as a service to others, you must also publicly release any | modifications as well as the source code of your management | layers under SSPL." | | The magic is in the "management layers" part. True copyleft | says "you can use this software in your product but you have | to open source any changes to the software". Okay, fine. This | "poison pill proprietary license dressed up as copyleft" is | saying "if you sell a service that uses an UNMODIFIED version | of elasticsearch, you have to release every piece of software | around elasticsearch, including your hypervisors, kernels, os | image...the list goes on". It's very clearly an attempt to | make the requirement so odious that no-one would risk | triggering that clause. | | Which is why functionally all they did was force Amazon (and | other organizations like Wikimedia who don't sell | Elasticsearch as a service but do refuse to run proprietary | software) to have to fork. | dboreham wrote: | Because they want to make money? | hehehaha wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781 | saurik wrote: | (On this thread, I think the top comment from StavrosK is | particularly poignant.) | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523 | hehehaha wrote: | Yes that comment really stuck with me. Because in many ways | cloud (in current form) wouldn't exist without OSS | licensing in general. | aaronbrethorst wrote: | I see a couple other people shared links, but for future | reference, the Algolia search box at the bottom of most pages | is a great way to answer these sorts of questions. | alexchamberlain wrote: | Rightly or wrongly, they are joining a long line of OSS | maintainers trying to protect themselves from the clouds | profiting from them. | | It seems reasonable to me at least to say: you can use this | software for free, but you can't resell it. If you want | professional support, please support someone who is maintaining | the software. | __blockcipher__ wrote: | > It seems reasonable to me at least to say: you can use this | software for free, but you can't resell it. If you want | professional support, please support someone who is | maintaining the software. | | Well, first of all I disagree that that's reasonable, but | let's be clear here: | | any license with a non-commerciality provision is not open | source. This is explicitly part of the open source | definition: | | https://opensource.org/osd | | > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor | | > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the | program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may | not restrict the program from being used in a business, or | from being used for genetic research. | | This is why Elasticsearch and Kibana are no longer open | source; you have a choice of two proprietary licenses if you | want to use their version. | my123 wrote: | It is not OSS if it does that, because you limit what the | software can be used for. | | It becomes just source-available software. | | Being open-source to get a user base and then change the | license isn't that great, they should have started as | proprietary and that'd have been fine. | alexchamberlain wrote: | I don't think they were disingenuous here: I think they | probably chose a license somewhat randomly (acknowledging | it wasn't copy left probably?), then got developing. Down | the road, they saw someone using the software in a way they | didn't like and decided that as they were now bigger, they | could afford to get a license drawn up with their values in | mind. I doubt there was a nefarious plan to use a licence | for it's reputation. | | Now, I do think we are missing a standard license in this | space - everyone seems to be writing their own, which | limits those that can use them to larger projects. | __blockcipher__ wrote: | I absolutely reject the notion that they chose Apache 2.0 | "randomly"...indeed it's what Lucene, which they use as | their kernel of sorts, is licensed under. | | You use Apache 2.0 when you explicitly don't want | copyleft. But here's what's great: copyleft wouldn't even | stop Amazon, so they have to use SSPL which is a | proprietary license masquerading as copyleft. | | Also, one way they were clearly outright reneging on | their promise was that Elastic explicitly promised the | community that the parts of the codebase that were Apache | 2.0 licensed (the 'open core') would never be made | proprietary. They broke that promise for this move. | | And what's doubly hilarious is from a business | perspective it's an awful move. It won't stop Amazon from | making money - they'll just fork 7.1.0 and develop under | Apache 2.0 like they just did, and keep operating their | service just the same. And by the way, it's Amazon's | right, legally AND ethically, to be able to operate AWS | Elasticsearch for profit - just as Elastic is right both | legally and ethically to use Lucene as a necessary part | of Elasticsearch. | jimmydorry wrote: | They couldn't compete with practically free (Amazon hosting | their software as a service), and allegedly Amazon weren't | commiting anything back into their repo. | | Elastic appeared to make their money through hosting their own | instances and selling professional licenses, which Amazon was | in direct competition with. | fishtoaster wrote: | The short, charitable version: | | Elastic's business model is "make + distribute ElasticSearch | for free, then offer hosted ES for money." AWS (among others) | offers hosted ElasticSearch as well - Elastic feels this isn't | fair, variously because: AWS may have violated trademark by | calling theirs "Amazon Elasticsearch Service", or because AWS | doesn't contribute enough to the open source development of | ElasticSearch, or one of a few other grievances. So they're | changing their license to one that protects against this sort | of "abuse" of the Apache license. | | The less charitable version is that since Elastic's business | model revolves around selling hosted ElasticSearch and AWS is | outcompeting them there, they're switching to an "Open Source, | but you're not allowed to do that anymore" license. But because | Elastic values the goodwill they get from being "open source," | they're trying to convince the world that this is a principled, | moral stance instead of a run-of-the-mill self-interested | decision to make their business more viable. | m00dy wrote: | If you are Elastic, how could you compete against AWS even if it | is your own software ? | crb002 wrote: | Lower cost. AWS usually has huge premiums over the raw | EC2/S3/EFS costs. | tw04 wrote: | Unfortunately lower cost will do nothing to get you in the | door at an enterprise that has a committed spend with AWS. | I'm sure Elastic has been finding this out the hard way. | mushrew wrote: | Elastic's SaaS offering is incredibly expensive vs AWS | Elasticsearch | __blockcipher__ wrote: | Better quality is a better answer. AWS charges a big premium | for Elasticsearch and I don't think they'd drop their prices | to try to squeeze Elastic - for one, it would be unlikely to | even work - but even so it's always best to differentiate on | being the better quality/"value" than the lowest cost. | | Having used AWS Elasticsearch, it has a lot of deep problems | with it in its current state so Elastic can compete on value | just fine. | | In other news, I think the Elastic licensing change beyond | being ethically a dick move (legally it's their right), is | just horrible business strategy. I said on this site several | days ago that Amazon was just going to make an Apache 2.0 | fork and keep chugging along, and that's exactly what we're | seeing. | mminer237 wrote: | Brand recognition should help. I also trust the original | developers to build a better product than Amazon will on their | fork. | Beached wrote: | AWS is doing a terrible job with their es version. and es has | aquired endgame and giving endgame away for 'free' with you | purchase of es licensing, and the es stack run by es is getting | a lot more attention and development that AWS version | zokier wrote: | Don't try to compete on same market, provide differentiated | offering. Focus on consultancy, custom development (plugins | etc), on-prem deployments. You are the foremost experts of the | software, capitalize that instead of trying to compete on ops | stuff which is AWS bread and butter. | | That might follow with recognition that your market might be | smaller than what Elastic co has so far projected, and even it | might not be enough to sustain $15B market cap, but bursting | that bubble should not be all doom and gloom. Being small does | not equate not being successful. | stefan_ wrote: | The AWS model isn't that they actually do novel development on | this software, it's that they grab the code, add a bunch of | crufty hacks to it to make it work better in their environment | then sell it as a hosted version. | | Think of it like the Amazon marketplace equivalent: watch for | products doing well, then get the cheapest possible clone made | and sell it as Amazon Basic, while harassing the original | vendors of these products and promoting their own brand in | search results. | truetraveller wrote: | Very insightful comment. Thank you! | crb002 wrote: | Elastic was suing them for trademark breach. Hosting didn't | bother them - it is FOSS. Lying that they were in partnership | with Elastic did. | rdtsc wrote: | That's the interesting thing to me, why they were so openly | dishonest about it. | https://twitter.com/Werner/status/649738362086027265 | | --- | | Introducing the Amazon Elasticsearch service, a great | partnership between @elastic and #AWS | | --- | | How was it a "great partnership" if one side didn't even know | about it... | CapriciousCptl wrote: | AFAIK, that tweet from Vogel is the only time someone | representing AWS claimed to have a partnership with Elastic. | He was wrong, but I don't think it's fair calling it | "dishonest." | marcinzm wrote: | >Hosting didn't bother them - it is FOSS. | | They literally changed the license to one that's only different | in not allowing people to host it the way Amazon did. | ksec wrote: | Precisely to fence off Amazon from using their Open Source | with their Name on it? | marcinzm wrote: | The new license does not say "X applies if you use our | name". It says "X applies if you use our source code under | any name." | jrockway wrote: | This is an embarrassing anecdote, but I thought I'd share. I | started using Elasticsearch because it showed up in the AWS | console along with all the other "Elastic" things ("Elastic | Compute Cloud") and I figured it was a thing they made | themselves. Only later on in the process did I realize that there | was a company called Elastic that named it. | | Very unfortunate. Probably a lesson about naming your company | after a common English word. | jlawer wrote: | I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something | else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch | v(FORKED_VERSION). There continued trying to associate it to ES | is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't | think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the | resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well. | | I am actually quite surprised they haven't just hired a small | team of core devs for it and try and out compete Elastic. The | groundwork is laid, I could easily see AWS being able to maintain | a "Fast Follower" + AWS Optimisation approach and be able to | offer a substantial portion of the value for a fraction of the | costs. Try and pick up the open source community now while there | is concerns around the license. | | Additionally at this point the AWS core platform is different | enough then GCP / Azure / other clouds. I imagine they could | build optimisations for AWS in and be able to save costs on | providing the service. (i.e. it might be worth doing some work in | FPGAs / ASICs, giving faster performance while only being | economical when your the scale of AWS). I kind of am surprised | AWS hasn't grown to attempt to have a guiding hand over many of | the open source projects that are effectively their vendors. Many | projects have a handful of core contributors and a hiring a key | person will ensure your able to influence development in a way | that assists you (assuming it is neutral to beneficial to the | project). | dijit wrote: | And I, for sure, will never use them. | | The AWS version of ES has been abysmal- it's only saving grace is | that it's "in the ecosystem"- I was convinced by an AWS zealot on | my team. Never again. | mrsuprawsm wrote: | Personally me and my team just evaluated the AWS ES and Elastic | offerings, and the AWS offering (surprisingly!) came out on | top, for our use case. Better performance, better IaC support, | and marginally cheaper. | | Honestly I would have preferred the Elastic offering to work | better, but that wasn't the case. | uncledave wrote: | I'll second that. Complete pile of excrement. | afandian wrote: | What exactly is wrong? And did you switch to something else? | core-questions wrote: | I send about 100GB a day to Amazon ES and it works fine. I used | to maintain ES 2.x and 5.x on my own and it was more work for | me personally at a slight cost savings. | | What has been abysmal for you? Maybe your use case is more | advanced than ours, which is mainly absorbing logs from all | over the place and doing the typical dashboard and alerts on | them (with Grafana). | halbritt wrote: | > I send about 100GB a day to Amazon ES | | This is why you haven't noticed any issues. | jasonrojas wrote: | This thread has some interesting links.. | https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/t/recent-elastic-co-... | humbleMouse wrote: | Amazon, ruining everyone's favorite open source apache projects | one at a time. | crb002 wrote: | Bezos is executing better than the original SAAS vendors that | FOSS community editions. You want to compete with buff Jeff | then make sure you support Azure/GCP too and can price below | Bezos' margin above raw EC2 - usually means you have to get | creative with spot instances and avoiding cross data center | network. | dathos wrote: | You say this as if it's not a sign of a monopoly. | jimmydorry wrote: | Amazon can, and will price you out of the market regardless | of what you do. And if your idea is novel enough, they will | just make their own version of it (or fork it, like in the | original post!). | googlryas wrote: | Is that wrong? The computer revolution was ignited by other | companies essentially copying the designs of | microprocessors and reselling them as their own. | PunchTornado wrote: | There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, | but morally. | | A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you | by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum | they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to | the project. | crb002 wrote: | They breached trademark in a press release lying that they were | in partnership. | choeger wrote: | Maybe I watched too much of suits, but is that not illegal | for publicly traded companies? | __blockcipher__ wrote: | There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically. | They're creating value for their customers, and releasing open | source software while doing so. Indeed it's Elastic who tried | to get all the positives of open source with none of the | negatives (as evidenced by them making Elasticsearch/Kibana no | longer open source) | | BTW, not that it's super relevant but the narrative that Amazon | is driving Elastic bankrupt is farcical. Elastic pulls in | $500MM in revenue and is valued at $15B+. Elastic's doing fine. | | Note: One thing Amazon did do that was unethical was claim that | they had "collaborated with Elastic" when they announced AWS | Elasticsearch long ago. That is indefensible. But there is | nothing wrong with them forking. | munificent wrote: | _> Elastic pulls in $500MM in revenue_ | | Not taking sides, but for comparison, Amazon makes that much | revenue every 12 hours. | thekyle wrote: | Bad comparison, Amazon does much more than Elastic. How | much does the Amazon Elasticsearch product bring in? That's | what actually matters here. | floatingatoll wrote: | It is absolutely possible that something legal can still be | ethically unacceptable. | | This is an instance where people believe that it is ethically | unacceptable for Amazon to do what they've been doing, so | strongly that they are relicensing open source software to | prohibit Amazon from continuing to benefit from their work on | it. | | Ethics are not as simple as law, especially in technology, | and very especially in open source licensing. | plasma wrote: | Is the crux of the issue AWS is making money off ES and not | paying Elastic a royalty (because the license doesn't need it)? | mirthflat83 wrote: | If you don't want that, maybe don't open source your code with | a license that allows others to do that? | iimblack wrote: | Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch | trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open- | source) part of their product. | | > I took a personal loan to register the Elasticsearch | trademark in 2011 believing in this norm in the open source | ecosystem. Seeing the trademark so blatantly misused was | especially painful to me. Our efforts to resolve the problem | with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK. | | > We have seen that this trademark issue drives confusion | with users thinking Amazon Elasticsearch Service is actually | a service provided jointly with Elastic, with our blessing | and collaboration. This is just not true. NOT OK. | | > 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. | | > 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. | | https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS | franklampard wrote: | And therefore stop being open source? | paxys wrote: | IMO Amazon has a better case for suing Elastic for | trademark infringement than vice versa. | __blockcipher__ wrote: | > Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch | trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open- | source) part of their product. | | Sure, but that allegation has absolutely nothing to do with | Elastic breaking its earlier promise to the community and | making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source. Indeed, | the license change will have no effect on Amazon except to | make Amazon's fork more successful because it's now been | made necessary. | dragonwriter wrote: | > Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch | trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open- | source) part of their product. | | If they have actual evidence of those things, they probably | need to allege them in court. | | The license change does nothing to address either issue, so | citing them to support the license change makes no sense at | all. | [deleted] | myth_buster wrote: | There behavior with Elasticsearh [0] seems similar to what they | did to sellers with Amazon Choice and their other knockoffs [1]. | | > 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. | | > Recently, we found more examples of what we consider to be | ethically challenged behavior. We have differentiated with | proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs | serving as "inspiration" for Amazon, telling us their behavior | continues and is more brazen. NOT OK. | | 0: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS | | 1: https://archive.is/9TIu6 | snoshy wrote: | This seemed inevitable, as Amazon has done this several times now | when asked to pay to support the organizations behind large | enterprise OSS offerings. | turbinerneiter wrote: | Wow, just wow. They think they are the good guys. Incredible. | parasubvert wrote: | Because, they are are the good guys? At least if you believe in | open source, not the fake stuff that Elastic is peddling. | oxinabox wrote: | ESH | k__ wrote: | Instead, they should create a serverless alternative. | evilsnoopi3 wrote: | The fact that AWS doesn't link to the Elastic License is | hilarious to me. The plain reading of the license is "APLv2 but | AWS Can't Sell a Hosted Version" so of course AWS forks the last | APL version and plows ahead. | | Note, I'm not trying to side with either AWS or Elastic here and | I fully recognize that both Elastic re-licensing and AWS forking | are within each org's rights. I really just think it is funny how | beside the point AWS's press release is here. | | EDIT: an apostrophe | macksd wrote: | To be fair, it was actually extremely difficult for me to find | the license text. All the announcements and FAQ's etc. seem to | omit a link to the actual text. | Havoc wrote: | >Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | | Seems like a rather disingenuous way of announcing it given the | reason for the license change is (allegedly) a direct response to | Amazon. | | Not that I'm a fan of Elastic's stance either... | __blockcipher__ wrote: | No, you've got things reversed - as do most in this thread. | | Elastic's original announcement was disingenuous, they titled | their blog post "Doubling Down on Open" when they were making | Elasticsearch and Kibana no longer open source. Furthermore, | Elastic promised in the past that ALL FUTURE VERSIONS of the | open core of Elasticsearch would remind Apache 2.0. They broke | that promise when they switched to proprietary licenses only | with 7.1.1. | | BTW, while the reasoning from Elastic is that they did it | because of Amazon, the actual effect is just to make | organizations like the one I work for (a non-profit that | refuses to run proprietary software in prod) have to use one of | these Apache 2.0 forks, while not stopping Amazon from | operating their Elasticsearch service at all (since Amazon is | always free to operate an Apache 2.0 service and indeed that's | the whole damn point of the license) | markphip wrote: | I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made | the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS | the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to | trademarks, there are courts to settle that. | | AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about | Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it | open source and it probably just would not have been widely used | and successful. It is up to Elastic to come up with a business | model that works, not blame others if it is not. | riku_iki wrote: | > it probably just would not have been widely used and | successful | | also tested and fixed for free by community contributors. | swiley wrote: | People get upset about the GPL but this is exactly why it was | created. | xtf wrote: | With Apache License they don't have to contribute back and it | is questionable/unlikely they'll do. | hehehaha wrote: | Well it could disincentivize others from keeping things open | sourced or making meaningful contributions. | pjmlp wrote: | Agreed, next time learn what using non copyleft licenses mean | in practice. | tw04 wrote: | Because an 800lbs gorilla is trying to crush an open source | project? They could've come up with some agreement to oem | Elastic and they both could've benefited. Instead they decided | to just build a competing service at the expense of Elastic. | It's the same reason most of the community had no time for | Oracle forking RHEL. | | >AWS contributes improvements to the project. | | Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't verified). | For a company the size of Amazon, unless it was one heck of a | PR that's basically nothing. | | *Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has | submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog | post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their | business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on | the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream. | parasubvert wrote: | You're confused. This isn't about crushing an OSS project: | it's about ensuring there actually IS an open source project. | | What Elastic is doing with its licensing is not open source. | | You might argue that if Elastic Inc dies then the project | dies, but then it wasn't a very robust project. | paxys wrote: | Elasticsearch isn't two scrappy guys in a garage writing code | out of the good of their hearts. It's a VC-backed $15B | company which now needs to make money. | | Open source is the last thing on either of the two gorillas' | minds. | hyperion2010 wrote: | Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can | easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't | have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the | thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually | contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a | better position to make money off of open source software is | part of the calculation that startups should be making if | they are writing open source software, especially if their | moat is a proprietary shim that any of the big providers | could rewrite in a month if they cared. Adding a rider to | your open source that says "oh, and only the original authors | at this one company are allowed to implement those shims" may | play well with the HN crowd, but it isn't open source | anymore. | | I will also note that is clearly not enough competition in | the cloud provider space, if there were more competition then | elastic might be able to make money from the platform | providers by implementing ES for each platform as you | suggest. | mirthflat83 wrote: | Understandable, because a lot of people open source their code | under a permissive license because it's a cool thing to do, not | because they understand what truly open sourcing their code | means. | dragonwriter wrote: | I don't think VC-backed startups do that. They open source | code because open source materially benefits adoption and | mindshare, which grows the potential market for services, and | that's how they end up with big valuations selling premium | services on top of their open source core. | | Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables | _other people_ to sell premium services on top of the open | source core, and sometimes those other people can make more | money because they are major incumbents that integrate other | offerrings. But that doesn't mean the startup would have been | better or grown faster or sold more of its own services if it | hadn't been open source. | belval wrote: | And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache | and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds | about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub. | justizin wrote: | Elastic _is_ derived from Apache Lucene, it's unclear if | anyone involved in its' development could legally have made | it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to. | | It seems like a lot of us perhaps rushed to discussion | before reading this article, which is about Amazon forking | ElasticSearch _so that_ an OSS version would remain | available. | | Honestly, this is a shitty move by Elastic and I'll be | advocating against new uses of it, though /because | reasons/, I doubt this will come up for me in the near | future. ;) | floatingatoll wrote: | Interpreting your point to be "If it's legal, it's | automatically acceptable", I can offer you clarity on why some | people are coming down on AWS here: | | They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever | reasons, _regardless_ that it is permitted by law. | mminer237 wrote: | Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I | think it's understandable why people would still prefer that | the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of | the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making. | aaronblohowiak wrote: | Why Elastic and not Lucene or OpenJDK ? | Chyzwar wrote: | They already have fork of OpenJDK (Amazon Corretto) | pojzon wrote: | Money | MisterPea wrote: | This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to | something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the | thousands of companies that use it. | worldsayshi wrote: | My two cents: | | Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in | the software world because the rules of the game benefits | everybody the most when everybody is generous. I believe | it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger | benefits when we are all generous. | | However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to | be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus | short circuiting the game and making the playground worse | for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better | again. | | So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source | contributors doesn't expect something back but they can | only hope that others at least pay it forward. | glogla wrote: | That's a very good description. Thank you. | | (sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough) | Seanambers wrote: | Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev | camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' | as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only | make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing | they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to | contribute to free software. But when others can live in | mansions because of it, maybe not so much :) | cosmodisk wrote: | How so? If the licence permits free copy/fork/whatever it's | all great to expect some return but surely it's not | guaranteed? | MattGaiser wrote: | > that the people who actually did the innovation and the | majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS | is making. | | So legally open source but socially closed source/non- | commercial use? | __blockcipher__ wrote: | I'd phrase it backwards: these people think it should have | the appearance of open source and get all the benefits | (contributions from community, widespread adoption), but | legally and ethically speaking it's closed source and they | get to make all the money. | | They seriously have this entitled attitude that because you | used the free software project that they started, that now | they're entitled to that money. It's patently absurd. | Imagine if Linus Torvalds went around with that attitude, | claiming he deserves to be a trillionaire because of the | absurd amount of value Linux has produced. (And ironically | Linux is a more restrictive license than Elasticsearch) | dragonwriter wrote: | With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving | it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or | you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source | users to pay you is "doing it wrong". | | Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn't come up with an open- | source compatible business model, and that's fine. But its | not Amazon's fault. | __blockcipher__ wrote: | > Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn't come up with an | open-source compatible business model, and that's fine. But | its not Amazon's fault. | | Exactly this. | | Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have | an open-source compatible business model. | | The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM | in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of | like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to | pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're | literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. | Nope, it's all gaslighting. _They don 't need to make this | license change_, without it they'll still be a $50B | business in a decade or less. | | They're just having an immature childish response because, | while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is _also_ | making boatloads of money, and that 's not fair in their | eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all | so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a | whole is, but that's another rant) | ahachete wrote: | > insane profits AWS is making | | Do you have numbers on how much AWS profits from Amazon | Elastic Search service? | | Have you checked the profits from Elastic for their | offerings? | | Have you compared them? | | How do you quantify "insane"? | | Honest questions. Just a data person. | __blockcipher__ wrote: | Forgive me for expressing my frustrating for a moment here: | | What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean | new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing | these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about | how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when | literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you | don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give | it away freely, sell it. | | Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of | open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it | was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building | Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they | couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache | 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with | Elastic submitted patches to their codebase. | | Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to | grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of | software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or | arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once | it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug | out from under them and switch to proprietary. | | Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them | more money, it will just hurt their brand image and | incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so | really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably | frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse | entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an | open source vendor gives away their software for free, | intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community | and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole | if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. | It's completely backwards logic. | | To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you | don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people | opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck | themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you | yell at someone using your free software for commercial | purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't | owe you any money. | | You people seem to think open source just means "source | available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that. | | [/unhinged rant] | markphip wrote: | Elastic forced the fork. AWS was contributing and complying | with the license. Why should AWS not be allowed to make | insane profits off open source? | scoopertrooper wrote: | It's like leaving your car in the middle of the road, keys in | the ignition, and a deed transferring ownership to whoever | holds it under the window wiper, then getting annoyed at | someone driving off with it. | weego wrote: | It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. | | Elastic because a highly successful business off the product | being open source and then leveraging that into funding and | enterprise licensing and maintenence. | | To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like | that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always | yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth | model that got you here. | sg47 wrote: | Amazon has not been contributing back to the open source | projects when they offer a service based on it. | | E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/performance- | updates-to... | | Amazon EMR release 5.24.0 includes several optimizations in | Spark that improve query performance. | | Why have these optimizations not been contributed back to the | community? | justizin wrote: | because then you wouldn't have been quietly walked into | vendor lock-in which extends beyond the software license to | the hardware you're leasing! | cosmodisk wrote: | Because they don't want to, or see no value in doing so. | I've been downvoted to oblivion just by stating that | contributions to popular OSS projects, especially those | initiated,or heavily used by large tech companies,are | nothing more than just free labour. Amazon's business is | commodity: they made books,one of the most precious things | we,as a civilization could create,a commodity. The storage | space, computing, even ML is being commoditised. Logistics | will folow,then some more. The company's perspective and | business goals are completely different than many would | like to think. | majormajor wrote: | Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from | using it for free in the previous places I've used it for | free, as far as I can tell. | | Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid | offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it | than self-host it. | | The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license | like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source | only works if everyone is a good actor, which was never a | realistic assumption, but it took a while for that naivety to | cost so much, I guess. | __blockcipher__ wrote: | > Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their | paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay | for it than self-host it. | | Key word here is would've. They were already Apache 2.0 | until 7.1.0 therefore this change will have absolutely no | effect on Amazon's business; all it will do is encourage | the develop of high-quality feature-rich Apache 2.0 forks | while hurting Elastic's brand image - rightly so - because | they're (a) no longer an open-source company [except for | beats/etc which only works in the context of the now- | proprietary elasticsearch/kibana], and (b) they outright | lied to the community when they claimed that future | versions of their open core would always remain Apache 2.0 | dragonwriter wrote: | > The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a | license like they're using now from day 1. | | Sure, if your whole business model is "sell a SaaS", then | making the whole offering an open source product that is | simple for other people to host and offer an equivalent | (or, if integrated with other offerings you don't have, | often _nore compelling_ ) service is a bad choice. | | But people choose open source licensing for a reason, and | against competing _software_ , a proprietary license can be | a negative feature which makes it harder to grow mindshare | and prove out utility. | marcinzm wrote: | Your right to do something does not remove my right to call you | a dick for doing it. There is a large difference between what | is legally allowed and what should be encouraged for the good | of society. | imgabe wrote: | Sure you can call someone a dick for abiding by the terms of | the agreement that you set out, but that doesn't mean you're | right. | | "Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without | paying me." | | "Ok, we'll use it and not pay you" | | "What, how dare you?! You dick!" | MrStonedOne wrote: | The trademark side absolutely kills any credibility or goodwill | they could hope to have. | paxys wrote: | The sad part is that while I really want to support Elasic here | we are likely going to have to move to Amazon's Apache-licensed | fork for our internal use because SSPL is incompatible with our | company's open source policy. | PaulWaldman wrote: | How much is the Elastic Search business worth to AWS? | | I'd image now AWS will have to put significant resources to | maintaining their fork and keeping it current. Couldn't that | money have been applied to a licensing deal with Elastic instead? | juanbyrge wrote: | The audacity of these AWS folks patronizing elastic about open | source despite AWS making millions of dollars off of their open | source project just reeks of entitlement. Glad I am never going | to use AWS. | blantonl wrote: | I can't tell if this is sarcasm or real. | | But one thing is for certain, AWS is using open source | software, for profit, under the Apache license, _exactly as the | license was intended_ | blibble wrote: | I suspect the era just before the cloud was the peak of open | source software | | these days you'd have to be a fool to start a company offering | an open source server based product under a liberal license | | Amazon is a parasite, plain and simple | driverdan wrote: | This is satire right? Do you say the same thing about Linux? | nginx? WordPress? | dtrailin wrote: | I would bet on AWS in this case as they will also likely have the | support of anyone who wants to make a hosted service of those | products. It will be interesting to see if eventually AWS starts | making new APIs that diverge from the Elastic or if they chose to | keep the product maintenance mode. | azurezyq wrote: | >>> "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be | open source software." | | So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid | OSS license? What a pirate logic here. | autarch wrote: | The SSPL is not an open source license. This is quite clear. | The Open Source Initiative, stewards of the term "open source", | have said so at https://opensource.org/node/1099. | | While AWS may be disingenuous, the statement you quoted is 100% | correct. | Chyzwar wrote: | They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop | pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs | of total 41000 in elastic repo. | | They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine | but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data | pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with | elastic will be challenging to say at least. | alpb wrote: | From my personal experience arguing with people on Twitter on | various contributions to the Kubernetes ecosystem, I have | frequently seen that some AWS employees (and sometimes the | companies they partner with) want to make it seem like AWS is | _really_ doing open source with real contributions. Every time | I pointed my finger and asked, I got a response from such | people "you should know not all contributions to the open | source are code". | | I understand that angle. You can fund development of OSS, you | can provide Project Manager support, you can publicize the tech | (for the sake of the tech; not sales). I am yet to see AWS | making OSS better for the sake of OSS, however. | | It seems that their contribution to 3rd party OSS projects | stops right at "it works fine on AWS". (I'm obviously excluding | AWS-originated projects like Firecracker VMM.) They even have a | VP-level article on "Setting the record straight" | (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/setting-the- | record-s...). | | As a person maintaining a decent number of popular open source | projects (disclaimer: Googler), I kind of am used to the meme | that AWS often tends to exaggerate their OSS contributions | (which is understandable, given they need to "neuter" that | threat if it comes as a sales question), and the community has | grown to get used to it (or AWS heroes tends to drink the kool- | aid, as expected). | merb wrote: | what aws does is more oss than that what elastic does. elastic | also did it because of $$. so neither of them wins. | Chyzwar wrote: | Elastic is at least open about reasons. AWS pretend to be an | OSS champion. Compared to other players Google, MS they do | the least amount of OSS work. Hypocrisy is really worse than | selfishness. It definitely shifted my neutral view of AWS. | | I can still spin ElasticSearch cluster for my backend and I | have somehow open license. Where is open source version of | Aurora, Dynamo, DocumentDB, Neptune or Redshift? Where is | anything OSS from AWS that is useful outside interfacing with | AWS services? | therealmarv wrote: | AWS has a point there (although I personally don't like their | wording, open source is only a side effect here, it's more about | how Amazon can charge for it also in future). | | It only makes me sad that AWS makes a lot of $$$ with their | elastic SaaS because of their size and for that reason can | monetize it better than the original authors. Feels very Amazon | like for me. | | At end I have the feeling it could be all avoided if Amazon paid | a little bit royalty to Elastic and both sides would have talked | more and better together. | izolate wrote: | We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully | smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but | par for the course for Bezos's company. | geofft wrote: | The fundamental "open source sustainability" problem is | capitalism, or at least our incarnation of it, and everyone | dances around it. You can't license your way out of this | problem. You can't services-company your way out of this | problem. The fundamental issue is that it is _good for the | world_ for skilled developers to spend all day writing software | and giving it away, but they can make much more money writing | software and not giving it away. | | And I'm not even necessarily advocating we change our system of | governance - we can do it fine with our current one. Even the | culture of academia would be fine here. There certainly are | skilled scientists who find it more profitable to do secret | work in for-profit labs, but far less so than in software. (In | large part, that system works because of government-funded | universities and government-funded research grants.) | parasubvert wrote: | If you think capitalism causes problems with people getting | paid for good work, I think you might be glossing over the | historical failures of the alternatives. | | Even in a socialist system, how does it solve the problem of | competition, free ridership, and economically non-rival/non- | excludable goods like software source code? You still need to | collect money but no one has to pay it unless you erect laws | that restrict freedom. | dang wrote: | The major threads on this so far: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25794987 | CapriciousCptl wrote: | Steve Jobs said something like Dropbox was a feature, not a | product. I think Bezos feels the same about _literally | everything._ AFAIK Azure /Google have actual partnerships with | the Elastic stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides | and have staying power. | | Part of me wonders if AWS always had planned to do this, and they | were just waiting until it made business sense to fork (ie they | had features and a new direction in mind but neglected to | implement them because Elasticsearch was good enough as is). The | alternative part is just 2 big corporations not finding a way to | get along. Which means without clear direction and careful | stewardship I'd expect the forks to just be cleanroom | reimplementations or something like that. | mcintyre1994 wrote: | > AFAIK Azure/Google have actual partnerships with the Elastic | stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides and have | staying power. | | Can you elaborate a bit here? We deploy from elastic.co into | AWS and it seems to be fully supported. I'm not sure what | they'd be doing with Google Cloud/Azure that they're not doing | with AWS. Their homepage seems to still equate them all "Run | where and how you want. Deploy on Google Cloud, Microsoft | Azure, and Amazon Web Services with Elastic Cloud." | soheil wrote: | To Elastic: if you're a $15B [0] company you don't get to be a | victim by appealing to your customer base to whine about how your | competitor is profiting "unjustly" from a decision _you_ made | that led to your growth in the first place. Choosing Apache2 | license ensures your OSS gets traction, but then you 'll have to | live with its consequences when Amazon comes knocking on the | door. | | [0] https://google.com/search?q=estc | brasetvik wrote: | While it's great that AWS has indeed contributed fixes to | upstream Elasticsearch, they link to 9 PRs that are generally on | the trivial end of the scale. (Though I don't doubt the PR that | adds a missing synchronized keyword might have been gnarly and | time consuming to debug, and that diff size does not necessarily | correlate to importance) | | For a project AWS was making hundreds of millions in revenue on | four years ago (as per an ex AWS employee), patting your own | shoulder for such a trivial amount of contributions is a bit | disingenuous. They might have contributed more, but if there was | something significant, they probably would have mentioned. | | Notable new features like "ultrawarm" they did not attempt to | contribute upstream, nor open source at all: | https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/aws-annou... | philip1209 wrote: | Elastic reaped a lot of benefits from open-source software. It's | unfortunate that this is happening, but their decision was self- | serving for much of the company's life. | motiejus wrote: | I don't trust aws will do a good job with the fork. Can anyone | tell me a FOSS project led by amazon that's not for accessing | their services (boto)? | | Now that elastic.co is going sideways, sphinxsearch (best search | server experience I've had) non-foss since circa 2017, what are | the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo | search? | | Edit/disclaimer: former aws employee | Thaxll wrote: | 9 commits in almost 3 years, what a joke... | RocketSyntax wrote: | This feels like a spin? Isn't AWS biting hand that feeds them? | They need a win-win strategy for open source devs. It's hard | enough to compete with their version of your service (spark, | kafka) without them forking your project. what's next, are they | going to fork spark and kafka? | caymanjim wrote: | AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off | the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they | became a market leader in this product space. It's how open | source works. The people who contributed to the product did so | with no expectation of reward _except_ that their efforts would | remain open source. | | Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the | rewards and make money off the product. They're free to do that, | and create restricted-license or closed-source versions for | future enhancements. But the community doesn't have to buy into | that and continue to contribute to what is no longer truly an | open source product. AWS is forking it and continuing with the | original, truly open source license. | | This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we | have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product. | | AWS does plenty of things worth criticizing, and one can even | criticize them in this particular instance for not working with | Elastic to provide more support to whatever it was they were | asking for. And Elastic may very well have a legitimate gripe | about trademarks. But yanking the Apache license out and moving | to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is | not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed | up for. | | You can't create an open source project, wait for it to gain | market dominance, decide to be less open source, and expect the | community to continue contributing. | | Elastic shot themselves in the foot and now they can either | revert their decision or get left behind as the community moves | on to what will ultimately end up being the better product. | Roybot wrote: | Contributor efforts are remaining open source. The change in | license goes into effect in the 7.11 release. Code contributed | under Apache stays that way. | | Typically open source projects have only a handful of core | developers - with a large majority being pass-by contributors | interested in fixing their problems/use case. Characterizing it | to sound like all these developers are being slighted is | strange. | | Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open | source. I don't doubt we are seeing less great software being | shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful | software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon | problem doesn't help. I'm with Elastic. | riku_iki wrote: | > This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now | we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source | product. | | This is controversial example, in my understanding MySql | creator requested to agree with his terms for all OSS commits, | which gave him copyright rights on codebase, then sold his | rights to Sun, and only then created MariaDb - OSS fork. | paxys wrote: | It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight. They are | both multi-billion dollar corporations looking out for their | shareholders' interests. "Open source" is being thrown around | by both sides as a marketing/goodwill tool, nothing more. | asim wrote: | Amazon are the masters of theivery. The hypocrisy is not going | unnoticed. Amazon contributed nothing of value to open source, | then they basically stole the hard work of others and again | contributed nothing back and now they're going so far as to | preach about open source. Please. The sad part is, users won't | care and customers won't care because at the end of the day ease | of use wins. Elastic are taking drastic measures which will in | the short term impact then but hopefully in the long term | everyone will give more thought to what licenses they choose. | Open source is no longer just about the freedom of choice but now | a marketing and commercial strategy for big tech. Just keep that | in mind if you ever want to build something of value in the open. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-21 23:00 UTC)