[HN Gopher] Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Ela...
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       Elasticsearch is dead, long live Open Distro for Elasticsearch
        
       Author : nathaliaariza
       Score  : 85 points
       Date   : 2021-01-15 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.logicalclocks.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.logicalclocks.com)
        
       | mrkurt wrote:
       | Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch,
       | limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license
       | change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead!
       | 
       | This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS
       | ecosystem.
        
         | jchw wrote:
         | My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because
         | it's good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their
         | business model so they moved to something much closer to shared
         | source.
         | 
         | Personally, I don't think there's anything immoral or shameful
         | about selling proprietary software or shared source or
         | whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open
         | source licenses. They're more restrictive than AGPL. They are
         | designed to protect a business model, not your rights as an end
         | user.
         | 
         | So it irks me that the only perspective I see reliably is that
         | Amazon is screwing everyone and not how startups are willing to
         | take advantage of the good will and marketing bonus and then
         | switch it up when they realize it can't be reconciled with
         | their business model. Continuing to call it "open source" is
         | just insult to injury, imo.
        
           | mrkurt wrote:
           | "Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous
           | power. It wasn't just a series of bad choices by the startups
           | that got them here, it was concentration of an emerging
           | market over 10-15 years.
           | 
           | Amazon dominates conversations because they extract the most
           | value from open source projects. They make more money selling
           | PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than
           | the creators of those projects. It's not the only
           | perspective, but it dominates for a reason.
           | 
           | Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users and
           | figure out what to build. Amazon has the benefit of watching
           | which projects become most viable (frequently because the
           | startup threatens their revenue somehow) and packaging them
           | up as their own services.
           | 
           | I want to live in a world where smaller startups _can_ OSS
           | their work and also monetize it. And I'd like them to be able
           | to do it without raising $100mm in VC.
        
             | ignoramous wrote:
             | > _Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users
             | and figure out what to build._
             | 
             | Therein lies the problem: Startups esp the ones that need
             | to grow _really_ fast and at _all_ costs choose to
             | permissively give away their proprietary advantage but
             | still want to  "capture _most_ value " from the market they
             | help create are making it unnecessarily hard for themselves
             | by going down the F/OSS route just to "get users and figure
             | out what to build". It is a losing strategy (you'd agree?)
             | because... if the startup's F/OSS product is any popular
             | and lots of users do use it, it is only inviting the likes
             | of Amazon (and anyone with the chops to build a cloud
             | offering, really) to package it as SaaS / PaaS around it.
             | 
             | I'd like to see startups experiment SSPL / CCPL / Commons
             | Clause licensing from day zero (like materialize.io) to see
             | if they can still attract users or build mind share. I'd
             | hate for them to instead release it under F/OSS licenses
             | (and CLA all contributions) to only conveniently turn
             | hostile with super-strong copylefts like SSPL or non-Libre
             | licenses like Commons Clause and BSL.
        
             | bryanrasmussen wrote:
             | >"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has
             | tremendous power
             | 
             | this goes to the question of history, are things
             | structurally so determined that if you remove someone or
             | something from history another would rise to take their
             | place. If Amazon had not existed to take advantage of open
             | source like this would someone arise to do it? I have to
             | think yes, it would be bound to happen eventually, it's a
             | weakness in the model and would be exploited by someone,
             | and when it was exploited people would respond by doing
             | sort of like what is happening now.
             | 
             | If Amazon was not here, someone would be making the history
             | of open source exploitation rhyme.
        
             | 015a wrote:
             | > They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL,
             | Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of
             | those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it
             | dominates for a reason.
             | 
             | They make more money selling EC2, with this software
             | installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their
             | customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there.
             | 
             | Which of these realities would you prefer:
             | 
             | 1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on
             | metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and
             | performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers
             | pay more for a worse product.
             | 
             | 2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it",
             | so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins,
             | Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've
             | now loaded and decides to point it at them)
             | 
             | 3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok,
             | all the negatives of closed source with few of the
             | positives of open source. No one wants the source code so
             | they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a
             | signal for their ability to move hosting providers should
             | they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts
             | longer than the people who wrote it.
             | 
             | 4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream
             | isn't aligned with customer success, because you're
             | financially incentivized to build a product which needs
             | support. Nope.
             | 
             | 5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG,
             | etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just
             | re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can
             | survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES
             | and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same
             | amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the
             | expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not
             | Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud
             | platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for
             | a worse product.
             | 
             | People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for
             | no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly
             | and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger.
             | Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS
             | is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of
             | story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product
             | Development and their Customers concerning whether they
             | _should_ build an open source ES. There 's just "Jeeze,
             | Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there
             | anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the
             | way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow,
             | thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away."
             | 
             | The real thing that's killing these database companies is
             | that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares
             | which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do
             | you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and
             | the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making
             | room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes
             | what the database can do. The discussions surround "where
             | are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh
             | that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc.
             | HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no
             | transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up
             | once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in
             | some very specific industries or use-cases it matters).
             | Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a
             | fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing
             | back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992,
             | update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the
             | success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar
             | businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how
             | boring the software actually is.
        
               | Pet_Ant wrote:
               | I feel like [3] is the heart of the matter. The value is
               | open-source to companies is that it commodifies support.
               | Also software at an enterprise scale costs money. Not
               | being held hostage allows you to switch support providers
               | or go internal or fly blind.
               | 
               | What these new quasi-open source (ie source available)
               | companies want to do leverage their authorship of the
               | software to be sole support service provider (of
               | meaningful size)... which is exactly the sole value the
               | enterprises extract from opensource: the lack of vendor
               | leverage!
               | 
               | The market does not tolerate a contradiction.
        
               | 015a wrote:
               | Exactly. Companies like Mongo, ES, etc leveraged open
               | source and venture capital to get where they are today,
               | and now they're finding that open source isn't the
               | business that venture capital wants it to be.
               | 
               | I really don't know why they get so much defense in the
               | community; I view their actions as a straight betrayal.
               | The one thing you can say about AWS is, they're the enemy
               | you know. They don't have a history of turning their back
               | on OSS, but they also don't have a history of abusing OSS
               | to gain traction for their product (though, the
               | MySQL/Aurora relationship could reasonably fall under
               | this. I think its different; not a betrayal because they
               | haven't turned their backs on MySQL, but are just trying
               | to make it better for their customers in ways MySQL alone
               | can't do). With AWS, you know what you get; they care
               | about the tech and the money; no politics (well, almost),
               | no weird philosophies guiding decision making, just
               | solving problems and getting paid to solve those
               | problems. That's infrastructure, baby.
               | 
               | Its a lot hazier with, say, MongoDB. You wouldn't believe
               | the pressure they've put on customers on 3.6; we're
               | talking weekly emails, even a few cold calls, from sales
               | reps. "Hey, I know its the holidays, but have you taken a
               | look at 4.0 yet? Let me send you a link to check it out,
               | lots of cool stuff." Yeah; the real reason they want you
               | to upgrade is because 4.0 has a bunch of new features
               | that competitors like AWS can't replicate due to its new
               | licensing. I'd love to hear from someone running MySQL on
               | RDS, and if they've had a similar experience with AWS
               | sales concerning Aurora; I suspect they haven't. Frankly,
               | AWS never talks to us and we never talk to them, unless
               | there's a problem or we want a discount, and they're
               | always accommodating for both. The perfect relationship.
        
             | glogla wrote:
             | This is exactly why I convinced my company to buy Airflow
             | from Astronomer and Presto from Starburst and Spark from
             | Databricks instead of getting all that from AWS.
             | 
             | I would rather give the money to the people who make the
             | stuff than to people who (all but) steal the stuff and sell
             | it to others.
             | 
             | And it usually comes out cheaper, too!
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | Basically shareware is back, they just keep calling FOSS.
        
           | api wrote:
           | > not your rights as an end user.
           | 
           | I'd love to have a license that grants FOSS rights to people
           | but not to corporations. There are end users and then there
           | are corporations monetizing FOSS and giving nothing back. On
           | top of that the monetization is via SaaS which is a more
           | closed computing model than commercial software. With SaaS
           | you don't even have the data and everything you do is subject
           | to total surveillance.
        
             | motives wrote:
             | The point about not giving back is not valid in the case of
             | AWS which has upstreamed many of its changes to
             | elasticsearch owned repos under the onerous elasticsearch
             | CLA. This is also true of many FOSS projects which AWS,
             | Microsoft, Google et al contribute to under the most
             | liberal license conditions(such as MIT licensing which
             | you'll find in 95% of Microsofts contributions for
             | example). Furthermore, I do not believe FOSS should concern
             | itself with who is using the codebase, as fully open source
             | software is about opening the code indiscriminately,
             | whether individual dev or large corporation. As soon as you
             | begin to discriminate between small and large corporation
             | you are no longer truly free (and fwiw elasticsearch itself
             | is a large corporation that has arguably exploited the good
             | will of individual dev PRs with relicensing under a non-
             | FOSS license).
        
             | liveoneggs wrote:
             | creative commons has many such licenses but then it's not
             | Open Source
        
           | judge2020 wrote:
           | Shouting 'FOSS' is also a great way to acquire talent.
        
           | majormajor wrote:
           | I think you're painting it as more cynical and malicious than
           | it was. There was probably too much naivety, but "open source
           | your software and charge for support and operations" was
           | promoted pretty heavily for a while _not just by these
           | companies, but by people who wanted to enjoy those projects
           | being open source_.
           | 
           | And then it got torpedoed...
        
         | hodgesrm wrote:
         | Maybe somebody who knows the history can answer this question:
         | how was it that Elastic didn't just own the cloud service
         | market before the AWS service showed up? They started in 2015
         | it appears. That should have been a good lead. [1]
         | 
         | [1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/announcing-support-for-
         | elastic-c...
         | 
         | Edit: added source
        
         | jillesvangurp wrote:
         | By fork they mean: a binary build straight from the unmodified
         | elastic source code using the elastic build file that creates
         | the OSS build bundled with a handful of plugins and components
         | to add alternatives some of the things elastic bundles. They
         | don't even build it themselves and it gets downloaded in binary
         | form straight from Elastic's servers.
         | 
         | If you don't believe me, this is the line in the code where
         | they 'fork' in their build script:
         | https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b...
         | 
         | It will be interesting to see if opendistro actually starts
         | contributing to Lucene or adding value to the elastic code base
         | or whether this 'fork' is effectively frozen in time and doomed
         | to go nowhere due to a lack of actual development on the core
         | product.
         | 
         | I seriously doubt that they are going to put any effort
         | whatsoever in that. Because in two years of pretending they
         | have a fork, there has been no serious code contributions from
         | their side at all that I'm aware off. Correct me if I'm wrong.
         | 
         | If you want to back an OSS version of related technology, maybe
         | use something like Apache Solr, which continues to provide many
         | of the same features and is part of the same ecosystem of users
         | and developers that work on Lucene, which also powers
         | Elasticsearch and which of course continues to contribute a lot
         | to Lucene; unlike Amazon.
        
         | 015a wrote:
         | I tend to think that it, more or less, is. Elasticsearch (as an
         | open source product) is not independent. Its reliant on Elastic
         | co, who have a demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance
         | in favor of making more money. Of course, they had to do this;
         | Amazon forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB. But the
         | fact that there _is_ a critical company behind these two
         | databases, who _can_ be strong-armed, is a threat to the
         | ecosystem these two databases have developed.
         | 
         | Compare to Postgres. Postgres will never die. Aurora is gaining
         | serious traction; do you think the Postgres developers are
         | concerned? Why would they be? Their livelihood, and their
         | ability to develop Postgres, does not depend on it being the #1
         | database in the world.
         | 
         | Naturally, ODfES has a tether to Amazon. Amazon could decide to
         | lock more features behind AWS ESS. Its not a perfect situation,
         | but it is better than the one ES has been in for the past few
         | years.
        
           | ayewo wrote:
           | You say that: "Elasticsearch (as an open source product) is
           | not independent. Its reliant on Elastic co, who have a
           | demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance in favor of
           | making more money. Of course, they had to do this; Amazon
           | forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB."
           | 
           | But there is one more factor you failed to acknowledge that
           | is driving them to make more money: Elastic.co took VC
           | funding.
           | 
           | Once you accept VC funding, it narrows the definition of
           | success down to what your investors think success should
           | look, like rather than what the founders desire.
        
           | majormajor wrote:
           | I think having a company behind it would generally be a
           | positive. People are paying for this product to continue,
           | versus something with just a couple devs doing it as a hobby.
           | 
           | Postgres had a huge head start here, and was built in a
           | different world WITHOUT an Amazon equivalent.
           | 
           | Are there a lot of major contributions to (not just on top
           | of) ODfES outside of Amazon? If not, I'd be fairly worried
           | about using it in a non-AWS-provided way in the long term,
           | now.
        
         | api wrote:
         | This is why lots of more serious projects have been going to
         | semi-OSS "source available" licenses like the BSL or more
         | restrictive licenses like the AGPL. If you're a company doing
         | open source or a serious project and use a liberal license,
         | your work will get co-opted and monetized by cloud vendors and
         | they will give you nothing. In some cases they won't even give
         | you credit.
        
         | mywittyname wrote:
         | > This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent
         | OSS ecosystem.
         | 
         | I used to manage a licensed ELK cluster. The licensing was
         | expensive (order of six figures) and was really only necessary
         | for LDAP integration. Features like timelion were cool, but
         | definitely not worth the price tag.
         | 
         | I migrated to an AWS-managed solution to for two reasons: 1) to
         | alleviate the burden of managing a cluster, 2) get away from
         | the onerous costs associated with licensing. Even thought it
         | was more expensive to run a managed cluster, since, at the
         | time, AWS limited the disk space per node. The cost savings was
         | significant enough to warrant migration.
         | 
         | I realize that Elastic.co offers their own managed solution.
         | But the version on AWS was an easier sell to management due to
         | known costs and not having to deal with sales people.
         | 
         | I think a lot of OSS is having difficulty transitioning to a
         | cloud-first model. The people making choices on tech stacks
         | want to spend less time dealing with infrastructure and more
         | time developing stuff. And this model of charging high
         | licensing fees for "enterprise" features feels antiquated, and
         | provides a large attack service for companies like AWS. What
         | enterprise engineers really want are AMIs, or better yet, fully
         | managed cloud interfaces, to bring up and manage OSS
         | deployments. Something that lets us focus on the products we
         | sell; not the ones we buy.
         | 
         | I believe that we need to rethink how OSS is delivered and how
         | to make money from it. "Enterprise" support looks a lot
         | different not than it did when Redhat was founded, yet the OSS
         | business model remains eerily similar.
        
           | mrkurt wrote:
           | It makes _total_ sense to migrate to AWS's Elasticsearch
           | product. This is, I think, the problem with incredibly
           | powerful companies. Acting rationally as consumers makes them
           | more powerful.
           | 
           | I mean, I still buy stuff from Amazon, use Gmail, etc.
           | 
           | We definitely need to rethink how OSS is delivered, but part
           | of rethinking that is understanding how dominant AWS over OSS
           | revenue.
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | > _This is not a good outcome for people who want an
         | independent OSS ecosystem._
         | 
         | I understand why this is not ideal for Elastic-the-company, but
         | _is_ it a bad outcome in the longer term?
         | 
         | As someone who is happy open source exists but uses mostly
         | proprietary software, this seems like a natural and expected
         | response to an open source project adopting a more restrictive
         | license.
        
           | mrkurt wrote:
           | I think we're all better off if small and midsized OSS
           | companies thrive. Amazon is not inventing and open sourcing
           | DBs. For the last 15 years, we've relied on independent
           | companies to advance the state of the art for _all of us_.
           | Amazon has no reason to build a compelling database and
           | release it to the community. When the giant tech companies do
           | open source they're work, it's usually an attempt to improve
           | their existing market at the expensive of another company:
           | Kubernetes, OpenDistro, Firecracker, and most of the CNCF
           | projects follow this pattern.
           | 
           | A fork is a natural response to an OSS project license
           | change. But when the company that _forces_ the license change
           | also creates the fork, it's gross.
        
             | CharlesW wrote:
             | Great points and a helpful perspective, thank you.
        
       | latchkey wrote:
       | Not too long ago, I tried to install the ELK stack to enable me
       | to ingest some log files and easily view them on a web page.
       | After many hours of digging through documentation, I gave up. The
       | process was a train wreck of obscurity, complexity and heavy
       | weight processes, just to do a relatively simple task.
       | 
       | I've been doing open source for 20+ years now and one thing that
       | we still haven't seemed to get right is: a simple install process
       | and good documentation.
       | 
       | ELK is dead to me, but not because of a license.
        
       | based2 wrote:
       | https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
        
         | tstrimple wrote:
         | Last time I was exploring this space, ElasticSearch was hands
         | down better than solr from a "speed to market" and "developer
         | experience" standpoint. Those things really matter. It's one of
         | the reasons MongoDB got way more popular than it should have
         | based on all the compromised built into the platform by
         | default.
        
           | mrkurt wrote:
           | It's still 100x easier to setup a relocated MongoDB cluster
           | with auto failover than it is with Postgres or MySQL. It's an
           | underrated power.
        
         | tootie wrote:
         | I'm also a fan of projects like fuse.js which are pretty
         | capable little search engines. It's nowhere the scalability of
         | elastic, but if you have even a few thousand documents, you can
         | jam them into an index the size of a big jpeg and have pretty
         | capable search with no infrastructure.
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | The bad news is that anyone who has hitched their wagon to ES
         | almost certainly has a bazillion lines of JSON query language
         | for interacting with the thing (unless they stick strictly to
         | the [query_string](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearc
         | h/reference/7.7/...) search language, which I believe is
         | lucene-compatible
         | 
         | That's not even including the meta APIs like /_cat/indices and
         | /_mappings et al that further lock one into ES-isms
        
       | shawnz wrote:
       | Open Distro is not a fork (not yet at least) but simply a
       | repackaging of ES plus some new plugins.
       | 
       | Open Distro will likely not continue to exist after this license
       | change unless Amazon commits to turning it into a complete fork
       | starting from the 7.10 version of ES.
        
       | throwarayes wrote:
       | This is why the Apache Software Foundation exists. The threat IMO
       | isn't SSPL but what happens the next license change. There's
       | nothing stopping future changes to make Elasticsearch
       | proprietary. It's not out of the question that Elastic could be
       | acquired by, say, an Oracle. Or there could be new management.
       | Suddenly they change licenses of take a ridiculously maximal view
       | of SSPL or Elastic license and sue everyone.
       | 
       | With ASF, at least the trademark stays with the Foundation. Along
       | with an effort to build a health community spanning more than one
       | company.
       | 
       | Elasticsearch has many benefits. But you have to take this risk
       | into account if you go down the Elastic path now. I wonder if
       | open distro though could become an ASF project, alleviating fears
       | of license change...
        
       | konart wrote:
       | >Elasticsearch is dead
       | 
       | No, it is not.
        
       | fefe23 wrote:
       | PSA: This site is basically an ad. And not one about
       | Elasticsearch at that.
       | 
       | I don't understand what all the noise is about. The new license
       | does not make ES closed source, as far as I can tell. They re-
       | license under the MongoDB server side license, which reads a lot
       | like a rephrased AGPL to me.
       | 
       | None of you had any reasonable expectation of getting a free
       | Elasticsearch to begin with, and decades worth of free
       | maintenance, optimization and expansion.
       | 
       | If their product is this integral to your business, then may I
       | suggest going ahead and buying a license for it?
        
         | shawnz wrote:
         | > None of you had any reasonable expectation of getting a free
         | Elasticsearch to begin with
         | 
         | That is sure what "Apache 2.0: now and forever", as they
         | previously promised, means to me.
        
         | jchw wrote:
         | For what it's worth, SSPL is NOT like AGPL. IANAL but...
         | 
         | AGPL is community oriented. With AGPL you have to contribute
         | your modifications back even if you are only offering the
         | application over the network and not in binary form. It extends
         | the copyleft principle. It is still debated whether it even
         | counts as open source.
         | 
         | SSPL is fascinating. Let me quote Section 13:
         | 
         | > If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified
         | version available to third parties as a service, you must make
         | the Service Source Code available via network download to
         | everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. Making
         | the functionality of the Program or modified version available
         | to third parties as a service includes, without limitation,
         | enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of
         | the Program or modified version remotely through a computer
         | network, offering a service the value of which entirely or
         | primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified
         | version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the
         | primary purpose of the Program or modified version.
         | 
         | > "Service Source Code" means the Corresponding Source for the
         | Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source
         | for _all programs that you use to make the Program or modified
         | version available as a service, including, without limitation,
         | management software, user interfaces, application program
         | interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup
         | software, storage software and hosting software_ , all such
         | that a user could run an instance of the service using the
         | Service Source Code you make available.
         | 
         | Emphasis mine. Basically "release the source for your entire
         | stack." That's not the same thing as AGPL. Copyleft is
         | concerned with linkage. This license seems to impose terms on
         | entirely unrelated pieces of software. IANAL but I don't even
         | think this has been tested in court before.
        
           | softwaredoug wrote:
           | "release the source code for your entire stack".
           | 
           | It's not "your entire stack" but rather your entire stack:
           | 
           | > If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified
           | version available to third parties as a service
           | 
           | ...
           | 
           | > Making the functionality of the Program or modified version
           | available to third parties as a service includes, without
           | limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the
           | functionality of the Program or modified version remotely
           | through a computer network, offering a service the value of
           | which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the
           | Program or modified version, or offering a service that
           | accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or
           | modified version.
           | 
           | Where:
           | 
           | > "The Program" refers to any copyrightable work licensed
           | under this License.
        
       | binarymax wrote:
       | Reports of Elasticsearch's death have been greatly exaggerated.
        
       | lastofthemojito wrote:
       | After bending the knee at the altar of Open-Source, the blog post
       | recommends Open Distro for Elasticsearch's Security plugin.
       | 
       | ODfE's Security plugin is a fork of floragunn GmbH's mixed-
       | license Search Guard product, including the bits that floragunn
       | charges for. This seems to have been done with floragunn's
       | blessing - presumably Amazon paid floragunn for this.
       | 
       | But Elasticsearch B.V (the company) accuses floragunn of stealing
       | Elastic's non-free X-Pack security software to create Search
       | Guard, putting both Search Guard and ODfE's Security plugin on
       | shaky legal ground.
       | 
       | I remember reading about this lawsuit on Elasticsearch's
       | (admittedly slanted) blog, not sure how far the lawsuit has gone
       | from there: https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-
       | includin...
       | 
       | Amazon of course says that Elasticsearch's claims are baseless:
       | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/launching-open-distr...
       | 
       | In either case, I'm not sure that ODfE will be trouble-free in
       | terms of licensing issues, depending on how these lawsuits go.
        
       | hansdieter1337 wrote:
       | Is anyone aware of an open source alternative for Kibana and
       | Logstash (based on lucene)?
        
         | e12e wrote:
         | Loki and grafana? (not really an alternative in the sense of
         | "full text search" over logs, but an alternative in the sense
         | "an interface for aggregate search over logs").
        
           | hodgesrm wrote:
           | There's also Cloki, which offers the same Loki APIs but
           | stores data in ClickHouse. It looks interesting.
           | 
           | https://github.com/qxip/cloki-go
           | 
           | Disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse at Altinity.
        
             | e12e wrote:
             | It does look interesting, but maybe a little too exciting:
             | "Super experimental". One advantage of loki, is that it is
             | part of hosted grafana, so there's some commitment to it as
             | a product.
        
           | jillesvangurp wrote:
           | Grafana started out as a fork of Kibana 3 if I remember
           | correctly, which was around the time Elastic acquired Kibana.
           | Since then, it has become a nice product in its own right.
           | But the shared history is interesting.
           | 
           | https://grafana.com/blog/2019/09/03/the-mostly-complete-
           | hist...
        
         | IggleSniggle wrote:
         | Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash all have OSS distributions,
         | and are included as part of Open Distro.
        
         | thruhiker wrote:
         | Fluentd (https://www.fluentd.org) is a great alternative to
         | Logstash that I've had a lot of success with. It is easy to
         | pair with Elasticsearch and Kibana and myriad other inputs and
         | outputs.
        
           | DominoTree wrote:
           | I've personally found Fluentd to be flaky at scale or under
           | heavy load, but it does talk to damn near everything and is
           | pretty simple to stand up
        
             | zinclozenge wrote:
             | If performance is an issue, try https://vector.dev/
        
         | __jf__ wrote:
         | Rsyslog could a Logstash replacement if you squint your eyes.
        
         | caniszczyk wrote:
         | for a logstash alternative, check out https://www.tremor.rs/
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-15 23:02 UTC)