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