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