[HN Gopher] Elasticsearch is open source, again
___________________________________________________________________
Elasticsearch is open source, again
Author : dakrone
Score : 213 points
Date : 2024-08-29 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.elastic.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.elastic.co)
| simonw wrote:
| > The good news is that while it was painful, it worked. 3 years
| later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market
| confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with
| AWS is stronger than ever. We were even named AWS partner of the
| year.
|
| I don't entirely understand this bit.
| encoderer wrote:
| I think they are saying when somebody looks to buy elastic
| search on AWS they find the Elastic offering on the market
| place and are not confused by the AWS offering that's now
| called open search.
| foxyv wrote:
| It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork:
|
| > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of
| Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory.
| It's a long story.
|
| I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.
| Raed667 wrote:
| what is preventing AWS from dropping OpenSearch and going
| back to just selling Elastic ?
| antimemetics wrote:
| sunk cost. at least that's what elastic seems to be betting
| on.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Perhaps the fact that AWS has got years of time investment
| already made into OpenSearch and staying with their own
| version allows them to reduce risks should Elastic attempt
| to change ElasticSearch's license again.
| foxyv wrote:
| To be honest, the OpenSearch brand has more value now than
| Elastic.
| jdboyd wrote:
| Please explain. This isn't obvious to me.
| lolinder wrote:
| I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data
| to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide
| margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars,
| gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of
| pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged,
| number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a
| single one shows OpenSearch ahead.
|
| What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that
| OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?
| jdc0589 wrote:
| thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell
| us anything about how many people are actually using one,
| just how much visible dev activity they have.
|
| I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying
| that value is based on utilization by a product's target
| users, not support activities.
| lolinder wrote:
| > it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are
| actually using one, just how much visible dev activity
| they have
|
| Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity
| are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open
| to better metrics, but they're what I can find.
|
| Truly, if anyone can give me _any_ metric that shows
| OpenSearch ahead I 'll shut up. I can't find one, and
| I've looked.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| As a related proxy for market awareness, DB-Engines.com's
| ranking is a composite index of a number of factors:
|
| * Google search volume and quantity of search result
| pages (blogs, recipes, etc.)
|
| * Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill
|
| * Number of job post listings as a requisite skill
|
| * Social media mentions
|
| It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not
| one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under
| management, etc.).
|
| With that said, in the August 2024 listing:
|
| * Elasticsearch is ranked #8 (of 423 systems tracked),
| with an index score of 129.83
|
| * OpenSearch is ranked #35, with an index score of 16.47
|
| This would make OpenSearch about an eighth as prevalent.
| abraae wrote:
| Large tech companies care about their reputation. If they
| dropped their own fork and went back and started again from
| Elastic that would be admitting their own incompetence. So
| not happening.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I think the bigger risk to Amazon: what if Elastic wants
| to pull the rug out from under them once again? Why take
| that risk when Amazon is already stable? Given the
| duration since the fork, I suspect there are more than a
| couple of features differences between the products that
| would have to be smoothed over.
| LamaOfRuin wrote:
| It's a very different open source license than their
| previous one. AGPL vs Apache 2.0
| wmf wrote:
| If you try to sell AGPL software the owner will probably
| shake you down.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Examples?
| paulmd wrote:
| lowagie/itextpdf being an obvious/prominent one.
|
| it happens - why would you think commercial operators
| who've chosen a dual-license model wouldn't protect their
| IP? That's literally their breadwinner.
| anticorporate wrote:
| What could be learned from this example that might enable
| companies in the future to leverage trademark instead of a
| license change to accomplish the same thing? So much damage
| could have been avoided if this had been resolved differently
| to begin with.
| foxyv wrote:
| Change your name, not your license.
| flockonus wrote:
| I think they are saying: trademark your product name
| (open source in this case), make sure it's used only as
| approved.
|
| Altho i believe it does go back to the license attached
| to the product.
| orra wrote:
| I don't understand why they didn't treat Amazon's previous
| offering as a trademark infringement.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call
| it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which
| is the actual ES code base, what's the infringement?
| orra wrote:
| The service is more than the code base: it's who is
| offering it, who supports it.
|
| Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law
| works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then
| sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like
| the car. But wholesale is a completely different
| situation.
| dboreham wrote:
| It depends on the legal jurisdiction but in the US you're
| allowed to use a competitor's brand name/trademark
| specifically to inform your customers. E.g.
| "acetaminophen, the stuff that's in Tylenol". You can
| also use the competitor's brand colors.
| exe34 wrote:
| so if I create a website called other-Facebook.com that
| looks exactly like Facebook, I can even tell people I'm
| going to steal their time and information just like the
| real Facebook, and that's allowed?
| rescbr wrote:
| I think "foobar.com, a Facebook with blackjack and
| hookers" would be OK, while "other-facebook.com"
| wouldn't.
|
| I'd say one is marketing, the other is misrepresentation.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| > Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law
| works.
|
| There's not really much actual law at work here, it's all
| civil matters.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the
| actual ES code base, what's the infringement?
|
| A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into
| thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is
| being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This
| confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than
| copyrights are meant to prevent.
|
| The trademark law doctrine of nominative fair use allows
| you to describe your product as a hosted version of the
| ElasticSearch codebase, which provides the substance of
| the right you were describing, and it's also why you can
| describe the Toyota car you're selling as a Toyota, both
| without needing permission from a rights holder.
|
| In the car case, you can also reference the product by
| name as a Toyota product because it is the same product
| Toyota sold, just being resold by you. But in the hosted
| service case, you're not reselling the same service as
| Elastic does; you're offering your own independent
| version of the service, backed by their technology. To
| prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from
| any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer
| support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you
| call your service ElasticSearch Service without their
| permission.
|
| This works similarly for lots of software products and
| services, even other free and open source software
| projects. Debian has a trademark policy and exercises
| oversight of modified / derived / integrated versions
| shipped by the major public cloud providers to make sure
| that it's consistent enough with Debian's software
| freedom values, expected functionality, and quality
| standards to be called Debian, using trademark rights as
| the way they have that leverage.
|
| At the same time, the cloud providers do not need
| trademark permission from Debian to redistribute
| unmodified official Debian images under the name Debian,
| or to derive from them without using Debian in the
| product name. (As with the ElasticSearch example, they
| can still use the word Debian in a fair and accurate way
| when describing the nature of any derived product they
| make without trademark permission.)
| pjerem wrote:
| How is it different than the thousands companies selling
| you PostgreSQL or Redis services ?
| jeppester wrote:
| Development of postgres is funded by the companies using
| it, for instance Amazon.
|
| Elasticsearch and Redis are private companies that fund
| most of the development themselves.
|
| When Amazon sell Elasticsearch and Redis, they are in
| direct competition with its creators.
|
| Obviously such a situation isn't sustainable in the long
| run, and as such both Elasticsearch and Redis (and to my
| knowledge also mongodb) have changed their licenses to
| avoid that cloud providers sell their OSS product without
| paying a license or otherwise contributing back.
|
| In the case of Elasticsearch and Amazon, Amazon even used
| the Elasticsearch brand to sell their own version.
|
| As I see it it's a good thing that cloud providers are
| forced to take part in maintaining the OSS software
| (forked or not) that they are cashing in on.
| fmbb wrote:
| The problem in that case is that ElasticSearch named
| their company after their product that they published for
| everyone to use or sell.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused
| into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service
| is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch.
| This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than
| copyrights are meant to prevent.
|
| > you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does;
| you're offering your own independent version of the
| service, backed by their technology. To prevent
| unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any
| weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer
| support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you
| call your service ElasticSearch Service without their
| permission.
|
| I don't know. The _orginal_ AWS-hosted Elastic Search
| product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS.
| That's fundamentally the same thing. Maybe the exact
| wording matters and the service name was "AWS managed
| elastic search" or whatever. I'm sure the Amazon lawyers
| knew how to name it.
|
| This feels analogous to "Amazon Linux" where it's clearly
| Amazon's version of Linux (which is also a trademark). Or
| "hosted postgres" or "Postgres compatible RDS" or any
| number of other services based on OSS.
| rectang wrote:
| That's an excellent explanation of a situation with a lot
| of complexity. Well done!
|
| The confusion between ElasticSearch the software kit and
| ElasticSearch the hosted service illustrates some of the
| drawbacks of having the same name for your Open Source
| product and your business.
| zem wrote:
| but if you set up a showroom that only sells toyota cars,
| i'm fairly sure you can't call it a toyota dealership
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I don't know if that's true. I see tons of car repair
| services advertising "we repair $BRAND with original
| parts" and they're definitely not owned by $BRAND.
|
| Clearly not confused with the original brand, but also
| advertising a service built off that brand.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Right, but they aren't naming their business "Bob's
| $BRAND" which is kinda the point.
| voxic11 wrote:
| They did https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-and-amazon-
| reach-agreeme...
| xeraa wrote:
| We did: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-and-amazon-
| reach-agreeme...
|
| But it takes a long time. And it's very costly (especially
| against a much larger entity like Amazon). Legal battles
| alone will rarely save you (in time).
|
| [I work for Elastic]
| orra wrote:
| Thanks, I'd missed that. Anyway, congrats on doing open
| source again
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Also worth noting that AWS was already selling products
| using Elastic in the name before Elastic/Elasticsearch
| (2010)
|
| Eg AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (2006) AWS Elastic Block
| Storage (2008)
|
| I suspect if Elastic tried to take them to court they would
| have got the trademark thrown out.
| ezekg wrote:
| Am I the only one not buying this reasoning? Seems like
| there's more than is being said, otherwise they would have
| said this by now. I'd reckon that ELv2 had friction that
| couldn't be easily overcome without OSS or at the very least
| DOSP [0]. I personally experienced said friction with ELv2,
| so makes me curious.
|
| [0]: https://opensource.org/dosp
| exe34 wrote:
| we sunk our own boat, it forced them to get on rafts and
| leave, and now we're declaring our own boat sea-worthy
| again.
| ezekg wrote:
| So, yes, the ELv2 did introduce significant friction?
| outop wrote:
| Yes, except that since Amazon have infinite resources,
| the friction didn't stop them doing anything, and the
| fork was always going to be perfectly viable.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| You are not the only one, that's a ridiculous story.
| Salgat wrote:
| Sounds to me like they're trying to cover up a bad case of
| regret. At our company we've fully shifted to OpenSearch,
| so there's no going back to ElasticSearch even if we wanted
| (not that we would want to). Also there is a lot of
| engineering contribution from Amazon that's seemingly gone
| now from Elasticsearch, right?
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Sounds like you've fully shifted to exploiting (without
| contributing anything) to OpenSearch. I think Elastic
| will be just fine without your company or Amazon.
| master_crab wrote:
| They are paying Amazon for Opensearch resources. To
| Amazon, that's enough contribution to continue supporting
| the source code.
| Spivak wrote:
| How truly far we've fallen that people refer to _using_
| open source software-- literally software given away for
| other people to use, exploitation.
|
| Gonna go tell those freeloading kids who take my candy on
| Halloween that they're exploiting me unless they
| contribute to next year's candy bowl.
| subomi wrote:
| > I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so
| makes me curious.
|
| Can you share more? What friction did you experience with
| ELv2?
| thih9 wrote:
| Their post[1] from three years ago explains in more detail the
| reasons behind the license change and what they consider not ok
| behavior by AWS. The "it worked" likely means that they
| consider these problems resolved or otherwise no longer
| relevant.
|
| [1]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat.
|
| Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the
| fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences?
|
| I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having
| RBAC built into their Kibana portion.
| DominoTree wrote:
| I've found OpenSearch to be a bit flaky but I haven't worked
| with it very seriously compared to ElasticSearch
|
| (and before OpenSearch, the AWS-managed ElasticSearch
| _absolutely_ hurt the ElasticSearch brand because of all of the
| issues Amazon created - it couldn 't even rebalance shards, let
| alone add new nodes or switch to larger nodes without a blue-
| green deployment)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| OpenSearch has terrible docs.
| mentalgear wrote:
| That's so quintessential AWS :P. Even only for this Elastic
| should be compared to not waste 10s of hours on poorly
| written documentations.
| coding123 wrote:
| The spark components were rushed and the documentation is super
| crappy.
|
| Elasticsearch hands down for this area.
| beardface wrote:
| For most use-cases (indexing denormalised data as documents
| then running searches against them), there's little difference
| between the two. The mechanics of how the cluster operates are
| almost identical.
|
| There are some Elasticsearch features that were part of X-Pack
| (their commercial offering) so aren't included in the
| OpenSearch fork. Some of those features are really nice to have
| and make life much easier; the enrich ingest processor is
| something I really miss in OpenSearch.
|
| The biggest differences are in the tooling around
| Elasticsearch. All the observability stuff, the SIEM features,
| various integrations, and now the AI fluff. I've worked with
| clients in different sectors and - aside from the observability
| stuff (which is really nice) - none have had an appetite for
| any of that.
|
| The OpenSearch team is doing some really cool stuff and the
| project has come a long way. I'm sure it'll continue to
| improve. It has a very loyal customer base and even has its own
| annual event; OpenSearchCon 2024 is next month!
| richbell wrote:
| > [D.N.A.]
|
| > [LOVE.]
|
| I don't understand what these are supposed to mean. Is this a new
| writing style, song references, or just a quirk of the author?
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| Seems to be references to Kendrick Lamar songs... for some
| reason?
| samplenoise wrote:
| They are Kendrick Lamar song titles. Not clear to me why,
| though
| aabhay wrote:
| These are songs by Kendrick Lamar. I guess that these were used
| to try and add a youthful, lighthearted touch to the article?
| Didn't work on me though.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| [Count me out] No reason to use Elasticsearch in 2024.
| NewJazz wrote:
| I'm a fan of that album and I didn't even realize the
| reference. Is there any other point to it?
| flockonus wrote:
| Subliminally heart warming. Just look how the article ends:
|
| > Forever :elasticheart: Open Source
| linotype wrote:
| Their marketing department is run by children?
| 0x5FC3 wrote:
| All those are Kendrick Lamar tracks. Highly recommend if you're
| into hip hop.
| jcoc611 wrote:
| It kind of reads like it was LLM generated..."Write an
| announcement/apology about ElasticSearch finally being open
| source again (for now), where each paragraph starts with a
| relevant title from a Kendrick Lamar song"
| shiomiru wrote:
| To me, at first, it read as satire - but that doesn't make
| sense, coming from the official blog. Being LLM-generated is
| a plausible explanation - considering the circumstances,
| saying "open source is in our DNA" is right inside the
| uncanny valley.
| reflexe wrote:
| Not like us is pretty new (may 24), not sure any proper llm
| could have been trained on it. All big openai models know
| nothing about 2024.
| jcoc611 wrote:
| Nothing a simple "Browse the Web" plugin/tool before
| replying can't fix ;)
| reducesuffering wrote:
| If Amazon's OpenSearch plateaus, and everyone wants to host
| ElasticSearch, but on their existing AWS infra/sales business
| inertia, this issue will fundamentally reoccur. Nothing actually
| changed except Elastic thinks Amazon will commit to their own
| fork. If Amazon doesn't, we're back to square one: Amazon hosts
| open source ElasticSearch, Elastic changes their license, another
| fork.
|
| "Amazon is fully invested in their fork." Amazon is a cutthroat
| business that will change strategy if their _investment_ isn 't
| paying off.
|
| That this scenario isn't addressed at the very top of your
| "addressing the _trolls_ " doesn't bode well at all.
| JoshuaRogers wrote:
| I felt like that was implied by the usage of AGPL: if Amazon
| wanted to start using this and apply patches on top of it, the
| AGPL would require that they share those patches with their
| customers, which would allow Elastic to integrate them into
| main again.
| quyse wrote:
| I don't think that's their intention. Elastic wouldn't be
| able to integrate Amazon's patches back into their codebase
| without losing the ability to change the license in the
| future. Even more, since it's AGPL, they'd have to get rid of
| their other licenses immediately.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Is that important, though?
|
| Isn't the whole point that amazon doesn't care about source
| availability or openness, so long as they can extract profit
| from people running it?
| chadash wrote:
| I love https://resend.com/ as an example of a website that does
| a GREAT job explaining what they do. Lots of companies tell you
| that integrating their product is quick, but with their website
| I can look at it for 30 seconds and understand what the next
| steps would be.
| zenorocha wrote:
| thanks for the kind words, we spent a ton of time on the
| website ;)
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| Great, how long until they change the license again?
| troyvit wrote:
| Depends on what new tricks ~FAANG~ MAMAA companies come up with
| to get as much as they can from open source without giving
| anything back I suppose.
| outop wrote:
| Whatever you think of those companies in a wider sense, it's
| totally inaccurate to suggest that Microsoft, Google or
| Amazon haven't given anything back to open source.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch.
|
| I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features
| behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of
| people had their data compromised due to that (due to people
| inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having
| auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)
| jgb1984 wrote:
| Source? Unless you're locked into the Amazon flavor of cloud
| hell I'm pretty sure most people are using the "real"
| elasticsearch. I know I am.
| tapoxi wrote:
| We have a vendor that refuses to support ES 8.x due to
| license fears, so we're just migrating everything over to
| OpenSearch.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yeah, it hasn't been nearly long enough for "everyone" or
| even most people to migrate.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I think it's pretty sad that Conglomo X can take an open source
| product, add some tweaks and sell/capture the entire market.
| Basically taking all the work that open source maintainers have
| done.
|
| What's the solution here?
| echelon wrote:
| Source available + MAU/ARR restriction clauses that prevent
| hyperscalers from robbing the bank.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Because that worked _so well_ for Elastic here.
| jddj wrote:
| I've always been a little sceptical as well of the grassroots
| (maybe, maybe not) resistance on here against any efforts to
| stop the big 3 from using their network effects to syphon off
| the revenue from these projects.
|
| The messaging against elastic style licences and even
| copyleft licenses is too convenient for me to trust as being
| 100% genuine.
| briankelly wrote:
| These handful of companies have employed legions of people
| at this point and I think plenty pump their own brand, not
| unlike colleges with their alumni networks.
| outop wrote:
| This is literally what open source is. If you don't support
| this, you don't support open source.
|
| There isn't a 'purer' form of open source which does exactly
| what you want with respect to big companies using the code.
|
| You can be in favour of licensing that restricts Amazon or
| Microsoft's right to use your work. But that position is
| detrimental to, not supportive of, open source, since such a
| license would not be open source.
| echelon wrote:
| Yes, let's praise and reward the hyperscaler and not the small
| company that is 1% of the size of AWS.
|
| AWS got Elastic's goodies for free. They just came in and
| gobbled up all of that value for themselves like vultures.
| Meanwhile the people putting in the work effectively got
| robbed.
|
| Small companies should stop doing open source and switch to
| source available + MAU/ARR restriction clauses.
| zokier wrote:
| The small company with over billion dollar revenue and
| thousands of employees?
| lsh0 wrote:
| > the small company that is 1% of the size of AWS
|
| What on earth? Elastic is a multi-billion dollar company.
| They are no indie startup, scrappy underdog nor are they
| victims here.
|
| AWS took the high road during this fiasco despite Elastic's
| mudslinging and flailing about.
| coding123 wrote:
| They did? I can't stand all the missing parts around
| documentation and the lesser known pieces like Spark
| integration - horrible.
| the_duke wrote:
| That's hugely overblown.
|
| Maybe 20% of the companies I work with have switched.
| lolinder wrote:
| What is "the community" here? Every metric I'm able to find
| (commit frequency, gh stars, gh stars gained since the launch
| of opensearch, stack overflow tags, google search result
| counts...) suggests that OpenSearch didn't really take much of
| Elastic's mind share in the end. Each metric I've looked at
| shows OpenSearch at somewhere between 20%-50% of Elastic's
| numbers, which isn't nothing but is a far cry from "the
| community".
|
| I've heard a few anecdotes suggesting some people took it
| seriously, but while we're sharing those: my company actually
| _adopted_ ElasticSearch since the license change and never
| seriously considered OpenSearch.
| js4ever wrote:
| Last time I deployed elastic was years ago. In the meantime I
| deployed hundreds of opensearch instead for customers.
| lolinder wrote:
| Are you the one who makes the call, or are you getting
| hundreds of customers requesting OpenSearch over Elastic?
|
| If you're making the call then that's really one anecdote,
| not hundreds.
| js4ever wrote:
| I let the customers choose by themselves. And guess what
| they choose every single time after checking license cost
| from Elastic.
| lolinder wrote:
| Do you tell them that it's deploy OpenSearch or buy an
| Elastic license, not mentioning that they could also
| legally deploy their own Elastic?
| pizza234 wrote:
| If you're referring to the SSPL (it's unclear), it can be
| used without obligations when a service uses it as a
| storage, rather than providing it as a service to the
| clients. Since the latter case is essentially cloud
| companies, I'm confused by the business nature of the
| "hundreds of customers"; if they're not cloud companies,
| Elasticsearch pre- or post-license change makes no
| difference.
| mirashii wrote:
| > For example, MongoDB used to be AGPL and Grafana is AGPL. It
| shows that AGPL doesn't affect usage or popularity.
|
| I take some issue with this characterization. Let's look at
| Grafana in particular. Grafana was not always AGPL, and much of
| its popularity came before the license change. I've been in
| multiple organizations who only purchased a license for Grafana
| to avoid the AGPL terms because it had gained traction already in
| the organization and switching away would have been more costly,
| and AGPL software is still outright banned.
|
| That Grafana is still popular does not show that the AGPL doesn't
| impact usage or popularity, only that Grafana is still popular.
| CtrlAltDelete51 wrote:
| Open source, again ... for now.
| system2 wrote:
| Nice, maybe they can hire some humans to write more explanatory
| website text, documentation, pricing information--better yet,
| anything on their website.
|
| Elastic.co is the #1 example we use with our clients when we want
| to show how 'vague websites make you lose clients.' We show them
| the website and ask, 'What do you think of this company?' and
| 'What do you think they are providing as a service?' Not a single
| client, including tech-savvy ones, has been able to answer.
|
| Elastic.co is probably one of the worst websites that somehow
| gained popularity despite its crappy pricing model and support.
| Their documentation assumes you already know everything about
| their weirdly vague services and have in-depth knowledge of
| server infrastructures.
|
| To anyone who works for them: If you're reading this, know that
| your website is so terrible that it became our first example of a
| crappy company.
| dboreham wrote:
| I assumed that "website that tells you nothing" was a
| deliberate thing, presumably because somehow they make more
| money as a result. It seems to be the rule more than exception.
| system2 wrote:
| I can't think of any company does that and makes money.
| Imagine Apple doing the same, they'd go bankrupt.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Well at least now you know one, elasticsearch.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Stock is down almost 25% afterhours (not sure if due to this or
| their earnings call)
| mrcwinn wrote:
| "'We had a slower start to the year with the volume of customer
| commitments impacted by segmentation changes that we made at
| the beginning of the year, which are taking longer than
| expected to settle. We have been taking steps to address this,
| but it will impact our revenue this year,' said Ash Kulkarni,
| Chief Executive Officer, Elastic."
|
| So, whatever that means, is the answer to your question.
| trog wrote:
| I guess it's better to have nerds fighting about licensing
| filling up the Internet instead of people talking about why
| there's a 25% decline in the share price :)
| stogot wrote:
| A sales org change caused 25% share price drop. Someone
| made a big mistake
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There's already an open source Elasticsearch, it's called
| OpenSearch and it is pretty much all you need right now.
|
| Users that had to pay the price to migrate to OpenSearch do not
| have a reason to migrate back to Elasticsearch.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Also, OpenSearch is Apache-2 licensed so much more usable.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| Lots of negativity in this thread. Can we take just a bit of time
| to appreciate this. Thank you Elastic folks!
| bytearray wrote:
| What are we appreciating exactly?
| politelemon wrote:
| Elastic being flexible
| linotype wrote:
| More like Elastic panicking when they realized the traction
| OpenSearch is getting at a number of companies.
| danillonunes wrote:
| Being flexible is kinda the point of an elastic.
| xbar wrote:
| Nice! Time to switch back real quick.
| chadash wrote:
| I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to
| use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's
| weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic
| License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code
| if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just
| says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to
| Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive in
| most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to
| open source their code, but very few of them plan to sell hosted
| search.
|
| Personally, I do wish that there was more broad acceptance of the
| Elastic License. Who wants to put in years building a business
| and then have a competitor with better distribution take your
| code and compete directly with you? For me, the reasons to want
| open-source code are:
|
| * If a vendor goes under, I can self-host
|
| * If a vendor raises prices too much, I can self-host
|
| * If there's a bug in the code that affects me too much, I can
| fix it
|
| * If there's a feature I really need, I can add it
|
| The Elastic License allows for all of the above. Seems fair to
| me.
| sofixa wrote:
| Same applies to BSL and similar. Not being able to compete with
| the project owners is much less restrictive, for me, than
| AGPL/GPL.
| outop wrote:
| But it restricts your ability to use a commodity product
| based on Elastic, provided by a third party who will compete
| on price or bundle it with other cloud services.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| GPL is viral and somewhat compatible with AGPL.
|
| BSL and GPL code are probably never mixing since they
| prohibit each other. This creates friction in GPL world and
| tends to produce incidents line this [1] out of thin air.
|
| 1. https://github.com/jshint/jshint/issues/1234
| ezekg wrote:
| > If a vendor goes under, I can self-host.
|
| It's worth mentioning that this is true -- to an extent. Under
| ELv2, if the vendor goes under, you can self-host, but you will
| eventually lose access to any features protected by a license
| key if/when that license expires, since said vendor can no
| longer renew said license.
|
| This was one of the main drivers for me writing the FCL [0],
| which undergoes DOSP [1], even for the protected features.
|
| [0]: https://fcl.dev
|
| [1]: https://opensource.org/dosp
| lolinder wrote:
| > to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to
| the product
|
| Specifically, this is the text [0]:
|
| > if you modify the Program, your modified version must
| prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely
| through a computer network (if your version supports such
| interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source
| of your version
|
| There are a few companies who try to make it sound like if you
| interact with an AGPL program over a network then your _client_
| code is now infected with the AGPL, but I 'm not at all sure
| how they arrived at that conclusion unless it was willful
| misinterpretation.
|
| Under the mainstream view, you only have to publish the source
| code for the AGPL work that you modified, which for 99.9% of
| users is fine but isn't great for a reseller.
|
| The main barrier isn't the actual text of the license, it's
| that AGPL is still untested in court and there _are_ companies
| who will try to make it mean something different than its
| apparent meaning, so legal departments are liable to get antsy.
| But lawyers are likely to get antsy about self-hosting under
| these other licenses as well.
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The Elastic License prohibits you from moving, changing, or
| disabling some of the software's functionality. It's a limited
| compromise, and I understand why it's necessary to achieve
| their business objective, but it's pretty straightforwardly not
| compatible with the open source ideal.
|
| Imagine what the web would be like if React users weren't
| allowed to compete with Meta.
| re wrote:
| > The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if
| you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just
| says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to
| Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive
| in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't
| want to open source their code, but very few of them plan to
| sell hosted search.
|
| There's two ways that this doesn't seem right to me, though it
| hinges on the vague term "interacting" and how it's
| interpreted.
|
| Suppose I use Elasticsearch to power website search on my
| company's website -- maybe something like a customer support
| knowledge base of a bunch of FAQs and support articles, and I
| make some modifications to Elasticsearch to better fit my
| requirements. My website makes calls to an Elasticsearch
| service to provide search results.
|
| 1. Based on my interpretation of the AGPL, visitors to my site
| who make searches are not remotely interacting with the
| Elasticsearch software that I am running; they are not sending
| requests directly to the Elasticsearch software, and thus they
| have no rights to its source code under the AGPL. (I'm not
| suggesting that a proxy server that passes on requests and
| responses unmodified would be the same situation.)
|
| 2. If they do in fact have rights to the source code, it is
| only to the modified version of Elasticsearch, not "all my
| source code" (which could include the web server software
| itself).
|
| > Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you
| modify the Program, your modified version must prominently
| offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer
| network (if your version supports such interaction) an
| opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version
| by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network
| server at no charge, through some standard or customary means
| of facilitating copying of software.
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13
|
| > In AGPLv3, what counts as "interacting with [the software]
| remotely through a computer network?" If the program is
| expressly designed to accept user requests and send responses
| over a network, then it meets these criteria.
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingR...
| SahAssar wrote:
| > The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if
| you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just
| says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to
| Elasticsearch"
|
| "changes to the product" means changes to the service itself,
| and "publish all of your source code" means the specific
| service, not for everything you build. If you patch the ES
| service you make the patch public, but you don't need to make
| any service calling ES public. That is pretty static and
| controlled on your end.
|
| On the other hand "direct competitor" can change over time, so
| that if elastic buys a competitor to my product or
| reinterpreters what it means to be a competitor it changes how
| I can use the software. Say you were early into ML stuff and
| built a RAG on top of ES, ES will probably offer that soon as a
| service (if they don't already) so now you are a competitor
| without any change to your business. Or you want to launch a
| small project that is ambiguously adjacent to a component (with
| these non-OSS licenses) that another team within your company
| uses from a third party. That now becomes a huge legal
| liability and risk, regardless if you use that exact component
| to compete with that supplier or are even aware of it.
|
| At least that is the way I've understood the risks of these
| non-OSS licenses and have gotten similar advice from lawyers at
| major users of OSS.
| chadash wrote:
| The words of the license are "You may not provide the
| software to third parties as a hosted or managed service,
| where the service provides users with access to any
| substantial set of the features or functionality of the
| software.".
|
| I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned
| anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and
| team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not
| an issue (but only if using the most recent version of ES,
| since the license for the code that I fork today has no
| bearing on future code that ES hasn't written yet).
| jchw wrote:
| For the most part I don't think people are against shared
| source or closed software existing, being sold, being marketed,
| etc. There's really only two things people viscerally don't
| like:
|
| - Marketing a project that isn't open source as open source.
| Debate about what the "definition" is or why it matters all you
| want; taking a term and using it in a way that contradicts the
| vast majority of domain experts is bullshit.
|
| - Taking an open source project, which people adopted on the
| basis that it was open source, which people contributed issues
| and pull requests to on the basis that it was open source,
| which people evangelized and promoted because it was open
| source, blogged about, built on, and so forth because it was
| open source... and moving it to a license that isn't open
| source.
|
| To be clear: yes, the unforced error here in many cases is
| accepting a CLA. That said, I think it's not even unreasonable
| that people _initially_ accepted CLAs: many of them presumably
| believed they would only ever be used in good faith, as a sort-
| of CYA. But CLAs are now very commonplace, so refusing to
| contribute to any project with a CLA requirement is hard.
|
| If nobody cared about the benefits of open source, then it
| would be easier for companies to just start with a closed or
| shared source offering and call it a day; not much backlash for
| _not_ changing a license. Clearly, marketing something as open
| source helps... but once you 've gotten what you need out of
| it, it's easy enough to click a button and change it back to
| being closed.
|
| In my opinion the big advantage of open source is that everyone
| is on a level playing field. This isn't "fair", it's balanced,
| and that matters if you are serious about long-term software.
| If shared-source software is discontinued, that's probably the
| end of the road for it. For open source software, it only
| depends on if there are big enough stakeholders to keep funding
| development; it never _has_ to stop.
|
| There's ideas like BUSL, which might work better... but it's
| still awkward and experimental. I don't put much stock into any
| of the other "shared sorta-like-open source" licenses, they're
| mostly bullshit and sometimes catastrophically horrible, i.e.
| much worse than AGPL.
| philippemnoel wrote:
| This is huge. We wrote "Why we picked AGPL" only a few weeks ago,
| discussing why ParadeDB (an Elastic competitor!) chose the AGPL.
| Glad to see Elastic is joining forces on the AGPL front.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Thank you, ElasticSearch!
|
| I know the AGPL may be a terrible license and all, but it is
| allowed by Free Software purists. I hope more companies follow
| suit.
| winddude wrote:
| They've probably been losing market share to all the opensource
| vector search solutions. But anyways, this is still good.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| For use by businesses, the AGPL is a nightmare from my
| perspective. What does it actually require on behalf of a company
| using AGPL components? If I write my own library and link
| statically I need to release that? What about if I link it
| dynamically? What if the library is running on a separate machine
| and is separated by the network?
|
| I'm sure there will be people commenting in this thread that they
| understand exactly what the AGPL requires, and it's not that bad,
| but their opinion matters much less than the opinion of lawyers.
|
| I've never been able to get lawyers in a business setting
| comfortable with us using AGPL components, for fear that it will
| be interpreted at some point to require us to release our
| application source code.
|
| As a result, we've never been able to use anything licensed AGPL
| in a corporate setting.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| what.... are those random words... in brackets??
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