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Last year Elastic opened up the source code of their commercial X-Pack offering: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open https://www.elastic.co/blog/d
by praseodym 8y ago
Last year Elastic opened up the source code of their commercial X-Pack offering: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open. This means that these components (security, alerting, etc.) are now available in the GitHub repository, but they are covered by the proprietary Elastic license instead of the Apache 2.0 license like the rest of the software. Some of the proprietary parts can be used for free, some need a paid commercial subscription. None of them are true open source (free as in freedom), though.
However, this is also when Elastic started muddying the waters (to quote the AWS blog post).
Most of the new features across the Elastic stack that were added in the past couple of months (Index Lifecycle Management, APM UI, Infrastructure and Logs UI, Kibana multi-tenancy, Kibana Canvas) are not added to the Apache 2.0 codebase but are only available in the free-but-not-open version. These features can be used for free with the Basic subscription (no registration needed) but only under the terms of the Elastic license.
And this Elastic license is where AWS feels the pain. It clearly prohibits SaaS offerings:
> You agree not to: [..] use Elastic Software Object Code for providing time-sharing services, any software-as-a-service, service bureau services or as part of an application services provider or other service offering (collectively, "SaaS Offering") [..]
(from https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/6.6/licenses/ELASTIC-LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/6.6/licenses/E...)
The license is very similar to moves that MongoDB and Redis made recently. Only Elastic is just now doubling down on adding new (and highly demanded) features to their proprietary offering.
- Jedd 8y agoFor improved context, read the HN thread around that announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487440
- SeaCow 8y agoIf you read the Elastic License, it's actually worse than Mongo & Redis -- you can't modify it and use it for anything other than testing. You can basically install & use it only (definition of License, then the restrictions sections); if your testing uncovers something wrong... what are you supposed to do, under the terms of their license?
- sam_lowry_ 8y agoDiscover Lucene.
- samcday 8y agoComparing Lucene to Elasticsearch is very apples to oranges, in my opinion. It's like if MySQL did something people didn't like and the answer was "Discover InnoDB". Sure, Lucene might be all you need, if all you need is some basic freetext search on a small set of data that fits on a single machine. Though maybe you misspoke and meant to say "Discover Solr"...
- sam_lowry_ 8y agoHm... Nope, ElasticSearch is a good entry point into Lucene. As your software needs grow, you may discover the benefits of going a level below. Start with ELK, then discover ElasticSearch, then use Lucene with your own way of distributing data over multiple machines if needed. Personally, I never had to use more than 1 machine even for huge data sets (JFYI, Orbis and Wikipedia fit onto one bare metal server).
- Felz 8y agoLucene's pretty great. The segments file model even works pretty well with S3.
- mosselman 8y agoThanks for the background.
- chupasaurus 8y agoElastic has not and probably wouldn't open the Security plugin because it _was_ the sole reason to buy X-Pack, one of main ones as of now. They've opened only monitoring and reporting because there are other ways to do it without X-Pack anyway, all other parts in OSS code just have interfaces so anyone's plugins could interact with them.
- praseodym 8y agoThey have open sourced it (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/master/x-pack/plugin/security https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/master/x-pack/...), but you cannot (legally) use it without a paid subscription. Same goes for PDF and PNG reports in Kibana. Monitoring is available in the free subscription, which cannot be used by SaaS providers. And now that we have an alternative: the Elastic monitoring plugin is pretty neat, but the Open Distro Performance Analyzer looks way more powerful. I’ve had the Elastic monitoring UI and a regular ‘perf top’ open with still no clue as to why Elasticsearch was eating CPU (relative to the query load). It looks like Performance Analyzer brings far more to the table.
- chupasaurus 8y agoI've missed it. > but you cannot (legally) use it without a paid subscription Sounds worse than my thoughts in the comment, considering the pricing for self-hosted nodes (happend that I know them).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- type0 8y ago> They have open sourced it (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/master/x-pack/... https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/master/x-pack/...), but you cannot (legally) use it without a paid subscription That's called Source-available and sometimes that's even worse because you (legally) cannot re-implement something similar after you have looked at the code.