6 ms·

Basically Amazon screwing Elastic. Take their code and monetize it, not giving anything back. When Elastic changed their license to prevent it, Amazon forks it.

Basically Amazon screwing Elastic. Take their code and monetize it, not giving anything back. When Elastic changed their license to prevent it, Amazon forks it. It's the biggest risk to open source right now. They are following the strategy of "commoditize the complementary good". Since Amazon makes money selling machine cycles, they want the software to be free.

__david__ 8y ago
No, no, no. Amazon is using the software in the way it was intended, legally and ethically. It's like companies published software under a license and never gave a thought to the consequences of the license they chose. If you license permissively, be prepared for your competitors to use it!
- tootie 8y ago
  Yeah but this is like eating an entire plate of free samples then asking for a refill. It's technically allowed but you're ruining for everyone else.
  - ttul 8y ago
    Nuh-uh. Elastic made millions selling stuff on top of open source that was licensed permissively to create a market. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      > millions A company turned a modest profit? Say it isn't so! The guy who wrote ElasticSearch created a company to finance the development of the project. For most of their history, they released their source code under a permissive license in good faith. Amazon abused that good faith, so now Elastic continues to make the source code open and license it freely to customers and the open source community (just not competitors). I've got no beef with Amazon, but you're kidding yourself if you compare them with Elastic in terms of ambition, greed, commitment to open source, etc.
      - neom 8y ago
        Basically sounds like Redhat was the last Redhat. Docker, Mesosphere, ElasticSearch, Aquia etc be damned?
        mbreese 8y ago
        Open source and venture capital do not mix well. I’m not sure I can think of any positive examples outside of OS vendors (Redhat), but there are many negative examples come to mind, going all the way back to Eazel. These debates go back decades.
        erik_seaberg 8y ago
        Open source work for hire can be a lifestyle business (it's not free until you agree to write it), but VC money wants some kind of sustained competitive advantage that drives huge scale.
  - losteric 8y ago
    It's like a wizard invents an incantation for a free and infinite supply of apples. They freely give away that spell, facilitate improvements from others, encourage the world to use this great spell. Then, someone starts selling apple sauce and it makes lots of money. Now the wizard wants to get rich too... but their sauce isn't good enough, so they try to lock down the spell. People get upset. They helped improve the spell, why should the wizard get all the money? Or their livelihoods now depend on the spell, why are they suddenly forced to pay? Now the apple guy decided he's going to stop playing that game, and starts supporting/improving/evangelizing a restriction-free apple incantation. Story to be continued...
    - berbec 8y ago
      Harry Potter and the GPL Violator of Azkaban
      - kuwze 8y ago
        Uh... Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AGPL is more like it
    - tootie 8y ago
      That's not exactly the allegory I'm envisioning. More like future products are going to be less open for fear of being subsumed by cloud vendors. This story of Elastic is not too dissimilar to the story posted about Docker the other day. Docker Inc is in the process of being crushed by Google via Kubernetes. It's going to potentially stifle future open source enterprise software development.
- weberc2 8y ago
  Which is why Elastic changed their licensing, and now Amazon is playing the hapless victim.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    They are hardly playing the victim, they are moving forward in the way that is most advantageous to themselves.
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    They're not playing the hapless victim. They're doing exactly what the open source license was designed to do and support. They're forking it because they don't like the direction of the current mainters, and are releasing their own open sourced updates to it. We've seen this happen repeatedly through many open source projects over the last couple of decades. Take the Jenkins/Hudson split, for example, or OpenWrt/LEDE, Node.js/IO.js, or to stretch even further back Mambo/Joomla. The whole purpose of the open source license is to ensure that you are always able to patch, support, and maintain what you're running. That you're not stuck depending on a single company to keep your software running. That you're always able to add missing features as you see them, etc. (obviously, the license you choose dictates whether you have to provide those back). By mixing up proprietary code with open source code Elastic betrayed those central ideals of open source, as have Nginx and any number of companies that have adopted this model. The reason why should be pretty obvious. By building the company model around premium modules, they have disincentivised themselves to fixing or enhancing the open source version of the software. Worse, they're not incentivised in any fashion to even accept patches that open source contributors provide that provide the missing features etc. By way of example, there's a fix for a common issue in Nginx that has landed in their upstream commercial version of Nginx, that hasn't made it in to the open source version (at least last I saw it hadn't, and the fix had been in upstream for quite a while). Nginx ignores DNS TTLs, and can seriously trip you up unless you happen to know to use a particular combination of variables and statically configured DNS resolvers in nginx to make it DNS TTL for servers it proxies too. The company behind Nginx has had zero incentive to provide that in the open source version, or accept patches that fix that behaviour. That leaves people tripping over the same bug for years on end, until they discover, just like so many before them, those blog posts that detail the behaviour and how to save yourselves from it. What each of these companies have done essentially makes actions like Amazon's actions here completely inevitable.
drilldrive 8y ago
I think that we are seeing open-source exemplified working in full here. And it definitely signals that being 100% for open source will come with some losses. >Basically Amazon screwing Elastic. Take their code and monetize it, not giving anything back. When Elastic changed their license to prevent it, Amazon forks it. I do not see how Amazon is taking advantage of Elastic here. Elastic gave an offer of open source without compensation, Amazon accepted their offer, and now Elastic isn't receiving compensation. Simple as that.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  and no one gets to make money except Amazon.
  - drilldrive 8y ago
    If you don't want Amazon and the like to use it, take extra care in your licensing then. Don't just throw an MIT license on there and assume all is well.
  - hjk05 8y ago
    Everyone gets to make money... the open version being maintained by Amazon you am an just copy and start your own company if you want. It’s Elastic that’s trying to limit the use of their version to prevent anyone except elastic from making money...
cthalupa 8y ago
>It's the biggest risk to open source right now. A company writing open source alternatives to proprietary licensed code is the biggest risk to open source right now?
- humblebee 8y ago
  I read that slightly different, but I think your interpretation of it is accurate to the text. My first read made me think it was in context to a company open sourcing code, particularly hosted software. If your product is SaaS (particularly infrastructure software), one might think twice about open sourcing it, or building it as open source. I don't know the history of elastic though, so the above may not be an accurate interpretation given more context. I am now curious if there is a license that allows people to profit using software, but not profit by selling software that conforms to some API. Basically gating the company to be the only company who can provide the SaaS solution. However, I don't think that license would apply to the actual API / algorithm, just the actual source. I think this is when it starts to bleed over into software patients.
  - loukrazy 8y ago
    I guess we will find out if you can defend your APIs using copyright in the Oracle vs Google case
losteric 8y ago
Elastic was attempting to leverage open-source into proprietary vendor lock-in by blurring the line between proprietary and FOSS code. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon fighting the trojan horse is a good thing. FOSS should not be an advertising stunt that gets walked back by coupling and interleaving FOSS with proprietary... especially not a project that already has community contributions. There are plenty of FOSS business models. If those aren't profitable enough, go proprietary.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
The answer is you use AGPL. The Webservice Exception to the GPL is how you get screwed by Amazon and others. Amazon has never touched or forked an AGPL project.
- paulcarroty 8y ago
  How AGPL helps if someone like Amazon just sell your software as service without modifications?
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    That won't work, since Amazon reworks and modifies applications to work as SaaS, like Kinesis:Kafka.. And then Amazon never upstreams any changes they find. So Non-A GPL licenses allow companies a free pass for SaaS. With the AGPL, if Amazon makes a change, they MUST make source available. No ifs, ands, or buts.
jrochkind1 8y ago
To me, the whole point of open source is the right to fork. If you are trying to remove the right to fork, that's what seems like a threat to open source to me.
spudlyo 8y ago
> It's the biggest risk to open source right now. I don't think that's true. Perhaps it's a big risk to "open core" business models, but in my mind "open source" is not about protecting your right to monetize software. Elastic wouldn't exist without Lucene, and when Elastic was flush with over 100M in venture capital, how much do you suppose they "gave back" to the Apache Software Foundation? There are plenty of viable FOSS business models (consulting, hosting, support, etc) that are not antithetical to my hippie pinko Stallmanesque beliefs about software, so I will not be sad to see "open core" businesses get royally forked.
manigandham 8y ago
They don't have to give anything back. That's the point. Elasticsearch is free to make proprietary code and products if they want, and they use plenty of other open-source software in their database. 90% of database vendors still don't have a cloud offering for some reason even though there's intense demand from customers which AWS is more than happy to meet.
tanilama 8y ago
Amazon does give back code in this case right? They are re-implementing part of Elasticsearch essentially. Unless Oracle finalizes the Win against Google on the API copyright, I think what Amazon does here is confrontal, but not very controversial. Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon Employee.

__david__ 8y ago

No, no, no. Amazon is using the software in the way it was intended, legally and ethically. It's like companies published software under a license and never gave a thought to the consequences of the license they chose. If you license permissively, be prepared for your competitors to use it!

tootie 8y ago
Yeah but this is like eating an entire plate of free samples then asking for a refill. It's technically allowed but you're ruining for everyone else.
- ttul 8y ago
  Nuh-uh. Elastic made millions selling stuff on top of open source that was licensed permissively to create a market. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    > millions A company turned a modest profit? Say it isn't so! The guy who wrote ElasticSearch created a company to finance the development of the project. For most of their history, they released their source code under a permissive license in good faith. Amazon abused that good faith, so now Elastic continues to make the source code open and license it freely to customers and the open source community (just not competitors). I've got no beef with Amazon, but you're kidding yourself if you compare them with Elastic in terms of ambition, greed, commitment to open source, etc.
    - neom 8y ago
      Basically sounds like Redhat was the last Redhat. Docker, Mesosphere, ElasticSearch, Aquia etc be damned?
      - mbreese 8y ago
        Open source and venture capital do not mix well. I’m not sure I can think of any positive examples outside of OS vendors (Redhat), but there are many negative examples come to mind, going all the way back to Eazel. These debates go back decades.
        erik_seaberg 8y ago
        Open source work for hire can be a lifestyle business (it's not free until you agree to write it), but VC money wants some kind of sustained competitive advantage that drives huge scale.
- losteric 8y ago
  It's like a wizard invents an incantation for a free and infinite supply of apples. They freely give away that spell, facilitate improvements from others, encourage the world to use this great spell. Then, someone starts selling apple sauce and it makes lots of money. Now the wizard wants to get rich too... but their sauce isn't good enough, so they try to lock down the spell. People get upset. They helped improve the spell, why should the wizard get all the money? Or their livelihoods now depend on the spell, why are they suddenly forced to pay? Now the apple guy decided he's going to stop playing that game, and starts supporting/improving/evangelizing a restriction-free apple incantation. Story to be continued...
  - berbec 8y ago
    Harry Potter and the GPL Violator of Azkaban
    - kuwze 8y ago
      Uh... Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AGPL is more like it
  - tootie 8y ago
    That's not exactly the allegory I'm envisioning. More like future products are going to be less open for fear of being subsumed by cloud vendors. This story of Elastic is not too dissimilar to the story posted about Docker the other day. Docker Inc is in the process of being crushed by Google via Kubernetes. It's going to potentially stifle future open source enterprise software development.
weberc2 8y ago
Which is why Elastic changed their licensing, and now Amazon is playing the hapless victim.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  They are hardly playing the victim, they are moving forward in the way that is most advantageous to themselves.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  They're not playing the hapless victim. They're doing exactly what the open source license was designed to do and support. They're forking it because they don't like the direction of the current mainters, and are releasing their own open sourced updates to it. We've seen this happen repeatedly through many open source projects over the last couple of decades. Take the Jenkins/Hudson split, for example, or OpenWrt/LEDE, Node.js/IO.js, or to stretch even further back Mambo/Joomla. The whole purpose of the open source license is to ensure that you are always able to patch, support, and maintain what you're running. That you're not stuck depending on a single company to keep your software running. That you're always able to add missing features as you see them, etc. (obviously, the license you choose dictates whether you have to provide those back). By mixing up proprietary code with open source code Elastic betrayed those central ideals of open source, as have Nginx and any number of companies that have adopted this model. The reason why should be pretty obvious. By building the company model around premium modules, they have disincentivised themselves to fixing or enhancing the open source version of the software. Worse, they're not incentivised in any fashion to even accept patches that open source contributors provide that provide the missing features etc. By way of example, there's a fix for a common issue in Nginx that has landed in their upstream commercial version of Nginx, that hasn't made it in to the open source version (at least last I saw it hadn't, and the fix had been in upstream for quite a while). Nginx ignores DNS TTLs, and can seriously trip you up unless you happen to know to use a particular combination of variables and statically configured DNS resolvers in nginx to make it DNS TTL for servers it proxies too. The company behind Nginx has had zero incentive to provide that in the open source version, or accept patches that fix that behaviour. That leaves people tripping over the same bug for years on end, until they discover, just like so many before them, those blog posts that detail the behaviour and how to save yourselves from it. What each of these companies have done essentially makes actions like Amazon's actions here completely inevitable.

drilldrive 8y ago

I think that we are seeing open-source exemplified working in full here. And it definitely signals that being 100% for open source will come with some losses. >Basically Amazon screwing Elastic. Take their code and monetize it, not giving anything back. When Elastic changed their license to prevent it, Amazon forks it. I do not see how Amazon is taking advantage of Elastic here. Elastic gave an offer of open source without compensation, Amazon accepted their offer, and now Elastic isn't receiving compensation. Simple as that.

anth_anm 8y ago
and no one gets to make money except Amazon.
- drilldrive 8y ago
  If you don't want Amazon and the like to use it, take extra care in your licensing then. Don't just throw an MIT license on there and assume all is well.
- hjk05 8y ago
  Everyone gets to make money... the open version being maintained by Amazon you am an just copy and start your own company if you want. It’s Elastic that’s trying to limit the use of their version to prevent anyone except elastic from making money...

cthalupa 8y ago

>It's the biggest risk to open source right now. A company writing open source alternatives to proprietary licensed code is the biggest risk to open source right now?

humblebee 8y ago
I read that slightly different, but I think your interpretation of it is accurate to the text. My first read made me think it was in context to a company open sourcing code, particularly hosted software. If your product is SaaS (particularly infrastructure software), one might think twice about open sourcing it, or building it as open source. I don't know the history of elastic though, so the above may not be an accurate interpretation given more context. I am now curious if there is a license that allows people to profit using software, but not profit by selling software that conforms to some API. Basically gating the company to be the only company who can provide the SaaS solution. However, I don't think that license would apply to the actual API / algorithm, just the actual source. I think this is when it starts to bleed over into software patients.
- loukrazy 8y ago
  I guess we will find out if you can defend your APIs using copyright in the Oracle vs Google case

losteric 8y ago

Elastic was attempting to leverage open-source into proprietary vendor lock-in by blurring the line between proprietary and FOSS code. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon fighting the trojan horse is a good thing. FOSS should not be an advertising stunt that gets walked back by coupling and interleaving FOSS with proprietary... especially not a project that already has community contributions. There are plenty of FOSS business models. If those aren't profitable enough, go proprietary.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

The answer is you use AGPL. The Webservice Exception to the GPL is how you get screwed by Amazon and others. Amazon has never touched or forked an AGPL project.

paulcarroty 8y ago
How AGPL helps if someone like Amazon just sell your software as service without modifications?
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  That won't work, since Amazon reworks and modifies applications to work as SaaS, like Kinesis:Kafka.. And then Amazon never upstreams any changes they find. So Non-A GPL licenses allow companies a free pass for SaaS. With the AGPL, if Amazon makes a change, they MUST make source available. No ifs, ands, or buts.

jrochkind1 8y ago

To me, the whole point of open source is the right to fork. If you are trying to remove the right to fork, that's what seems like a threat to open source to me.

spudlyo 8y ago

> It's the biggest risk to open source right now. I don't think that's true. Perhaps it's a big risk to "open core" business models, but in my mind "open source" is not about protecting your right to monetize software. Elastic wouldn't exist without Lucene, and when Elastic was flush with over 100M in venture capital, how much do you suppose they "gave back" to the Apache Software Foundation? There are plenty of viable FOSS business models (consulting, hosting, support, etc) that are not antithetical to my hippie pinko Stallmanesque beliefs about software, so I will not be sad to see "open core" businesses get royally forked.

manigandham 8y ago

They don't have to give anything back. That's the point. Elasticsearch is free to make proprietary code and products if they want, and they use plenty of other open-source software in their database. 90% of database vendors still don't have a cloud offering for some reason even though there's intense demand from customers which AWS is more than happy to meet.

tanilama 8y ago

Amazon does give back code in this case right? They are re-implementing part of Elasticsearch essentially. Unless Oracle finalizes the Win against Google on the API copyright, I think what Amazon does here is confrontal, but not very controversial. Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon Employee.