14 ms·

On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

306 points by christophilus 8y ago

tjolls12 8y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elastic...
dhd415 8y ago
With the rise of cloud computing, the effort by cloud providers to commoditize their complements, i.e., software, inevitably leads to this particular kind of conflict between companies backing OSS software who wish to deploy their own SaaS offerings and cloud providers with their own SaaS offerings. A common response is that OSS backers can build businesses based on support and consulting but I believe that's overly restrictive. Those kinds of businesses don't scale nearly as well as managed services and it will definitely have a chilling effect on OSS development if the kinds of companies that are permitted to be built on them are simply support and consulting. I don't believe that companies backing OSS have an exclusive right to offer managed services for their software, but the current situation with cloud providers offering managed services with only token engagement with the OSS community (and then only when forced into it by licensing restrictions) is not beneficial to OSS, either.
- SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  The post describes how Amazon offered more than a token engagement. Elastic rejected them, as such a partnership would have included "preferential treatment that would place them above our users". That's consistent with what I've seen from other OSS-backing companies; they want cloud providers to contribute to their community, but flatly refuse to go out of their way to enable it.
__blockcipher__ 8y ago
I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit. If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro. Anyone have a different take?
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  Just my 2 cents. I don't care about Amazon's distro, I think it won't work. Others have tried, e.g. MariaDB vs MySQL, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Time will show though... Edit: The thought was about big companies with their own agenda behind open source initiatives. Sorry about confusion.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    What pattern are you seeing in those examples? Most Linux distros today ship with LibreOffice and have MariaDB in-repo. From where I sit, the open forks won.
    - rooam-dev 8y ago
      Yes, the fork timeline/direction is different, but imho, the pattern is, big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork. I only can imagine the amount of resources put into keeping up. Will Amazon "rebase" their version with Elastic's? I doubt that for long time. Features advantaging AWS will be pushed, for better integration with 3rd party, which basically AWS' solutions. I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        > big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork. MariaDB is a community fork away from a controlling company. Libreoffice is run by its own foundation, again after forking away from a company-controlled version. > I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS. I mean, worst case just run it on EC2/ECS, which lets you run anything you want. They're not going to break that.
    - mises 8y ago
      Won in terms of user base, maybe. But in terms of money made and commercial adoption? Mysql beats Mariadb, though I can' t say for openoffice/libreoffice.
buryat 8y ago
so, any license changes?
timdorr 8y ago
For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961
- hodgesrm 8y ago
  Clicking through to the AWS blog article [1] we find this: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. This was part of the promise the maintainer made when they gained developers’ trust to adopt the software. I have enormous respect for Adrian's work on cloud systems but the quote above seems very self-serving for Amazon. Open source is bound by licenses that define the terms of open source code use. There's nothing whatsoever in the licenses that binds the project developers to continue to work on the project, to maintain similar license terms in later releases, or to take (or not take) any other action in their lives. To argue otherwise seems contrary to the notions of freedom that are the foundation of open source software. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... Edit: typo corrected
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    I think it’s fine for Elastic to seek to go to a non-open-source license (whether source-available or not) for new developments or portions of their code. It’s also fine for others, including AWS, to take the open-source portions and fork/continue developing on the open source fork. In such a situation, I’d expect open to win over proprietary.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit. Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None. Same as they owe me nothing. By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in that you can always use the code and license you've been using - but there's no way anybody can make it a "responsibility" of a maintainer to to anything in the future. They could die, they could get bored, they could get an all-encompassing job, they could get a family, they could get venture capital and license any future work with a non-open source license (as Redis and Elastic have done, at least in some people's view). The "the promise the maintainer made" was "here's some code, under GPL or aGPL, or Apache Licence, or Artistic license of BSD three clause, or whatever the promise at the time was. Take it or leave it. No future responsibility assumed or enforced. They might even have a track record of releasing more stuff under the same license/promise. But they can stop or change things whenever they want. If Amazon wants the maintainers to do anything else (including ever committing another line of code or fixing a bug), they can wait for them to do (or not) it at their discretion, or they can pay the maintainer (or someone else) to do it (and then, depending on the license, potentially be required to release that code under the same license. Sorry for the rant, but that line caught my eye too, and I got immediately pissed off at Amazon's sense of entitlement there. No open source maintainer owes you shit. They've shared what they've shared, and you can take it or leave it, but you taking it doesn't place any obligation or responsibility on them. (deep breath)
vegardx 8y ago
It would be interesting if someone pushed a PR that contains more or less all the "secret sauce" of X-Pack, and see what reasons they'd use for rejecting it. Clarification: Not push X-Pack itself, but features comparable. Like they suggested people do in the post.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rushabh 8y ago
"When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. This happened numerous times over the years, and only recently again, this time with Amazon. Some have aligned and became wonderful partners to us and the community. Others, sadly, didn't follow through. We have a commitment that we will treat a single developer contributing to our products the same as others. There is no preference, and we will reject any ask to have one. Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself." The way this is written, it seems like there was a difference of opinion in terms of the product architecture, and not a purely commercial decision by Amazon. I would think it would make commercial sense for the team at Elastic to align with Amazon than the other way round. On the other hand Amazon claims that Elastic was moving away towards proprietary code [1]. Overall, being in open source for a decade, I am against this trend in dual licensing (which I fear is pushed by Venture Capitalists). People forget that the fact that you have freedom and zero friction, is what makes open source awesome. There are other ways to make money, like building a kick-ass consulting practice around the open source offering. [1] https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/faq.html https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/faq.html
blinkingled 8y ago
Lot of bitterness about people forking and bundling ES. If it was so painful for Elastic maybe they should have gone for a more suitable model - you get everything open source and pay for support and priority /early access to security updates. Unlike the current model where you get basic features as open source and have to pay for and use different license if you want to use essential features like monitoring and performance analysis. Someone else with a business model that benefits from providing these features for free and making them open source to reduce their development/maintenance burden - cloud providers like Amazon - are going to do just that. And they're well within their right to do so.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > pay for support and security updates. Impeding security updates seems rather unethical. Unless you mean backports to old/stable versions, which is still iffy in my mind but does at least maintain a way to stay secure for everyone.
  - blinkingled 8y ago
    I meant priority/early access to security updates really. Updated my post to reflect that. For example enterprises may want quicker access to well tested bug or security fixes - they can get that first and then the patches appear on GitHub for open source users.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    Seems unethical for people benefiting from something to externalize the cost of security, expecting bug hunters to work with no benefits. I could lean toward selling security fixes if it was commercial software. Not sure about free/open yet. If something like Tor, I'd rather we make exceptions regardless of general philosophy just to keep majority of people safe. Especially the kind of folks that help us out with their sacrifices. Most software isn't like that. My current preference is going back to highly-permissive, shared-source licenses by public-benefit companies whose charters and contracts don't let them screw people in at least all the ways we know about. Perpetual, free licenses w/ no or optional support for non-commercial or small business. Cost goes up with scale from there maybe with enterprise features sold separately. Anything not a competitive advantage, esp building blocks or platform stuff, might get open-sourced. Anyone licensed can modify the software and distribute that to other licensees. Might make exception for features or code in new version so they can't skip payment with backport. Maintains most of benefits of OSS with less risk of proprietary or hybrid licensing. Charging for security fixes could be a simple way of motivating folks to pay for improvements to the software. A preferred model that's harder to build is using methods that make nearly vulnerability-free software with a warranty against specific types of defects or at specific, defect rates. Cleanroom shops and Praxis Correct-by-Construction did that with an upfront premium applied with defect rate in warranty fixed at supplier's cost. So, still thinking on specifics of all of that or potential integrations.
pauldix 8y ago
This is a really great response and I'm curious how AWS will respond. It's particularly damning because AWS was arguing from a position of moral authority on the move, which I think was disingenuous. They wanted to create a fork and act like they weren't. Shay just called them out on it. I also wrote up my own thoughts, but it's obviously not as relevant as this. I'm a little more blunt about what AWS is doing. I even throw in a comparison to Microsoft abusing their monopoly power in the 90's by distributing Explorer for free to kill off Netscape: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-project-to-be-an-elasticsearch-fork/ https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-pr... Longer term, the real question is how Elastic will respond to this commercially. Will they create more closed source? Go higher up the stack into specific applications? It's going to be an interesting and tumultuous couple of years in open source infrastructure software.
- andreareina 8y ago
  Elastic doesn't have much moral authority either when they keep using the word "open" in reference to code that isn't open source. But they never say "open source" so technically correct. EDIT: you've remarked elsewhere on the thread about commercial and economic realities, so I want to take the opportunity to qualify my statement: they're free to license and monetize their code however they want. It's what I see as deceptive intent that I'm having a (very strong) reaction to.
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    Iiuc, they are basically using open core model, with core app being free/open/libre under Apache license, and extensions proprietary with code available non-free/non-open/non-libre Elastic license. At least to me the situation seems pretty clear, and Amazon complaining that they can't take all of the code to create a competing service seems pretty disingenious to me. OP's post is thus in line with what I would expect - but it seems to irk you in some way. What is it that I'm missing?
    - andreareina 8y ago
      I said more here[1] but basically the use of "open" around their gratis/proprietary code. Never "open source" so it's not an untruth but it's still misleading especially in a context where they're also talking about their contributions to open source, a commitment to being open, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19369774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19369774
explodingcamera 8y ago
Wow elastic seems salty. I don't think this blog post was a great idea. While I understand that they need to monetize their project, I have been put off by them putting their security features behind a paywall. They literally advertised "Security" as non-existent on their XPack pricing page for their basic free plan. Furthermore, I am still laughing about how the author litteraly wrote that Amazon "bluntly copied" them, "sadly, painfully, with critical bugs".
shareinnovation 8y ago
Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. Elastic, mongo, Kafka, redis, all are being preyed upon.
- benologist 8y ago
  This has been part of Amazon's business model for years, they have 10,000s of products copied from their vendors. They have even copied stuff hosted on AWS in addition to open source software deployed on AWS. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...
- mises 8y ago
  > Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. How? Redis is trying, and got backlash. Mongo is trying, and got backlash. Confluent is trying, and got backlash. We've rather got to pick our poison here: do we want companies to open their code and have it used for managed services/cloned, or do we want them to close it and keep making cool tech? I recall reading about the model Google used to use for this sort of thing: open your source code about three to five years after you stop using it. This gives something to the community, while still allowing you to maintain a competitive advantage, run a managed service, etc. Particularly for those who run a SAAS model, it lets them gain widespread adoption before a competitor can spin up an instance of their stuff and undercut them slightly. Oh, and for those saying "use the Red Hat model", the Red Hat model can't work for everyone. Red Hat had a new idea and essentially no competition for enterprise linux at the time, and so didn't have to deal with the competition. They got a chance to build a customer base before Oracle knocked their product off. And even then, Oracle did completely rip off their work. That's the risk you run with open-sourcing your codebase, and not every company is built to work that way; not our job to tell them they should redo their business model to allow it.
  - 8y ago
amirathi 8y ago
Why write emotionally charged letter instead of one backed with facts? Amazon is claiming [1][2] that Elastic has been intentionally unclear about what part of Elastic stack is open source vs proprietary. It would best serve Elastic if they respond to that with facts. If the claims are true, and done intentionally, it's a really bad move on part of Elastic. The ambiguity around licensing hurts all their users and not just Amazon. [1] "Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary." [2] "Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate"
- cik 8y ago
  I couldn't agree more with Amazon. We build something on Elastic - and trying to work with them to get licensing was at best a major PITA. In ~2017 Elastic decided they wanted to go Enterprise Only. They started to charge $100k for x-pack, though one could get a dev license for $50K. We quickly built a SQL parser for Elastic, an alerting engine, some other bits. These are all bits that just went poof yesterday when Amazon released opendistro - and I couldn't be happier. Sure we'll have to slice out a bunch of code, but at the end of the day it didn't have value to our core business. I just wish Elastic as a company was easier to deal with. We'd be months ahead if not for them - and ultimately just worked around them. This is in spite of MY using Elastic for ~9 years now.
  - ksec 8y ago
    May be Amazon should just spend some money and buy elastic? and call it a day.
    - cik 8y ago
      Not worth their target of $500M. Quite frankly Amazon just sunk the value of Elastic in a huge way. I'm trying to figure out if anyone here will let me pre-register for a short.
AbraKdabra 8y ago
I read all of that as a rant about "pleople cloning my open source project and making it better, stop plz". Duh, I'm glad about the direction Amazon is going.
jrochkind1 8y ago
It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party. When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing. When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either. It may be that the collective HN vibe is critical no matter what. But also maybe "we" in aggregate legitimately don't like either option given. I know open source devs need to make money somehow. I also wish there was a way to do it that was open source. I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source. In the original period of open source, people generally worked on open source on the clock at their existing jobs, a building tools they needed for that job, a job not dedicated to that particular product but to getting something done that product helped with. People were getting paid to write open source, but it wasn't by "productizing" it. The results were still shared freely. (this is how/where apache httpd, for one, came from; people with jobs who needed an http server writing one on the clock, even though their job was not "writing an http server." They needed an http server to accomplish what was needed for their employers, but their employers had no desire or capacity to be in the business of selling an http server. Why not collaborate on one we can all use?) But those days are gone, software has just gotten _so much more complex_ and time-consuming to develop. The open source software we have and need can't be developed in someone's "spare" (even on-the-clock spare) time. Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product. But we see the perils of that when an employer decides "wait, why aren't we making money selling this? Why are we contributing our employee's time to it?" (thanks Oracle). So that leaves people trying to productize it one way or another. It is not clear to me how to have a healthy open source ecosystem in that market environment. I don't think "proprietary layer on top" is actually good for open source, especially if it's gonna lead (naturally) to rejecting contributions from outside to add those same features as open source (why would we want to spend time working with a contributor to make the feature solid, when we _already wrote it_, and when accepting the contribution would _harm our business model_ because that feature is what we want to charge for?), and then resistance to the "right to fork" which I consider the fundamental basis of open source freedom.
- 8y ago
andreareina 8y ago
Clicking through to the other blog posts, it becomes apparent the the author plays fast and loose with the word "open", to their benefit. They "opened up" by providing gratis licenses to some of their software. They don't call it "open source", but the phrase "open source" is also scattered around the articles, so that "open" benefits by proximal association. They're free to license their software however they want; I don't use it so I really don't care. But it really rankles when someone extols the virtues of open source and waxes rhetoric about how open they are, and yet the software they offer is proprietary by default. They "double down on open", but the open source distribution is opt-in. I cannot help but feel that the articles are deliberately constructed to mislead. That's a serious accusation and I wish I could be more charitable in how I interpret them but the terminology is so consistent that it cannot be an accident -- gratis-but-proprietary is always "open", libre is never just "open" but always "open source". Technically correct isn't enough. No-one's explicitly staked "open" as being the same as "open source". But in the context of this conversation "open" is an obvious contraction of "open source" and to use the obvious contraction to mean something diametrically opposed is not reasonable or ok; especially when "source available" is widely understood. The same thing was attempted with the Commons License. The intent behind words is important. Persuasive oratory is fine but using those tactics to mislead does not engender trust, especially when the beneficiary is the one speaking and not the audience.
- Jedd 8y ago
  I came away with a similar impression. OP uses the word free twice, in both cases meaning $-free. "We [...] open sourced most of it, and made all of it free." From an enterprise licensing perspective, 'open source' as a subset of 'free' just means I shall have to spend more time with lawyers and accountants.
wgjordan 8y ago
Actions speak louder than words. Amazon's words [1] were backed up by action- specifically, the public release of Open Distro for Elasticsearch and several useful, advanced features under an Apache 2.0 license. This post from Elastic consists of vague claims of 'FUD' and of their commercial code being 'bluntly copied', without any further clarifying details or responsive action to back them up. (E.g., if you have real evidence of Amazon copying proprietary code, which I doubt, then announce the copyright infringement lawsuit you have just filed, don't weakly allude to your grievances in a blog post.) Conspicuously, the post did not contain any defense or even mention of Amazon's key accusations of "significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base", or its claim that "the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular." The only response offered is a vague, generic "we believe in open source" - again with no concrete action backing up those empty words. If this is the best and only response Elastic is able to offer, I fully expect Amazon to keep the high ground in this controversy. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...
- hypto 8y ago
  actions? I think this is speaking for itself: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss What has Amazon contributed to yet? Repackage other open source projects that was already existing? I don't call it a contribution.
  - wgjordan 8y ago
    > actions? I think this is speaking for itself: [link] The link is to a packaged, binary distribution of the 'OSS only' features, the assertion was regarding 'significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base'. The two are not the same. Also, from the release notes linked to from that page, Amazon's assertion that 'neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary' does appear to be valid.
    - 8y ago
throwaway12iii 8y ago
Remember that AWS pays the Open Source Initiative, and that their members often post on Open Source related topics here without disclosing their conflict of interest. Remember that AWS takes from developers, but doesn't give back anywhere near what they have made from the communities work. Rather than supporting Elastic... they decide to make a hostile fork. AWS are a bunch of jerks.
- geofft 8y ago
  What is the "Open Source Institute"? If you mean the Open Source Initiative, then yes, I have posted on open-source related topics here, yes, I am a member of the OSI (I joined... two weeks ago? mostly so I could vote for OSI board members who are committed to opposing corporate influence over the open source definition), and no, I do not have a conflict of interest. I paid the OSI $40 to join. I receive no money from the OSI; I certainly receive no money that Amazon donated to the OSI. I am not OSI staff, and I think the OSI only has one paid staff member. Saying there's a conflict of interest is like saying that individual ACLU members have a conflict of interest when speaking about a company that donates to the ACLU, or that Amazon Prime members have a conflict of interest when speaking about Amazon. (I am, as it happens, rather opposed to Amazon as a company. I canceled my Prime membership; I try to shop anywhere else if possible; I celebrated the loss of NYC HQ2. But in this case, I think they're in the right.)
  - throwaway12iii 8y ago
    An Open Source advocacy group with cloud providers on their board, and cloud providers who pay them hundreds of thousands per year. Their mission is to be evangelists for their definition of Open Source. The one that benefits cloud providers. Of course a lobby group like this should be transparent. But I don't expect a group like that with closed mailing lists to actually be Open.
    - geofft 8y ago
      I'm still not sure what group you're talking about. If you're talking about the Open Source Initiative, the description you're giving doesn't quite make sense: the board members of the Open Source Initiative are individuals, not organizations. Some of the individuals happen to be employed by Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc., but they don't seem to work in the cloud organizations and they're not representing their companies, anyway. The total budget of the OSI is in the couple hundred thousand range, i.e., comparable to a single full-time software engineer. So the fact that a few companies are each giving five-digit donations that add up to a six-digit budget doesn't seem like it's a huge priority for any of these companies. Take a look at the sponsorship levels on https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors . In any case, I agree that the Open Source Initiative should be transparent, and my individual membership in the OSI is not an endorsement of everything the OSI does any more than having a PyCon ticket is endorsement of everything the Python Software Foundation or their corporate sponsors do. (One specific thing they haven't done is post form 990s more recently than 2016, and I do intend to ask them to post these. But if you look at the 2016 one https://opensource.org/files/2016990EZ.pdf https://opensource.org/files/2016990EZ.pdf you can see that these aren't vast sums of money, and Craigslist donated more money to the OSI than any cloud provider.)
Infinity15 8y ago
They write this big post and end the last paragraph saying "It is always Day 0 at Elastic". What does that remind you of? :D
dominotw 8y ago
This was bad. I was expecting a move towards transparency that could've outmaneuvered amazon. This is just appeal to emotion.
shasts 8y ago
what would be the next move from Amazon? Open distro for Kafka, MongoDB and Redis, and all other successful opensource tools? Just don't know where Amazon is going with this approach of re-packaging existing opensource tools and calling it their opensource contribution.
- striking 8y ago
  Amazon is rewriting the proprietary enterprise features of ES from scratch and giving them away for free. Also, their MongoDB "distro" is just "Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)". That's not going to be open source, because it took a lot of work to basically rewrite most of Mongo.
scoutt 8y ago
As an alternative to parsing 3 HN links (plus comments) and reading between the lines, can someone please summarize what's going on ? Thank you.
ignoramous 8y ago
> When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. I think this may have been the crux of the friction between the companies. Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP [0][1], if not other enterprises. > Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself. I look around and spot at least three substantial bug/fixes from AWS employees (?) [2][3][4], so I don't see any lack of effort from AWS? AWS engs were sending pull requests, just like the others. That said, any sort of heavy handedness from maintainers of elasticsearch might also play a role in forcing enterprises to take control of software they depend upon so much where legally allowed. We have seen this happen with Node.js/IO.js and MariaDB/MySQL before. > The FUD mostly comes from large(r) companies that fear what such a movement can cause. The irony of this statement is not lost on me. Elastic is that larger company (one that crucially controls a majority of the ecosystem around elasticsearch: kibana, logstash, beats, xpack to name a few), and AWS is an upstart here with their investment in open-distro, presumably to fight FUD. > We all sometimes need to self reflect on what and why we did that made us successful, to make sure we stay true to our course. [..] to others out there, that face so many reasons to be distracted, keep your focus [..] And last, to express our shared commitment to continue to build great products [..] It is our true north. I think one right way for Elastic to show commitment to opensource would be to entrust the projects to a community agreed governance model, like others before them have done [5][6][7][8]. Also, what's interesting is that its not just Amazon here, but Expedia and Netflix as well putting their weight behind open-distro [9]. Like someone pointed out, this response from Elastic does seem to be emotionally charged [10]. --- [0] https://www.elastic.co/about/partners/google-cloud-platform https://www.elastic.co/about/partners/google-cloud-platform [1] blog.google "With the Elastic partnership in place, we’re kicking off our joint engineering work and will start rolling out managed Elasticsearch on GCP later this year." https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-partners-elastic-offer-managed-open-source-search-and-analytics-gcp/ https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-p... [2] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/27628/files https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/27628/files [3] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/31479 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/31479 [4] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/29531 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/29531 [5] GridGrain and https://ignite.apache.org https://ignite.apache.org [6] Various networking companies and http://opennetworking.org http://opennetworking.org [7] Cloudera and https://impala.apache.org https://impala.apache.org [8] LinkedIn/Confluent and https://kafka.apache.org/ https://kafka.apache.org/ [9] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... [10] "It is always Day 0 at Elastic (like the developers we serve, we use zero based numbering)."
scriptkiddy 8y ago
I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations. That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead. Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason to choose ElasticSearch over RethinkDb? ElasticSearch does have a larger ecosystem, but with how good RethinkDb's API is, I'm not entirely sure any 3rd party packages would actually be necessary. Add to that RethinkDb's ability to do joins and changefeeds and this decision becomes a no-brainer for me.
- brylie 8y ago
  From what I gather, RethinkDB hasn't seen a release since July 2017: https://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2.3.6-release/ https://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2.3.6-release/ The project may be transitioning to new governance.
  - scriptkiddy 8y ago
    Yeah, it was taken over by the Linux Foundation. I can't really say that RethinkDb NEEDS a new release.It's feature complete in my eyes. All it really needs at this point is maintenance.
- sciurus 8y ago
  The fact that the company behind rethinkdb went out of business and the community has been unable to keep it alive? https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/next https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/next
  - scriptkiddy 8y ago
    I mean, the core had 3 commits just last month. Some of the client libraries are much more active: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-python/commits/master https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-python/commits/master https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-rs/commits/next https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-rs/commits/next Sure, that's not a ton of development, but at least it's actually, really, open source. In addition, the software itself doesn't really need much improvement. It does what it's supposed to do very well and the client libraries are fantastic.
KorematsuFred 8y ago
I think a lot of open source people forget that large companies worry a lot about licenses and clarity around that. Without that clarity and control they get sued left and right and on this very forum we end up discussing how evil this large company has been. Elastic search is a great product and there is no doubt about it. However I understand Amazon's viewpoint that it should be clear which part of ES are open source and which are not. A the end of the day Amazon or Google can easily buuld a clone of ES from ground up.
newaccoutnas 8y ago
I'm sure Shay et al have good intentions, but to have any degree of usability with elastic.co you need to buy x-packs which goes against the grain a little. I'd still like to have auth (not just basic-http) on personal projects.
- cheald 8y ago
  Searchguard is a plugin for ES which gives you TLS + auth. They offer a paid version with more features (ActiveDirectory integration, HIPAA-compliant auditing, etc - actual enterprise features), but if you just need auth/ACLs/transport TLS, it's a great product.
  - newaccoutnas 8y ago
    Oh, thanks, I'll take a look
- softwaredoug 8y ago
  “Any degree of usability” Really? I have used ES for years and the majority of folks have gotten by with simple nginx proxies... most don’t need document level security
car12 8y ago
Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS. At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care. Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist. But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?
- marcinzm 8y ago
  Protecting Elastic Search the company and Elastic Search the open source project is not the same thing. AWS is releasing their changes as open source software to the public and maintaining their release. As long as ES the project keeps getting released who cares if it's Amazon, Netflix, Google or whomever that pays for the work behind it?
- geofft 8y ago
  Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. Open source developers do not need to be able to put food on the table while being employed by Elasticsearch. Frankly, yesterday's announcement made me seriously consider whether I wanted to apply for a job working at AWS, since I expect they have many positions where you're spending most of the time working on open source code like Elasticsearch. The argument you're making is equivalent to the old argument against open-source software itself: if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? Sure, it's great that some bored Finnish guy wrote an OS that's competitive with Solaris, but if he drives Sun out of business what's the guarantee anyone else will want to work on his OS? Don't we need proprietary software companies to ensure that quality software gets developed?
  - car12 8y ago
    > if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? And that did happen, we don't have a single decent affordable personal computing ecosystem at this point. The only good personal computing ecosystem is with Apple, which makes its money by selling proprietary software mostly but is not affordable to ordinary joe. What an ordinary person can buy, is an ad-riddled machine like a windows desktop or a chromebook, where although the software is not proprietary, they're basically selling you ads(directly or indirectly through your data). To tie it back in, in fact open source software did rise up and proprietary software did go down, but we lost the pure software aspect that came with proprietary software. Basically, open source software is being used to sell you ads and if the ads based business goes down/stops so does open source ecosystem. If you haven't realized, the biggest parts of the open source economy are propped by FAANG and Microsoft. If these big whales go away, open source's vibrancy will vanish in a poof. In fact open source software creation is hugely concentrated to North America and by extension FAANG. So if FAANG were to stop sponsoring open source, we'll be back to proprietary software age soon. So, I'm not convinced of your argument that "open source" has won conclusively.
jalaziz 8y ago
This letter is clearly not written by someone who interacts with customers. As someone who has tried to work with Elastic, their pricing is atrocious even for the most basic of features. You can't get alerting without paying a king's ransom for features you'll likely never use.
raiyu 8y ago
While the original movement behind open source was one of benevolence that isn't to say that the economic model of open source at scale actually works as a competitive advantage. There are costs associated with running a business and one of the largest is marketing. What open source allows you to do is defer these costs by charging nothing for adoption. This allows you to acquire users, build up an ecosystem, and create a moat against competitors to your business. Competitors not in the sense of AWS which is adjacent, but competitors in the sense of another replacement for Elastic Search itself. At the beginning you are losing 100% of your revenue opportunity, but you have to remember that you are either modeling yourself as a consumer company or business company. Simply put, consumers companies make more money from consumers while businesses make more money from businesses. AWS is a business company so the majority of their revenue is from businesses. With most open source projects you are also a business, which means if you find 10 years of success 90% of your revenue will eventually come from businesses. Those early adopters are usually smaller entities so they aren't really a large opportunity loss and the big businesses want to see massive adoption before they really consider switching. So effectively you are cutting out 20% of your revenue opportunity to build up an ecosystem moat as well as marketing budget. It isn't money directly out of your pocket, but instead is paid purely in head count, which by the way is much cheaper and more effective than trying to market your software to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. The "free" component isn't just one of benevolence but actually an attack on any future competitor because why would those early adopters pay $5 for something that they can get for free. Most early businesses rely on these smaller customers and open source actually cuts that out of the equation, reducing competition. So it's a very interesting dynamic in the sense that something that was started for a "good" purpose can accidentally actually stifle future competition, when you would assume otherwise.
linuxdude314 8y ago
The claim that Amazon says they work with Elastic for their service is bogus. I've asked many times, and its been made clear to me that they have some additional services they run, but aside from those run upstream Elasticsearch. (Same with Kubernetes). Elastic's licensing is very hard to navigate, and the per node nature of it often makes it more cost prohibitive than Splunk. Hopefully this is a wakeup call to Elastic to start delivering value that can't simply be added by third party contributions. If thats the case, what purpose is Elastic (corporation) actually fulfilling?
ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
time to forget elastic and use open distros
yowlingcat 8y ago
Yeah, Elastic doesn't look great here. Anyone else getting deja vu about Mongo?
benatkin 8y ago
Elastic, like Redis and MongoDB before it, decided that Open Core isn't enough, but that they need to go against the Open Source Initiative (a grassroots organization that represents the Open Source movement very well, and runs https://opensource.org/ https://opensource.org/ which contains the open source definition) and confuse users by misusing the well understood, but non-trademarked term "open source". This phrase in the post from the article: "When others closed down, we opened up." ...links to another article called Doubling Down on Open [1] where they say introduce their source available strategy and in some places call it open source (with and without capital letters) and in other places differentiate between it and open source. Please don't call things Open Source that don't fit the Open Source Definition. You have a right to do so since it's not trademarked, and I'll defend that right, but it adds confusion (the D part of FUD). And while the OSI doesn't have a trademark to Open Source (perhaps rightfully so since it's a generic term, though more generic terms like Apple have been trademarked), they do own opensource.org. [1]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open
mythz 8y ago
OSS is a great business model if you're one of the 3 multi-billion dollar major cloud vendors co's who are collectively the primary beneficiaries of everyone else's OSS investments since relatively no-one pays to acquire/use free OSS software, only to host it, so it's of course in their best interest to keep everything OSS so they can collect rent at the point where people pay to utilize its value - for hosting their production systems. It's easy for AWS, Azure or GCP to be altruistic and suggests everything should be OSS for the betterment of humanity, since they've become the primary beneficiaries of the wealth created by OSS which benefits them more than anything else. Then use the profits to develop billion dollar cloud infrastructure moats to ensure a barrier to entry that prohibits anyone else from partaking in. This is ultimately the core issue between companies behind developers of OSS software like Redis Labs, Confluent, Elastic.co, etc. They've put in the investment to build and support their OSS products but it's the cloud vendors end up reaping most of the revenue derived from it given they're the only entity Customers pay to host their production systems. This is what the extended OSS licenses are designed to target which are typically free for everyone else but prohibits the cloud vendors from absorbing all the rewards from hosting their software without revenue sharing anything back.
prabhatjha 8y ago
I think that AWS are the "bad guy" here. I am happy to be proven wrong but they don’t have a track record of contributing code to the OSS projects they provide as a service. Whenever they are forced like it was the case with Mongo and now with Elastic they are using their power to have a competing OSS project. There is nothing wrong with this business wise but it's totally against spirit of OSS. If you look at Red Hat on other hand when they decided that Kubernetes was the way to go for their OpenShift project they put lots of engineering resources for upstream k8s.
mdnormy 8y ago
This response doesn't address why Netflix and Expedia Group is joining AWS open distro effort. Licensing is major headache for them I assumed. Personally, as current and former administrator of multiple ES cluster, I'm quite worried how this "intermingling of open source and proprietary code" will affect my current and previous team. We certainly not aware of it before this week.
vikaskyadav 8y ago
This is why I like Thanos. Bullshit is everywhere. Even a person doing behind a great open source software is getting criticism now. Good days!
cestith 8y ago
Very specifically, the open core of Elastic's offering doesn't do authentication. It's not that there's a limited number of users. It's not that it's a single user and password in a config file somewhere. It's that you go from having all the features of a licensed version including multiple users with configurable access to different data sets down to needing to run elk with no native authentication and authorization and then wrap authentication around it one way or another if you want the community edition. This is 2019. A data aggregation and inspection system that by default sits open on a port for anyone to use is not quite fit for purpose.

306 points by christophilus 8y ago

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elastic...

dhd415 8y ago

With the rise of cloud computing, the effort by cloud providers to commoditize their complements, i.e., software, inevitably leads to this particular kind of conflict between companies backing OSS software who wish to deploy their own SaaS offerings and cloud providers with their own SaaS offerings. A common response is that OSS backers can build businesses based on support and consulting but I believe that's overly restrictive. Those kinds of businesses don't scale nearly as well as managed services and it will definitely have a chilling effect on OSS development if the kinds of companies that are permitted to be built on them are simply support and consulting. I don't believe that companies backing OSS have an exclusive right to offer managed services for their software, but the current situation with cloud providers offering managed services with only token engagement with the OSS community (and then only when forced into it by licensing restrictions) is not beneficial to OSS, either.

SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
The post describes how Amazon offered more than a token engagement. Elastic rejected them, as such a partnership would have included "preferential treatment that would place them above our users". That's consistent with what I've seen from other OSS-backing companies; they want cloud providers to contribute to their community, but flatly refuse to go out of their way to enable it.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago

I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit. If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro. Anyone have a different take?

rooam-dev 8y ago
Just my 2 cents. I don't care about Amazon's distro, I think it won't work. Others have tried, e.g. MariaDB vs MySQL, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Time will show though... Edit: The thought was about big companies with their own agenda behind open source initiatives. Sorry about confusion.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  What pattern are you seeing in those examples? Most Linux distros today ship with LibreOffice and have MariaDB in-repo. From where I sit, the open forks won.
  - rooam-dev 8y ago
    Yes, the fork timeline/direction is different, but imho, the pattern is, big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork. I only can imagine the amount of resources put into keeping up. Will Amazon "rebase" their version with Elastic's? I doubt that for long time. Features advantaging AWS will be pushed, for better integration with 3rd party, which basically AWS' solutions. I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      > big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork. MariaDB is a community fork away from a controlling company. Libreoffice is run by its own foundation, again after forking away from a company-controlled version. > I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS. I mean, worst case just run it on EC2/ECS, which lets you run anything you want. They're not going to break that.
  - mises 8y ago
    Won in terms of user base, maybe. But in terms of money made and commercial adoption? Mysql beats Mariadb, though I can' t say for openoffice/libreoffice.

buryat 8y ago

so, any license changes?

timdorr 8y ago

For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961

hodgesrm 8y ago
Clicking through to the AWS blog article [1] we find this: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. This was part of the promise the maintainer made when they gained developers’ trust to adopt the software. I have enormous respect for Adrian's work on cloud systems but the quote above seems very self-serving for Amazon. Open source is bound by licenses that define the terms of open source code use. There's nothing whatsoever in the licenses that binds the project developers to continue to work on the project, to maintain similar license terms in later releases, or to take (or not take) any other action in their lives. To argue otherwise seems contrary to the notions of freedom that are the foundation of open source software. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... Edit: typo corrected
- sokoloff 8y ago
  I think it’s fine for Elastic to seek to go to a non-open-source license (whether source-available or not) for new developments or portions of their code. It’s also fine for others, including AWS, to take the open-source portions and fork/continue developing on the open source fork. In such a situation, I’d expect open to win over proprietary.
- bigiain 8y ago
  Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit. Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None. Same as they owe me nothing. By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in that you can always use the code and license you've been using - but there's no way anybody can make it a "responsibility" of a maintainer to to anything in the future. They could die, they could get bored, they could get an all-encompassing job, they could get a family, they could get venture capital and license any future work with a non-open source license (as Redis and Elastic have done, at least in some people's view). The "the promise the maintainer made" was "here's some code, under GPL or aGPL, or Apache Licence, or Artistic license of BSD three clause, or whatever the promise at the time was. Take it or leave it. No future responsibility assumed or enforced. They might even have a track record of releasing more stuff under the same license/promise. But they can stop or change things whenever they want. If Amazon wants the maintainers to do anything else (including ever committing another line of code or fixing a bug), they can wait for them to do (or not) it at their discretion, or they can pay the maintainer (or someone else) to do it (and then, depending on the license, potentially be required to release that code under the same license. Sorry for the rant, but that line caught my eye too, and I got immediately pissed off at Amazon's sense of entitlement there. No open source maintainer owes you shit. They've shared what they've shared, and you can take it or leave it, but you taking it doesn't place any obligation or responsibility on them. (deep breath)

vegardx 8y ago

It would be interesting if someone pushed a PR that contains more or less all the "secret sauce" of X-Pack, and see what reasons they'd use for rejecting it. Clarification: Not push X-Pack itself, but features comparable. Like they suggested people do in the post.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

rushabh 8y ago

"When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. This happened numerous times over the years, and only recently again, this time with Amazon. Some have aligned and became wonderful partners to us and the community. Others, sadly, didn't follow through. We have a commitment that we will treat a single developer contributing to our products the same as others. There is no preference, and we will reject any ask to have one. Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself." The way this is written, it seems like there was a difference of opinion in terms of the product architecture, and not a purely commercial decision by Amazon. I would think it would make commercial sense for the team at Elastic to align with Amazon than the other way round. On the other hand Amazon claims that Elastic was moving away towards proprietary code [1]. Overall, being in open source for a decade, I am against this trend in dual licensing (which I fear is pushed by Venture Capitalists). People forget that the fact that you have freedom and zero friction, is what makes open source awesome. There are other ways to make money, like building a kick-ass consulting practice around the open source offering. [1] https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/faq.html https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/faq.html

blinkingled 8y ago

Lot of bitterness about people forking and bundling ES. If it was so painful for Elastic maybe they should have gone for a more suitable model - you get everything open source and pay for support and priority /early access to security updates. Unlike the current model where you get basic features as open source and have to pay for and use different license if you want to use essential features like monitoring and performance analysis. Someone else with a business model that benefits from providing these features for free and making them open source to reduce their development/maintenance burden - cloud providers like Amazon - are going to do just that. And they're well within their right to do so.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
> pay for support and security updates. Impeding security updates seems rather unethical. Unless you mean backports to old/stable versions, which is still iffy in my mind but does at least maintain a way to stay secure for everyone.
- blinkingled 8y ago
  I meant priority/early access to security updates really. Updated my post to reflect that. For example enterprises may want quicker access to well tested bug or security fixes - they can get that first and then the patches appear on GitHub for open source users.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  Seems unethical for people benefiting from something to externalize the cost of security, expecting bug hunters to work with no benefits. I could lean toward selling security fixes if it was commercial software. Not sure about free/open yet. If something like Tor, I'd rather we make exceptions regardless of general philosophy just to keep majority of people safe. Especially the kind of folks that help us out with their sacrifices. Most software isn't like that. My current preference is going back to highly-permissive, shared-source licenses by public-benefit companies whose charters and contracts don't let them screw people in at least all the ways we know about. Perpetual, free licenses w/ no or optional support for non-commercial or small business. Cost goes up with scale from there maybe with enterprise features sold separately. Anything not a competitive advantage, esp building blocks or platform stuff, might get open-sourced. Anyone licensed can modify the software and distribute that to other licensees. Might make exception for features or code in new version so they can't skip payment with backport. Maintains most of benefits of OSS with less risk of proprietary or hybrid licensing. Charging for security fixes could be a simple way of motivating folks to pay for improvements to the software. A preferred model that's harder to build is using methods that make nearly vulnerability-free software with a warranty against specific types of defects or at specific, defect rates. Cleanroom shops and Praxis Correct-by-Construction did that with an upfront premium applied with defect rate in warranty fixed at supplier's cost. So, still thinking on specifics of all of that or potential integrations.

pauldix 8y ago

This is a really great response and I'm curious how AWS will respond. It's particularly damning because AWS was arguing from a position of moral authority on the move, which I think was disingenuous. They wanted to create a fork and act like they weren't. Shay just called them out on it. I also wrote up my own thoughts, but it's obviously not as relevant as this. I'm a little more blunt about what AWS is doing. I even throw in a comparison to Microsoft abusing their monopoly power in the 90's by distributing Explorer for free to kill off Netscape: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-project-to-be-an-elasticsearch-fork/ https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-pr... Longer term, the real question is how Elastic will respond to this commercially. Will they create more closed source? Go higher up the stack into specific applications? It's going to be an interesting and tumultuous couple of years in open source infrastructure software.

andreareina 8y ago
Elastic doesn't have much moral authority either when they keep using the word "open" in reference to code that isn't open source. But they never say "open source" so technically correct. EDIT: you've remarked elsewhere on the thread about commercial and economic realities, so I want to take the opportunity to qualify my statement: they're free to license and monetize their code however they want. It's what I see as deceptive intent that I'm having a (very strong) reaction to.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  Iiuc, they are basically using open core model, with core app being free/open/libre under Apache license, and extensions proprietary with code available non-free/non-open/non-libre Elastic license. At least to me the situation seems pretty clear, and Amazon complaining that they can't take all of the code to create a competing service seems pretty disingenious to me. OP's post is thus in line with what I would expect - but it seems to irk you in some way. What is it that I'm missing?
  - andreareina 8y ago
    I said more here[1] but basically the use of "open" around their gratis/proprietary code. Never "open source" so it's not an untruth but it's still misleading especially in a context where they're also talking about their contributions to open source, a commitment to being open, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19369774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19369774

explodingcamera 8y ago

Wow elastic seems salty. I don't think this blog post was a great idea. While I understand that they need to monetize their project, I have been put off by them putting their security features behind a paywall. They literally advertised "Security" as non-existent on their XPack pricing page for their basic free plan. Furthermore, I am still laughing about how the author litteraly wrote that Amazon "bluntly copied" them, "sadly, painfully, with critical bugs".

shareinnovation 8y ago

Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. Elastic, mongo, Kafka, redis, all are being preyed upon.

benologist 8y ago
This has been part of Amazon's business model for years, they have 10,000s of products copied from their vendors. They have even copied stuff hosted on AWS in addition to open source software deployed on AWS. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...
mises 8y ago
> Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. How? Redis is trying, and got backlash. Mongo is trying, and got backlash. Confluent is trying, and got backlash. We've rather got to pick our poison here: do we want companies to open their code and have it used for managed services/cloned, or do we want them to close it and keep making cool tech? I recall reading about the model Google used to use for this sort of thing: open your source code about three to five years after you stop using it. This gives something to the community, while still allowing you to maintain a competitive advantage, run a managed service, etc. Particularly for those who run a SAAS model, it lets them gain widespread adoption before a competitor can spin up an instance of their stuff and undercut them slightly. Oh, and for those saying "use the Red Hat model", the Red Hat model can't work for everyone. Red Hat had a new idea and essentially no competition for enterprise linux at the time, and so didn't have to deal with the competition. They got a chance to build a customer base before Oracle knocked their product off. And even then, Oracle did completely rip off their work. That's the risk you run with open-sourcing your codebase, and not every company is built to work that way; not our job to tell them they should redo their business model to allow it.
- 8y ago

amirathi 8y ago

Why write emotionally charged letter instead of one backed with facts? Amazon is claiming [1][2] that Elastic has been intentionally unclear about what part of Elastic stack is open source vs proprietary. It would best serve Elastic if they respond to that with facts. If the claims are true, and done intentionally, it's a really bad move on part of Elastic. The ambiguity around licensing hurts all their users and not just Amazon. [1] "Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary." [2] "Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate"

cik 8y ago
I couldn't agree more with Amazon. We build something on Elastic - and trying to work with them to get licensing was at best a major PITA. In ~2017 Elastic decided they wanted to go Enterprise Only. They started to charge $100k for x-pack, though one could get a dev license for $50K. We quickly built a SQL parser for Elastic, an alerting engine, some other bits. These are all bits that just went poof yesterday when Amazon released opendistro - and I couldn't be happier. Sure we'll have to slice out a bunch of code, but at the end of the day it didn't have value to our core business. I just wish Elastic as a company was easier to deal with. We'd be months ahead if not for them - and ultimately just worked around them. This is in spite of MY using Elastic for ~9 years now.
- ksec 8y ago
  May be Amazon should just spend some money and buy elastic? and call it a day.
  - cik 8y ago
    Not worth their target of $500M. Quite frankly Amazon just sunk the value of Elastic in a huge way. I'm trying to figure out if anyone here will let me pre-register for a short.

AbraKdabra 8y ago

I read all of that as a rant about "pleople cloning my open source project and making it better, stop plz". Duh, I'm glad about the direction Amazon is going.

jrochkind1 8y ago

It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party. When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing. When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either. It may be that the collective HN vibe is critical no matter what. But also maybe "we" in aggregate legitimately don't like either option given. I know open source devs need to make money somehow. I also wish there was a way to do it that was open source. I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source. In the original period of open source, people generally worked on open source on the clock at their existing jobs, a building tools they needed for that job, a job not dedicated to that particular product but to getting something done that product helped with. People were getting paid to write open source, but it wasn't by "productizing" it. The results were still shared freely. (this is how/where apache httpd, for one, came from; people with jobs who needed an http server writing one on the clock, even though their job was not "writing an http server." They needed an http server to accomplish what was needed for their employers, but their employers had no desire or capacity to be in the business of selling an http server. Why not collaborate on one we can all use?) But those days are gone, software has just gotten _so much more complex_ and time-consuming to develop. The open source software we have and need can't be developed in someone's "spare" (even on-the-clock spare) time. Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product. But we see the perils of that when an employer decides "wait, why aren't we making money selling this? Why are we contributing our employee's time to it?" (thanks Oracle). So that leaves people trying to productize it one way or another. It is not clear to me how to have a healthy open source ecosystem in that market environment. I don't think "proprietary layer on top" is actually good for open source, especially if it's gonna lead (naturally) to rejecting contributions from outside to add those same features as open source (why would we want to spend time working with a contributor to make the feature solid, when we _already wrote it_, and when accepting the contribution would _harm our business model_ because that feature is what we want to charge for?), and then resistance to the "right to fork" which I consider the fundamental basis of open source freedom.

8y ago

andreareina 8y ago

Clicking through to the other blog posts, it becomes apparent the the author plays fast and loose with the word "open", to their benefit. They "opened up" by providing gratis licenses to some of their software. They don't call it "open source", but the phrase "open source" is also scattered around the articles, so that "open" benefits by proximal association. They're free to license their software however they want; I don't use it so I really don't care. But it really rankles when someone extols the virtues of open source and waxes rhetoric about how open they are, and yet the software they offer is proprietary by default. They "double down on open", but the open source distribution is opt-in. I cannot help but feel that the articles are deliberately constructed to mislead. That's a serious accusation and I wish I could be more charitable in how I interpret them but the terminology is so consistent that it cannot be an accident -- gratis-but-proprietary is always "open", libre is never just "open" but always "open source". Technically correct isn't enough. No-one's explicitly staked "open" as being the same as "open source". But in the context of this conversation "open" is an obvious contraction of "open source" and to use the obvious contraction to mean something diametrically opposed is not reasonable or ok; especially when "source available" is widely understood. The same thing was attempted with the Commons License. The intent behind words is important. Persuasive oratory is fine but using those tactics to mislead does not engender trust, especially when the beneficiary is the one speaking and not the audience.

Jedd 8y ago
I came away with a similar impression. OP uses the word free twice, in both cases meaning $-free. "We [...] open sourced most of it, and made all of it free." From an enterprise licensing perspective, 'open source' as a subset of 'free' just means I shall have to spend more time with lawyers and accountants.

wgjordan 8y ago

Actions speak louder than words. Amazon's words [1] were backed up by action- specifically, the public release of Open Distro for Elasticsearch and several useful, advanced features under an Apache 2.0 license. This post from Elastic consists of vague claims of 'FUD' and of their commercial code being 'bluntly copied', without any further clarifying details or responsive action to back them up. (E.g., if you have real evidence of Amazon copying proprietary code, which I doubt, then announce the copyright infringement lawsuit you have just filed, don't weakly allude to your grievances in a blog post.) Conspicuously, the post did not contain any defense or even mention of Amazon's key accusations of "significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base", or its claim that "the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular." The only response offered is a vague, generic "we believe in open source" - again with no concrete action backing up those empty words. If this is the best and only response Elastic is able to offer, I fully expect Amazon to keep the high ground in this controversy. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

hypto 8y ago
actions? I think this is speaking for itself: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss What has Amazon contributed to yet? Repackage other open source projects that was already existing? I don't call it a contribution.
- wgjordan 8y ago
  > actions? I think this is speaking for itself: [link] The link is to a packaged, binary distribution of the 'OSS only' features, the assertion was regarding 'significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base'. The two are not the same. Also, from the release notes linked to from that page, Amazon's assertion that 'neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary' does appear to be valid.
  - 8y ago

throwaway12iii 8y ago

Remember that AWS pays the Open Source Initiative, and that their members often post on Open Source related topics here without disclosing their conflict of interest. Remember that AWS takes from developers, but doesn't give back anywhere near what they have made from the communities work. Rather than supporting Elastic... they decide to make a hostile fork. AWS are a bunch of jerks.

geofft 8y ago
What is the "Open Source Institute"? If you mean the Open Source Initiative, then yes, I have posted on open-source related topics here, yes, I am a member of the OSI (I joined... two weeks ago? mostly so I could vote for OSI board members who are committed to opposing corporate influence over the open source definition), and no, I do not have a conflict of interest. I paid the OSI $40 to join. I receive no money from the OSI; I certainly receive no money that Amazon donated to the OSI. I am not OSI staff, and I think the OSI only has one paid staff member. Saying there's a conflict of interest is like saying that individual ACLU members have a conflict of interest when speaking about a company that donates to the ACLU, or that Amazon Prime members have a conflict of interest when speaking about Amazon. (I am, as it happens, rather opposed to Amazon as a company. I canceled my Prime membership; I try to shop anywhere else if possible; I celebrated the loss of NYC HQ2. But in this case, I think they're in the right.)
- throwaway12iii 8y ago
  An Open Source advocacy group with cloud providers on their board, and cloud providers who pay them hundreds of thousands per year. Their mission is to be evangelists for their definition of Open Source. The one that benefits cloud providers. Of course a lobby group like this should be transparent. But I don't expect a group like that with closed mailing lists to actually be Open.
  - geofft 8y ago
    I'm still not sure what group you're talking about. If you're talking about the Open Source Initiative, the description you're giving doesn't quite make sense: the board members of the Open Source Initiative are individuals, not organizations. Some of the individuals happen to be employed by Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc., but they don't seem to work in the cloud organizations and they're not representing their companies, anyway. The total budget of the OSI is in the couple hundred thousand range, i.e., comparable to a single full-time software engineer. So the fact that a few companies are each giving five-digit donations that add up to a six-digit budget doesn't seem like it's a huge priority for any of these companies. Take a look at the sponsorship levels on https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors . In any case, I agree that the Open Source Initiative should be transparent, and my individual membership in the OSI is not an endorsement of everything the OSI does any more than having a PyCon ticket is endorsement of everything the Python Software Foundation or their corporate sponsors do. (One specific thing they haven't done is post form 990s more recently than 2016, and I do intend to ask them to post these. But if you look at the 2016 one https://opensource.org/files/2016990EZ.pdf https://opensource.org/files/2016990EZ.pdf you can see that these aren't vast sums of money, and Craigslist donated more money to the OSI than any cloud provider.)

Infinity15 8y ago

They write this big post and end the last paragraph saying "It is always Day 0 at Elastic". What does that remind you of? :D

dominotw 8y ago

This was bad. I was expecting a move towards transparency that could've outmaneuvered amazon. This is just appeal to emotion.

shasts 8y ago

what would be the next move from Amazon? Open distro for Kafka, MongoDB and Redis, and all other successful opensource tools? Just don't know where Amazon is going with this approach of re-packaging existing opensource tools and calling it their opensource contribution.

striking 8y ago
Amazon is rewriting the proprietary enterprise features of ES from scratch and giving them away for free. Also, their MongoDB "distro" is just "Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)". That's not going to be open source, because it took a lot of work to basically rewrite most of Mongo.

scoutt 8y ago

As an alternative to parsing 3 HN links (plus comments) and reading between the lines, can someone please summarize what's going on ? Thank you.

ignoramous 8y ago

> When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. I think this may have been the crux of the friction between the companies. Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP [0][1], if not other enterprises. > Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself. I look around and spot at least three substantial bug/fixes from AWS employees (?) [2][3][4], so I don't see any lack of effort from AWS? AWS engs were sending pull requests, just like the others. That said, any sort of heavy handedness from maintainers of elasticsearch might also play a role in forcing enterprises to take control of software they depend upon so much where legally allowed. We have seen this happen with Node.js/IO.js and MariaDB/MySQL before. > The FUD mostly comes from large(r) companies that fear what such a movement can cause. The irony of this statement is not lost on me. Elastic is that larger company (one that crucially controls a majority of the ecosystem around elasticsearch: kibana, logstash, beats, xpack to name a few), and AWS is an upstart here with their investment in open-distro, presumably to fight FUD. > We all sometimes need to self reflect on what and why we did that made us successful, to make sure we stay true to our course. [..] to others out there, that face so many reasons to be distracted, keep your focus [..] And last, to express our shared commitment to continue to build great products [..] It is our true north. I think one right way for Elastic to show commitment to opensource would be to entrust the projects to a community agreed governance model, like others before them have done [5][6][7][8]. Also, what's interesting is that its not just Amazon here, but Expedia and Netflix as well putting their weight behind open-distro [9]. Like someone pointed out, this response from Elastic does seem to be emotionally charged [10]. --- [0] https://www.elastic.co/about/partners/google-cloud-platform https://www.elastic.co/about/partners/google-cloud-platform [1] blog.google "With the Elastic partnership in place, we’re kicking off our joint engineering work and will start rolling out managed Elasticsearch on GCP later this year." https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-partners-elastic-offer-managed-open-source-search-and-analytics-gcp/ https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-p... [2] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/27628/files https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/27628/files [3] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/31479 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/31479 [4] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/29531 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/29531 [5] GridGrain and https://ignite.apache.org https://ignite.apache.org [6] Various networking companies and http://opennetworking.org http://opennetworking.org [7] Cloudera and https://impala.apache.org https://impala.apache.org [8] LinkedIn/Confluent and https://kafka.apache.org/ https://kafka.apache.org/ [9] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... [10] "It is always Day 0 at Elastic (like the developers we serve, we use zero based numbering)."

scriptkiddy 8y ago

I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations. That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead. Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason to choose ElasticSearch over RethinkDb? ElasticSearch does have a larger ecosystem, but with how good RethinkDb's API is, I'm not entirely sure any 3rd party packages would actually be necessary. Add to that RethinkDb's ability to do joins and changefeeds and this decision becomes a no-brainer for me.

brylie 8y ago
From what I gather, RethinkDB hasn't seen a release since July 2017: https://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2.3.6-release/ https://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2.3.6-release/ The project may be transitioning to new governance.
- scriptkiddy 8y ago
  Yeah, it was taken over by the Linux Foundation. I can't really say that RethinkDb NEEDS a new release.It's feature complete in my eyes. All it really needs at this point is maintenance.
sciurus 8y ago
The fact that the company behind rethinkdb went out of business and the community has been unable to keep it alive? https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/next https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/next
- scriptkiddy 8y ago
  I mean, the core had 3 commits just last month. Some of the client libraries are much more active: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-python/commits/master https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-python/commits/master https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-rs/commits/next https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-rs/commits/next Sure, that's not a ton of development, but at least it's actually, really, open source. In addition, the software itself doesn't really need much improvement. It does what it's supposed to do very well and the client libraries are fantastic.

KorematsuFred 8y ago

I think a lot of open source people forget that large companies worry a lot about licenses and clarity around that. Without that clarity and control they get sued left and right and on this very forum we end up discussing how evil this large company has been. Elastic search is a great product and there is no doubt about it. However I understand Amazon's viewpoint that it should be clear which part of ES are open source and which are not. A the end of the day Amazon or Google can easily buuld a clone of ES from ground up.

newaccoutnas 8y ago

I'm sure Shay et al have good intentions, but to have any degree of usability with elastic.co you need to buy x-packs which goes against the grain a little. I'd still like to have auth (not just basic-http) on personal projects.

cheald 8y ago
Searchguard is a plugin for ES which gives you TLS + auth. They offer a paid version with more features (ActiveDirectory integration, HIPAA-compliant auditing, etc - actual enterprise features), but if you just need auth/ACLs/transport TLS, it's a great product.
- newaccoutnas 8y ago
  Oh, thanks, I'll take a look
softwaredoug 8y ago
“Any degree of usability” Really? I have used ES for years and the majority of folks have gotten by with simple nginx proxies... most don’t need document level security

car12 8y ago

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS. At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care. Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist. But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?

marcinzm 8y ago
Protecting Elastic Search the company and Elastic Search the open source project is not the same thing. AWS is releasing their changes as open source software to the public and maintaining their release. As long as ES the project keeps getting released who cares if it's Amazon, Netflix, Google or whomever that pays for the work behind it?
geofft 8y ago
Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. Open source developers do not need to be able to put food on the table while being employed by Elasticsearch. Frankly, yesterday's announcement made me seriously consider whether I wanted to apply for a job working at AWS, since I expect they have many positions where you're spending most of the time working on open source code like Elasticsearch. The argument you're making is equivalent to the old argument against open-source software itself: if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? Sure, it's great that some bored Finnish guy wrote an OS that's competitive with Solaris, but if he drives Sun out of business what's the guarantee anyone else will want to work on his OS? Don't we need proprietary software companies to ensure that quality software gets developed?
- car12 8y ago
  > if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? And that did happen, we don't have a single decent affordable personal computing ecosystem at this point. The only good personal computing ecosystem is with Apple, which makes its money by selling proprietary software mostly but is not affordable to ordinary joe. What an ordinary person can buy, is an ad-riddled machine like a windows desktop or a chromebook, where although the software is not proprietary, they're basically selling you ads(directly or indirectly through your data). To tie it back in, in fact open source software did rise up and proprietary software did go down, but we lost the pure software aspect that came with proprietary software. Basically, open source software is being used to sell you ads and if the ads based business goes down/stops so does open source ecosystem. If you haven't realized, the biggest parts of the open source economy are propped by FAANG and Microsoft. If these big whales go away, open source's vibrancy will vanish in a poof. In fact open source software creation is hugely concentrated to North America and by extension FAANG. So if FAANG were to stop sponsoring open source, we'll be back to proprietary software age soon. So, I'm not convinced of your argument that "open source" has won conclusively.

jalaziz 8y ago

This letter is clearly not written by someone who interacts with customers. As someone who has tried to work with Elastic, their pricing is atrocious even for the most basic of features. You can't get alerting without paying a king's ransom for features you'll likely never use.

raiyu 8y ago

While the original movement behind open source was one of benevolence that isn't to say that the economic model of open source at scale actually works as a competitive advantage. There are costs associated with running a business and one of the largest is marketing. What open source allows you to do is defer these costs by charging nothing for adoption. This allows you to acquire users, build up an ecosystem, and create a moat against competitors to your business. Competitors not in the sense of AWS which is adjacent, but competitors in the sense of another replacement for Elastic Search itself. At the beginning you are losing 100% of your revenue opportunity, but you have to remember that you are either modeling yourself as a consumer company or business company. Simply put, consumers companies make more money from consumers while businesses make more money from businesses. AWS is a business company so the majority of their revenue is from businesses. With most open source projects you are also a business, which means if you find 10 years of success 90% of your revenue will eventually come from businesses. Those early adopters are usually smaller entities so they aren't really a large opportunity loss and the big businesses want to see massive adoption before they really consider switching. So effectively you are cutting out 20% of your revenue opportunity to build up an ecosystem moat as well as marketing budget. It isn't money directly out of your pocket, but instead is paid purely in head count, which by the way is much cheaper and more effective than trying to market your software to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. The "free" component isn't just one of benevolence but actually an attack on any future competitor because why would those early adopters pay $5 for something that they can get for free. Most early businesses rely on these smaller customers and open source actually cuts that out of the equation, reducing competition. So it's a very interesting dynamic in the sense that something that was started for a "good" purpose can accidentally actually stifle future competition, when you would assume otherwise.

linuxdude314 8y ago

The claim that Amazon says they work with Elastic for their service is bogus. I've asked many times, and its been made clear to me that they have some additional services they run, but aside from those run upstream Elasticsearch. (Same with Kubernetes). Elastic's licensing is very hard to navigate, and the per node nature of it often makes it more cost prohibitive than Splunk. Hopefully this is a wakeup call to Elastic to start delivering value that can't simply be added by third party contributions. If thats the case, what purpose is Elastic (corporation) actually fulfilling?

ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago

time to forget elastic and use open distros

yowlingcat 8y ago

Yeah, Elastic doesn't look great here. Anyone else getting deja vu about Mongo?

benatkin 8y ago

Elastic, like Redis and MongoDB before it, decided that Open Core isn't enough, but that they need to go against the Open Source Initiative (a grassroots organization that represents the Open Source movement very well, and runs https://opensource.org/ https://opensource.org/ which contains the open source definition) and confuse users by misusing the well understood, but non-trademarked term "open source". This phrase in the post from the article: "When others closed down, we opened up." ...links to another article called Doubling Down on Open [1] where they say introduce their source available strategy and in some places call it open source (with and without capital letters) and in other places differentiate between it and open source. Please don't call things Open Source that don't fit the Open Source Definition. You have a right to do so since it's not trademarked, and I'll defend that right, but it adds confusion (the D part of FUD). And while the OSI doesn't have a trademark to Open Source (perhaps rightfully so since it's a generic term, though more generic terms like Apple have been trademarked), they do own opensource.org. [1]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open

mythz 8y ago

OSS is a great business model if you're one of the 3 multi-billion dollar major cloud vendors co's who are collectively the primary beneficiaries of everyone else's OSS investments since relatively no-one pays to acquire/use free OSS software, only to host it, so it's of course in their best interest to keep everything OSS so they can collect rent at the point where people pay to utilize its value - for hosting their production systems. It's easy for AWS, Azure or GCP to be altruistic and suggests everything should be OSS for the betterment of humanity, since they've become the primary beneficiaries of the wealth created by OSS which benefits them more than anything else. Then use the profits to develop billion dollar cloud infrastructure moats to ensure a barrier to entry that prohibits anyone else from partaking in. This is ultimately the core issue between companies behind developers of OSS software like Redis Labs, Confluent, Elastic.co, etc. They've put in the investment to build and support their OSS products but it's the cloud vendors end up reaping most of the revenue derived from it given they're the only entity Customers pay to host their production systems. This is what the extended OSS licenses are designed to target which are typically free for everyone else but prohibits the cloud vendors from absorbing all the rewards from hosting their software without revenue sharing anything back.

prabhatjha 8y ago

I think that AWS are the "bad guy" here. I am happy to be proven wrong but they don’t have a track record of contributing code to the OSS projects they provide as a service. Whenever they are forced like it was the case with Mongo and now with Elastic they are using their power to have a competing OSS project. There is nothing wrong with this business wise but it's totally against spirit of OSS. If you look at Red Hat on other hand when they decided that Kubernetes was the way to go for their OpenShift project they put lots of engineering resources for upstream k8s.

mdnormy 8y ago

This response doesn't address why Netflix and Expedia Group is joining AWS open distro effort. Licensing is major headache for them I assumed. Personally, as current and former administrator of multiple ES cluster, I'm quite worried how this "intermingling of open source and proprietary code" will affect my current and previous team. We certainly not aware of it before this week.

vikaskyadav 8y ago

This is why I like Thanos. Bullshit is everywhere. Even a person doing behind a great open source software is getting criticism now. Good days!

cestith 8y ago

Very specifically, the open core of Elastic's offering doesn't do authentication. It's not that there's a limited number of users. It's not that it's a single user and password in a config file somewhere. It's that you go from having all the features of a licensed version including multiple users with configurable access to different data sets down to needing to run elk with no native authentication and authorization and then wrap authentication around it one way or another if you want the community edition. This is 2019. A data aggregation and inspection system that by default sits open on a port for anyone to use is not quite fit for purpose.