6 ms·

Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amaz

by mrkurt 6y ago

Rephrased: Amazon played hardball with open source Elasticsearch, limiting elastic's ability to make money and forcing a license change. Now you should use Amazon's fork instead! This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem.

jchw 6y ago
My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to something much closer to shared source. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive than AGPL. They are designed to protect a business model, not your rights as an end user. So it irks me that the only perspective I see reliably is that Amazon is screwing everyone and not how startups are willing to take advantage of the good will and marketing bonus and then switch it up when they realize it can’t be reconciled with their business model. Continuing to call it “open source” is just insult to injury, imo.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Basically shareware is back, they just keep calling FOSS.
- api 6y ago
  > not your rights as an end user. I'd love to have a license that grants FOSS rights to people but not to corporations. There are end users and then there are corporations monetizing FOSS and giving nothing back. On top of that the monetization is via SaaS which is a more closed computing model than commercial software. With SaaS you don't even have the data and everything you do is subject to total surveillance.
  - liveoneggs 6y ago
    creative commons has many such licenses but then it's not Open Source
  - motives 6y ago
    The point about not giving back is not valid in the case of AWS which has upstreamed many of its changes to elasticsearch owned repos under the onerous elasticsearch CLA. This is also true of many FOSS projects which AWS, Microsoft, Google et al contribute to under the most liberal license conditions(such as MIT licensing which you'll find in 95% of Microsofts contributions for example). Furthermore, I do not believe FOSS should concern itself with who is using the codebase, as fully open source software is about opening the code indiscriminately, whether individual dev or large corporation. As soon as you begin to discriminate between small and large corporation you are no longer truly free (and fwiw elasticsearch itself is a large corporation that has arguably exploited the good will of individual dev PRs with relicensing under a non-FOSS license).
- judge2020 6y ago
  Shouting 'FOSS' is also a great way to acquire talent.
- majormajor 6y ago
  I think you're painting it as more cynical and malicious than it was. There was probably too much naivety, but "open source your software and charge for support and operations" was promoted pretty heavily for a while not just by these companies, but by people who wanted to enjoy those projects being open source. And then it got torpedoed...
- mrkurt 6y ago
  "Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power. It wasn't just a series of bad choices by the startups that got them here, it was concentration of an emerging market over 10-15 years. Amazon dominates conversations because they extract the most value from open source projects. They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users and figure out what to build. Amazon has the benefit of watching which projects become most viable (frequently because the startup threatens their revenue somehow) and packaging them up as their own services. I want to live in a world where smaller startups _can_ OSS their work and also monetize it. And I'd like them to be able to do it without raising $100mm in VC.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power this goes to the question of history, are things structurally so determined that if you remove someone or something from history another would rise to take their place. If Amazon had not existed to take advantage of open source like this would someone arise to do it? I have to think yes, it would be bound to happen eventually, it's a weakness in the model and would be exploited by someone, and when it was exploited people would respond by doing sort of like what is happening now. If Amazon was not here, someone would be making the history of open source exploitation rhyme.
  - 015a 6y ago
    > They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. They make more money selling EC2, with this software installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there. Which of these realities would you prefer: 1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers pay more for a worse product. 2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it", so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins, Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've now loaded and decides to point it at them) 3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok, all the negatives of closed source with few of the positives of open source. No one wants the source code so they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a signal for their ability to move hosting providers should they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts longer than the people who wrote it. 4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream isn't aligned with customer success, because you're financially incentivized to build a product which needs support. Nope. 5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for a worse product. People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger. Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product Development and their Customers concerning whether they should build an open source ES. There's just "Jeeze, Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow, thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away." The real thing that's killing these database companies is that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes what the database can do. The discussions surround "where are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc. HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in some very specific industries or use-cases it matters). Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992, update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how boring the software actually is.
015a 6y ago
I tend to think that it, more or less, is. Elasticsearch (as an open source product) is not independent. Its reliant on Elastic co, who have a demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance in favor of making more money. Of course, they had to do this; Amazon forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB. But the fact that there is a critical company behind these two databases, who can be strong-armed, is a threat to the ecosystem these two databases have developed. Compare to Postgres. Postgres will never die. Aurora is gaining serious traction; do you think the Postgres developers are concerned? Why would they be? Their livelihood, and their ability to develop Postgres, does not depend on it being the #1 database in the world. Naturally, ODfES has a tether to Amazon. Amazon could decide to lock more features behind AWS ESS. Its not a perfect situation, but it is better than the one ES has been in for the past few years.
- majormajor 6y ago
  I think having a company behind it would generally be a positive. People are paying for this product to continue, versus something with just a couple devs doing it as a hobby. Postgres had a huge head start here, and was built in a different world WITHOUT an Amazon equivalent. Are there a lot of major contributions to (not just on top of) ODfES outside of Amazon? If not, I'd be fairly worried about using it in a non-AWS-provided way in the long term, now.
- ayewo 6y ago
  You say that: "Elasticsearch (as an open source product) is not independent. Its reliant on Elastic co, who have a demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance in favor of making more money. Of course, they had to do this; Amazon forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB." But there is one more factor you failed to acknowledge that is driving them to make more money: Elastic.co took VC funding. Once you accept VC funding, it narrows the definition of success down to what your investors think success should look, like rather than what the founders desire.
api 6y ago
This is why lots of more serious projects have been going to semi-OSS "source available" licenses like the BSL or more restrictive licenses like the AGPL. If you're a company doing open source or a serious project and use a liberal license, your work will get co-opted and monetized by cloud vendors and they will give you nothing. In some cases they won't even give you credit.
mywittyname 6y ago
> This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem. I used to manage a licensed ELK cluster. The licensing was expensive (order of six figures) and was really only necessary for LDAP integration. Features like timelion were cool, but definitely not worth the price tag. I migrated to an AWS-managed solution to for two reasons: 1) to alleviate the burden of managing a cluster, 2) get away from the onerous costs associated with licensing. Even thought it was more expensive to run a managed cluster, since, at the time, AWS limited the disk space per node. The cost savings was significant enough to warrant migration. I realize that Elastic.co offers their own managed solution. But the version on AWS was an easier sell to management due to known costs and not having to deal with sales people. I think a lot of OSS is having difficulty transitioning to a cloud-first model. The people making choices on tech stacks want to spend less time dealing with infrastructure and more time developing stuff. And this model of charging high licensing fees for "enterprise" features feels antiquated, and provides a large attack service for companies like AWS. What enterprise engineers really want are AMIs, or better yet, fully managed cloud interfaces, to bring up and manage OSS deployments. Something that lets us focus on the products we sell; not the ones we buy. I believe that we need to rethink how OSS is delivered and how to make money from it. "Enterprise" support looks a lot different not than it did when Redhat was founded, yet the OSS business model remains eerily similar.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  It makes _total_ sense to migrate to AWS's Elasticsearch product. This is, I think, the problem with incredibly powerful companies. Acting rationally as consumers makes them more powerful. I mean, I still buy stuff from Amazon, use Gmail, etc. We definitely need to rethink how OSS is delivered, but part of rethinking that is understanding how dominant AWS over OSS revenue.
- bostik 6y ago
  > not having to deal with sales people. This aspect does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Unless your product is an exceptionally well focused developer tool, it will take months, and sometime multiple quarters, to see whether it adds any real value. Exceptions exist but are rare. In practice the generous[TM] 30-day trial period is almost always worthless, and often a gateway to sustained net negative. Add to that the constant barrage of dark patterny attempts to infest your calendar and the upsell pressure tactics. Every third-party integration is an additional liability for maintenance, and far too frequently an increase in attack surface. Time is your most precious asset and the sales people are trying to rob you of it. To every sales person on the planet: if you want to sell me a service or product, then sell me NOTHING BUT the service or product. Make useful documentation accessible, and make additional features discoverable, with unambiguous pricing clearly in place where necessary. Then get out of my way. With OSS product I can install and trial it as long as I need, without needing to give off my contact details or be added to your invasive CRM. If I need additional features that are only available under your more restrictive license offering, I will buy them when I have the need. Your sales quota or bonus thresholds do not factor in, and if you try make them my problem, I will look at migration options.
CharlesW 6y ago
> This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem. I understand why this is not ideal for Elastic-the-company, but is it a bad outcome in the longer term? As someone who is happy open source exists but uses mostly proprietary software, this seems like a natural and expected response to an open source project adopting a more restrictive license.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  I think we're all better off if small and midsized OSS companies thrive. Amazon is not inventing and open sourcing DBs. For the last 15 years, we've relied on independent companies to advance the state of the art for _all of us_. Amazon has no reason to build a compelling database and release it to the community. When the giant tech companies do open source they're work, it's usually an attempt to improve their existing market at the expensive of another company: Kubernetes, OpenDistro, Firecracker, and most of the CNCF projects follow this pattern. A fork is a natural response to an OSS project license change. But when the company that _forces_ the license change also creates the fork, it's gross.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    Great points and a helpful perspective, thank you.
hodgesrm 6y ago
Maybe somebody who knows the history can answer this question: how was it that Elastic didn't just own the cloud service market before the AWS service showed up? They started in 2015 it appears. That should have been a good lead. [1] [1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/announcing-support-for-elastic-cloud-hosted-elasticsearch-standard https://www.elastic.co/blog/announcing-support-for-elastic-c... Edit: added source
jillesvangurp 6y ago
By fork they mean: a binary build straight from the unmodified elastic source code using the elastic build file that creates the OSS build bundled with a handful of plugins and components to add alternatives some of the things elastic bundles. They don't even build it themselves and it gets downloaded in binary form straight from Elastic's servers. If you don't believe me, this is the line in the code where they 'fork' in their build script: https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-build/blob/master/elasticsearch/linux_distributions/opendistro-tar-build.sh#L51 https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b... It will be interesting to see if opendistro actually starts contributing to Lucene or adding value to the elastic code base or whether this 'fork' is effectively frozen in time and doomed to go nowhere due to a lack of actual development on the core product. I seriously doubt that they are going to put any effort whatsoever in that. Because in two years of pretending they have a fork, there has been no serious code contributions from their side at all that I'm aware off. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you want to back an OSS version of related technology, maybe use something like Apache Solr, which continues to provide many of the same features and is part of the same ecosystem of users and developers that work on Lucene, which also powers Elasticsearch and which of course continues to contribute a lot to Lucene; unlike Amazon.
- _msw_ 6y ago
  Disclosure: I work for Amazon, but not directly on search related technology. Some information about Amazon's investments in upstream Apache Lucene can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-apache-lucene/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a... Covered in the 2019 blog post are: * Concurrent updates and deletes * Indexing custom term frequencies * Lazy loading of Finite State Transducers

by mrkurt 6y ago

jchw 6y ago

My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to something much closer to shared source. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive than AGPL. They are designed to protect a business model, not your rights as an end user. So it irks me that the only perspective I see reliably is that Amazon is screwing everyone and not how startups are willing to take advantage of the good will and marketing bonus and then switch it up when they realize it can’t be reconciled with their business model. Continuing to call it “open source” is just insult to injury, imo.

pjmlp 6y ago
Basically shareware is back, they just keep calling FOSS.
api 6y ago
> not your rights as an end user. I'd love to have a license that grants FOSS rights to people but not to corporations. There are end users and then there are corporations monetizing FOSS and giving nothing back. On top of that the monetization is via SaaS which is a more closed computing model than commercial software. With SaaS you don't even have the data and everything you do is subject to total surveillance.
- liveoneggs 6y ago
  creative commons has many such licenses but then it's not Open Source
- motives 6y ago
  The point about not giving back is not valid in the case of AWS which has upstreamed many of its changes to elasticsearch owned repos under the onerous elasticsearch CLA. This is also true of many FOSS projects which AWS, Microsoft, Google et al contribute to under the most liberal license conditions(such as MIT licensing which you'll find in 95% of Microsofts contributions for example). Furthermore, I do not believe FOSS should concern itself with who is using the codebase, as fully open source software is about opening the code indiscriminately, whether individual dev or large corporation. As soon as you begin to discriminate between small and large corporation you are no longer truly free (and fwiw elasticsearch itself is a large corporation that has arguably exploited the good will of individual dev PRs with relicensing under a non-FOSS license).
judge2020 6y ago
Shouting 'FOSS' is also a great way to acquire talent.
majormajor 6y ago
I think you're painting it as more cynical and malicious than it was. There was probably too much naivety, but "open source your software and charge for support and operations" was promoted pretty heavily for a while not just by these companies, but by people who wanted to enjoy those projects being open source. And then it got torpedoed...
mrkurt 6y ago
"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power. It wasn't just a series of bad choices by the startups that got them here, it was concentration of an emerging market over 10-15 years. Amazon dominates conversations because they extract the most value from open source projects. They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users and figure out what to build. Amazon has the benefit of watching which projects become most viable (frequently because the startup threatens their revenue somehow) and packaging them up as their own services. I want to live in a world where smaller startups _can_ OSS their work and also monetize it. And I'd like them to be able to do it without raising $100mm in VC.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power this goes to the question of history, are things structurally so determined that if you remove someone or something from history another would rise to take their place. If Amazon had not existed to take advantage of open source like this would someone arise to do it? I have to think yes, it would be bound to happen eventually, it's a weakness in the model and would be exploited by someone, and when it was exploited people would respond by doing sort of like what is happening now. If Amazon was not here, someone would be making the history of open source exploitation rhyme.
- 015a 6y ago
  > They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. They make more money selling EC2, with this software installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there. Which of these realities would you prefer: 1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers pay more for a worse product. 2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it", so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins, Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've now loaded and decides to point it at them) 3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok, all the negatives of closed source with few of the positives of open source. No one wants the source code so they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a signal for their ability to move hosting providers should they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts longer than the people who wrote it. 4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream isn't aligned with customer success, because you're financially incentivized to build a product which needs support. Nope. 5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for a worse product. People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger. Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product Development and their Customers concerning whether they should build an open source ES. There's just "Jeeze, Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow, thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away." The real thing that's killing these database companies is that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes what the database can do. The discussions surround "where are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc. HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in some very specific industries or use-cases it matters). Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992, update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how boring the software actually is.

015a 6y ago

I tend to think that it, more or less, is. Elasticsearch (as an open source product) is not independent. Its reliant on Elastic co, who have a demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance in favor of making more money. Of course, they had to do this; Amazon forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB. But the fact that there is a critical company behind these two databases, who can be strong-armed, is a threat to the ecosystem these two databases have developed. Compare to Postgres. Postgres will never die. Aurora is gaining serious traction; do you think the Postgres developers are concerned? Why would they be? Their livelihood, and their ability to develop Postgres, does not depend on it being the #1 database in the world. Naturally, ODfES has a tether to Amazon. Amazon could decide to lock more features behind AWS ESS. Its not a perfect situation, but it is better than the one ES has been in for the past few years.

majormajor 6y ago
I think having a company behind it would generally be a positive. People are paying for this product to continue, versus something with just a couple devs doing it as a hobby. Postgres had a huge head start here, and was built in a different world WITHOUT an Amazon equivalent. Are there a lot of major contributions to (not just on top of) ODfES outside of Amazon? If not, I'd be fairly worried about using it in a non-AWS-provided way in the long term, now.
ayewo 6y ago
You say that: "Elasticsearch (as an open source product) is not independent. Its reliant on Elastic co, who have a demonstrated history of reducing its FOSS-stance in favor of making more money. Of course, they had to do this; Amazon forced them into a corner, similar to MongoDB." But there is one more factor you failed to acknowledge that is driving them to make more money: Elastic.co took VC funding. Once you accept VC funding, it narrows the definition of success down to what your investors think success should look, like rather than what the founders desire.

api 6y ago

This is why lots of more serious projects have been going to semi-OSS "source available" licenses like the BSL or more restrictive licenses like the AGPL. If you're a company doing open source or a serious project and use a liberal license, your work will get co-opted and monetized by cloud vendors and they will give you nothing. In some cases they won't even give you credit.

mywittyname 6y ago

> This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem. I used to manage a licensed ELK cluster. The licensing was expensive (order of six figures) and was really only necessary for LDAP integration. Features like timelion were cool, but definitely not worth the price tag. I migrated to an AWS-managed solution to for two reasons: 1) to alleviate the burden of managing a cluster, 2) get away from the onerous costs associated with licensing. Even thought it was more expensive to run a managed cluster, since, at the time, AWS limited the disk space per node. The cost savings was significant enough to warrant migration. I realize that Elastic.co offers their own managed solution. But the version on AWS was an easier sell to management due to known costs and not having to deal with sales people. I think a lot of OSS is having difficulty transitioning to a cloud-first model. The people making choices on tech stacks want to spend less time dealing with infrastructure and more time developing stuff. And this model of charging high licensing fees for "enterprise" features feels antiquated, and provides a large attack service for companies like AWS. What enterprise engineers really want are AMIs, or better yet, fully managed cloud interfaces, to bring up and manage OSS deployments. Something that lets us focus on the products we sell; not the ones we buy. I believe that we need to rethink how OSS is delivered and how to make money from it. "Enterprise" support looks a lot different not than it did when Redhat was founded, yet the OSS business model remains eerily similar.

mrkurt 6y ago
It makes _total_ sense to migrate to AWS's Elasticsearch product. This is, I think, the problem with incredibly powerful companies. Acting rationally as consumers makes them more powerful. I mean, I still buy stuff from Amazon, use Gmail, etc. We definitely need to rethink how OSS is delivered, but part of rethinking that is understanding how dominant AWS over OSS revenue.
bostik 6y ago
> not having to deal with sales people. This aspect does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Unless your product is an exceptionally well focused developer tool, it will take months, and sometime multiple quarters, to see whether it adds any real value. Exceptions exist but are rare. In practice the generous[TM] 30-day trial period is almost always worthless, and often a gateway to sustained net negative. Add to that the constant barrage of dark patterny attempts to infest your calendar and the upsell pressure tactics. Every third-party integration is an additional liability for maintenance, and far too frequently an increase in attack surface. Time is your most precious asset and the sales people are trying to rob you of it. To every sales person on the planet: if you want to sell me a service or product, then sell me NOTHING BUT the service or product. Make useful documentation accessible, and make additional features discoverable, with unambiguous pricing clearly in place where necessary. Then get out of my way. With OSS product I can install and trial it as long as I need, without needing to give off my contact details or be added to your invasive CRM. If I need additional features that are only available under your more restrictive license offering, I will buy them when I have the need. Your sales quota or bonus thresholds do not factor in, and if you try make them my problem, I will look at migration options.

CharlesW 6y ago

> This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem. I understand why this is not ideal for Elastic-the-company, but is it a bad outcome in the longer term? As someone who is happy open source exists but uses mostly proprietary software, this seems like a natural and expected response to an open source project adopting a more restrictive license.

mrkurt 6y ago
I think we're all better off if small and midsized OSS companies thrive. Amazon is not inventing and open sourcing DBs. For the last 15 years, we've relied on independent companies to advance the state of the art for _all of us_. Amazon has no reason to build a compelling database and release it to the community. When the giant tech companies do open source they're work, it's usually an attempt to improve their existing market at the expensive of another company: Kubernetes, OpenDistro, Firecracker, and most of the CNCF projects follow this pattern. A fork is a natural response to an OSS project license change. But when the company that _forces_ the license change also creates the fork, it's gross.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  Great points and a helpful perspective, thank you.

hodgesrm 6y ago

Maybe somebody who knows the history can answer this question: how was it that Elastic didn't just own the cloud service market before the AWS service showed up? They started in 2015 it appears. That should have been a good lead. [1] [1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/announcing-support-for-elastic-cloud-hosted-elasticsearch-standard https://www.elastic.co/blog/announcing-support-for-elastic-c... Edit: added source

jillesvangurp 6y ago

By fork they mean: a binary build straight from the unmodified elastic source code using the elastic build file that creates the OSS build bundled with a handful of plugins and components to add alternatives some of the things elastic bundles. They don't even build it themselves and it gets downloaded in binary form straight from Elastic's servers. If you don't believe me, this is the line in the code where they 'fork' in their build script: https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-build/blob/master/elasticsearch/linux_distributions/opendistro-tar-build.sh#L51 https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b... It will be interesting to see if opendistro actually starts contributing to Lucene or adding value to the elastic code base or whether this 'fork' is effectively frozen in time and doomed to go nowhere due to a lack of actual development on the core product. I seriously doubt that they are going to put any effort whatsoever in that. Because in two years of pretending they have a fork, there has been no serious code contributions from their side at all that I'm aware off. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you want to back an OSS version of related technology, maybe use something like Apache Solr, which continues to provide many of the same features and is part of the same ecosystem of users and developers that work on Lucene, which also powers Elasticsearch and which of course continues to contribute a lot to Lucene; unlike Amazon.

_msw_ 6y ago
Disclosure: I work for Amazon, but not directly on search related technology. Some information about Amazon's investments in upstream Apache Lucene can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-apache-lucene/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a... Covered in the 2019 blog post are: * Concurrent updates and deletes * Indexing custom term frequencies * Lazy loading of Finite State Transducers