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Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

• rkangel 6y ago
  I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems like the most blatant trademark violation ever.
  • edoceo 6y ago
    Against the huge wallet of Amazon? Litigation isn't free. How much "justice" can Elastic afford?
    • ironmagma 6y ago
      On the other hand, as a result there are probably tens of millions to be made off a successful suit.
      • edoceo 6y ago
        Works on Contingency? No. Money Down! - L. Hutz
    • exhilaration 6y ago
      A few people above have said that Elastic is worth $10-14 billion. This isn't a one-man OSS project we're talking about.
      • edoceo 6y ago
        Valuation and available Cash are very different.
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    It seems to me (not a lawyer) that “Amazon Elastic Search Service” would be OK in a way that “Amazon Elasticsearch Service” would not. (AWS had EC2 before Elastic’s trademark was registered.)
    • brlewis 6y ago
      I'm not a lawyer either, but as I understand it, a trademark is violated if it's likely to confuse people into thinking the product/service is from the trademark holder when it actually isn't. If Amazon's CEO experienced such confusion himself, that does sound like a slam dunk to me. FTA: When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK.
      • DougBTX 6y ago
        It does seem tricky. On on hand, they want to stop AWS using "Elasticsearch" in a product name because it isn't in partnership with Elastic co., but on the other hand AWS's product really does contain Elasticsearch, which is why they are changing their license. If AWS had a product called "Elasticsearch Service" which didn't contain Elasticsearch, then it would be pretty clear cut as that would be very confusing, but a product called "Elasticsearch Service" that really does contain "Elasticsearch" seems pretty self-explanatory.
        • brlewis 6y ago
          In general, yes, it can be tricky to determine what will and won't be confusing to people, since different people see things differently. In this specific case, it doesn't seem tricky to me. When you have concrete examples of people getting confused, no speculation is needed.
          • sokoloff 6y ago
            But what are they confused over? "Amazon RDS for SQL Server" seems no more and no less confusing to me than "Amazon Elasticsearch Service". As a user, I don't care in the least about the business relationship behind the product. I care about whether Amazon RDS works like SQL Server and whether Amazon Elasticsearch Service works like Elasticsearch. What financial arrangements, if any, are behind the scenes are not a concern to users.
        • 6y ago
  • bluelu 6y ago
    Is it really so easy? Doesn't elastic also use Amazon trademarks in their code and documentation? (e.g. ec2, etc..)? I'm not a licence expert, but maybe if you have a have a legal licence to run it, you probably can also name it like that?
  • kmeisthax 6y ago
    Trademark law is complicated enough that I can imagine several scenarios where owning "Elastic" does not allow you to prescribe Amazon's use of "Elasticsearch Service", or at least where there's enough of a question of law as to allow the matter to proceed to rather expensive litigation. Also: >Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK. This and several other sentences alleging illegal behavior on the part of Amazon seem suspicious to me. When I hear someone say that they had to sue another company, but provide no further details of the suit, then I can only assume that their lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge. Otherwise, they'd talk about the litigation - there is no legal condition I could think of where you would be allowed to disclose the existence of a lawsuit and make general allegations about a company, but not disclose the existence of at least a settlement agreement, if not a legal judgment. Does anyone know if Elastic's Amazon lawsuit went anywhere?
  • toast0 6y ago
    What else would you call the Amazon Elasticsearch Service? Isn't that just Nominative fair use: referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark? Especially when it launched and there wasn't a fork.
    • bmurphy1976 6y ago
      It was a bad choice of name by Amazon. They should have created "Amazon Search Services" and ElasticSearch would be one of multiple available options ala RDS and its many database options. I'm no lawyer but it appears to me that they are blatantly in violation of ElasticSearch's trademark.
• pluc 6y ago
  The license changes are described here: https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change
• StreamBright 6y ago
  I wish there was something better than Elastic for indexing large volume of text.
  • k__ 6y ago
    Yes. AWS should build a real serverless alternative to it or buy Algolia or something...
    • StreamBright 6y ago
      Yes, I would be much happier that. I do not even understand why to do this whole dance with Elastic.
      • lnsp 6y ago
        A lot of people have adopted the Elastic stack over the years, I guess Amazon just wanted their share.
        • uncledave 6y ago
          I think most people just wanted Amazon to take the administrative overhead away from them. Amazon saw that gap.
        • k__ 6y ago
          Sure thing. That's the reason for many services they created. But they usually tend to build their own alternative that integrates better into their eco-system.
        • brodouevencode 6y ago
          They do. They've done similar things with Redis and MariaDB, both of whom also offer commercial solutions. The SAs all insist that "no it's a partnership". I don't fault them they're parroting the marketing line. With the new Grafana stuff that seems more like a real partnership because you have to purchase the enterprise features and support from the marketplace. What they've done to Redis and partiularly Elastic is pretty shameful. The Elasticsearch Service has problems: you can't join the cluster like you can with the normal version, permissions are janky at best, it's slow, and it's expensive. For those reasons the projects my team used it on opted to roll our own elasticsearch cluster which proved a better solution long term beyond the initial annoyances. I say that to say it's not a one to one product, which will probably be their defense.
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Amazon is the new Microsoft.
  • richardARPANET 6y ago
    *Oracle
    • jnsaff2 6y ago
      I've been at the receiving end of Elastics selling tactics and pricing. Elastic is the new Oracle was my conclusion. IIRC the pricing was along the lines of $12k per CPU Core or GB of RAM. Straight from the nineties.
      • aprdm 6y ago
        In my experience it was that by Node regardless of how many cpus or ram the node had. Regardless very expensive.
      • wg0 6y ago
        And Mongo is something similar as well. Just running single instance (on infrastructure that you pay for) might cost about 3k or more per month.
  • nautilus12 6y ago
    I was told many of the more predatory players from Microsoft left to join Microsoft in the last few years. I need to look into this though.
    • jbarberu 6y ago
      "...players from Microsoft left to join Microsoft in...", wat?
• patrickaljord 6y ago
  Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business or for whatever reason they see fit obviously, more power to them.
  • david_draco 6y ago
    Use the code yes, but not use the trademarks. And also not publicly claim to collaborate when they actually do not give back. That's what they complain about.
  • d3nj4l 6y ago
    That is not the point. There is legal and there is good - and simply reiterating that something is legal is unproductive and pointless.
    • shawnz 6y ago
      I don't think the person you are replying to is making any kind of argument about legality. I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you.
      • patrickaljord 6y ago
        Exactly, what Amazon did isn't just legal, it is explicitly specified as OK by the license that the elastic search team selected for their code.
        • NeutronStar 6y ago
          "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK." Is that legal by your standards?
• dhd415 6y ago
  Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification. Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That makes it pretty clear that it's meant strictly for competition with AWS.
  • granzymes 6y ago
    Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. Maybe we can change the link to this post?
    • elliekelly 6y ago
      I read the whole linked article and was disappointed there was no explanation of the license changes they made - only justifications for the change.
      • rovr138 6y ago
        I think the title covers that this is "why" the change occurred. Not the explanation of the license they changed to.
        • elliekelly 6y ago
          That’s fair, if perhaps a bit pedantic. I suppose I was expecting some explanation of why the language of the new license would address these “whys” as opposed to just a list of grievances.
    • the_local_host 6y ago
      I kept feeling like I was reading the same thing over and over and just not finding out what exactly Amazon is doing now that it won't be able to do in the future. Skimming the links to the blog post and FAQ didn't help much. Whatever it is it's pretty deep in the weeds. It looks like the intent is for most users to be unaffected; non-AWS cloud providers to be unaffected; even AWS's Elastic Cloud to be unaffected; but AWS has to stop doing something with specific regard to Elastic Search and I can't figure out what it is.
• say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."
• brodouevencode 6y ago
  They kinda do the same with Redis.
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    I have never seen the Redis maintainer(s) complain about it though. Would be interesting to compare/contrast, what leads to the difference. They do the same with lots of products really. Postgres and MySQL too for instance. Also never seen postgres or mysql maintainance teams complain about it. What are the contextual differences that make it a point of conflict with authors/maintainers in one case but not others?
    • anarazel 6y ago
      Plenty people spending a lot of their time working on Postgres have complained about Amazon's style of using open source. Among them myself (long before working for an AWS competitor). Most of us don't have problems, or even the opposite, with companies making loads of money with Postgres. What I/we am severely disappointed with is that they barely put resources towards contributing back. Every now they make grand statements about their community support, but in the end little materializes. This is purely my personal opinion.
  • rsstack 6y ago
    Redis itself is proper open source. There are a few modules, completely separate from the Redis code base, that aren't open source (even though Redis Labs will claim they are, like how Elastic claim Elasticsearch is open source). The other non-open-source-but-wants-open-source-clout is Mongo.
    • brodouevencode 6y ago
      I think it's more about the source of the revenue stream. Redis (from what I know, which is minimal) relies more on support - they have a hosted solution but support/licensing of modules is where they really make money. Elastic relies on hosting - they've invested a lot in infrastructure.
• ddevault 6y ago
  Elastic was an open source project, and now it's not. This was done because they believe it will be more profitable. It does affect you, especially if you contributed to the project, in which case they're basically spitting in your face as thanks for your hard work. This is not materially different from when Oracle infamously killed OpenSolaris, something they were rightfully crucified for by the community. They're not wrong about Amazon misinformation, use of trademarks, and so on, and should have pursued the legal remedies for this more deeply. Called them out publically, and shamed them like this post attempts to do. But, if it didn't work, tough shit. It has nothing to do with the license. They made a contrat with their community when they choose an open source license. >We created Elasticsearch; we care about it more than anyone else. No, you didn't. Elasticsearch is the combined work of thousands of contributors. Aside: using "Free & Open" in your messaging is a pretty low move, deliberately designed to mislead users.
  • aprdm 6y ago
    There’s still an oss license elasticsearch, they packed a lot of extra features to compete with Amazon distro and that bundle has a different license
    • jrochkind1 6y ago
      I think you are mistaken and have missed the recent news which OP is about, but I'm not totally sure what you are talking about. Which license do you consider an OSS licensed elasticsearch?
      • Proven 6y ago
        Earlier you didn't say OSS - you said open source
      • aprdm 6y ago
        The apache license, https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... If you don't use any of the x-pack features (which used to be paid) you're all good.
• pfsalter 6y ago
  Nice to see someone at least standing up to the behemoth that is Amazon
• z77dj3kl 6y ago
  "And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. It has no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises." No, that's just not true. So many users, from small hobby side-projects, to large open source projects, and mega-corps care about the licensing of dependencies, each for their own reason, and will not want to build on top of proprietary software that imposes draconian licensing terms. It doesn't matter what they say, read the license. It's vague and there is no legal precedent. It's a big risk for anyone who cares about licensing issues for their projects.
  • signal11 6y ago
    If you're a paying customer, you are probably fine. If you're using SSPL'd Elastic (or Mongo DB, the risks are the same) for anything serious -- i.e. beyond a hobby, get legal advice ASAP. SSPL isn't an OSI certified license; many would call it at best a 'shared source' license because of the riders attached. [DELETED because, as user `gpm` points out, OSI doesn't own 'open source' as a trademark, sorry about that -- the need for legal advice doesn't go away, however.] In fact given their kvetching about Amazon and their trademark, Elastic's cheerleading of open source in this and the original blog post seems to be a bit misleading and doing OSI's trademark a disservice.[/DELETED]
    • gpm 6y ago
      OSI does not have a trademark on the term open source, they tried and failed to acquire one.
      • ddevault 6y ago
        Trademarks are not a requirement for defining terminology. The word "cake" is not trademarked, but if I sell you a used car tire when you buy a "cake" from me, I still lied and misled you about the product.
      • prepend 6y ago
        I think they need one. Comically, this is why trademarks exist to prevent people from confusing the market with similar and reused terms. I think we need a CreativeCommons-like trademark for open source software before it’s too late.
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Switching to SSPL feels more like retribution than a fix for the problem. But sadly nothing can be done if Amazon is willing to flagrantly steal your trademark. At least switching to SSPL might bubble the related trademark issue up to a higher-paid set of lawyers within the Amazon monstrosity, and maybe it'll get resolved.
• josho 6y ago
  This is fine. No seriously. Hear me out. If you are a proponent of capitalism then this is how the system works. The little fish grow into big fish. The big fish eat the little fish. The ecosystem suffers. It has always been this way. Many of us remember Microsoft in the nineties. Fewer will remember the phone or oil industry doing the same. Don’t fight this issue. Fight the system that tolerates this pattern. Money in politics, high cost of litigation are both the real concerns.
  • adamcstephens 6y ago
    Your examples from the past were all knocked down (MS) or broken apart to keep the market available to competitors. Are you saying we should do this or just get money out of politics?
    • josho 6y ago
      MSFT was broken apart. The DOJ trial only began after a decade of microsoft abusing their market position and destroying numerous companies. I'm saying large industry has undue influence over the regulators and so action only comes when companies like Elastic have gone bankrupt.
  • whitepaint 6y ago
    There are no better alternatives. And about the ElasticSearch, they should have just used a different license.
    • josho 6y ago
      Reflecting on this more I think capitalism is the wrong word. Completely unregulated markets is what is really the issue. It leads to the incumbents extracting all the profit and then using their monopoly position to extract rents for the next few decades.
    • jrochkind1 6y ago
      Would ElasticSearch have gotten as popular as it has if they had used a non-opensource license from the start?
• tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y ago
  I am interested to see how long or if Elastic sticks around after this. If people will just move on to another AWS product or if they'll keep using Elasticsearch.
  • prepend 6y ago
    I think it depends on whether Amazon wants to start funding development of their fork. I think under this new license, Amazon can’t just bring over changes from elastic any more. If Amazon commits to dev work then their project might be the one that survives since it’s actually OSS and more capable of being used in more products. But if they don’t then it will drift and not be very useful any longer.
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  I don't think most of Amazon's behavior actually violates any norms and values of traditional open source communities. I think instead we are finding that norms and values of traditional open source communities are in some ways contradictory/inconsistent; that there can be competing interests where it isn't true that either one of them is the one that "opensource norms and values" privileges; or that the traditional "norms and values" don't necessary lead to the world that enthusiasts had fantasized about. In a lot of these discussions, I think the underlying basic thing is that some are alleging, often implicitly, that included in the "norms and values of open source" are that if anyone is making money from value provided by open source, it should be authors of that open source, or at least they should get a cut. I don't think that is in fact one of the traditional norms and values of open source community. In some ways it's even counter to the tradition. The actual world/ecosystem around open source has evolved to be very different than the one imagined by traditional norms and values though. Compare to how apache httpd was originally written -- 6 or 8 people, each from a different organization, collaborated on company time each getting paid by their employer, to produce something of value to all of their employers, where the only desired 'profit' was the thing being available for all to use. That is sort of a stereotypical traditional fantasy of open source. It is of software being created without a profit motive, in an ecosystem where people would contribute to such things on 'company time' (they had a steady salary from some company already). The more people using the software you wrote, the better, and you never wanted a cut of their profits -- that is the fantasy of traditional open source norms and values. That is not the world we ended up with though. So the problem is that now it is "obvious" to some people that if we wrote the the thing, and then formed a company around that thing we wrote -- it's not "fair" if someone else is making money from it without giving us a cut. But this isn't a value encoded into open source licenses at all, and that wasn't an oversight, it was intentional because this wasn't in fact a traditional "norm and value" of open source at all, and in fact it is in some ways counter to the actual traditional norms and values, one of which I would say was: Your desire to make a profit from this code should not in fact be allowed to prevent anyone else from using it. It is ElasticSearch which is acting contradictory to norms and values of open source in believing nobody should be able to use their software without giving them a cut of profits from it. These disputes will keep happening, not because some companies are violating the "norms and values" of open source, but because the actual traditional norms and values of open source are increasingly unable to power a sustainable economy where people can get paid (in the manner they think they deserve?) while producing open source.
• prepend 6y ago
  So I guess the options are now to use the “OpenDistro” [0] or the SSPL distro maintained by Elastic. It’s too bad that Elastic is no longer open source, but respect the companies choice to close source their stuff. Will be interesting if Amazon just maintains their fork or abandons it to make something else. I’m not familiar with elastic as a project and not sure how many community contributions they have, but expect that to shrink as I’m not sure many OSS developers will freely contribute to non-OSS projects. As for trademark stuff, I expect a renaming like Hudson/Jenkins. [0] https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch
  • dannyw 6y ago
    Elastic is still open source for anyone but Amazon or other cloud providers trying to resell their work.
  • pietrovismara 6y ago
    The source code is freely accessible and you can use it for free. What's the difference to you as a user? Or are you simply concerned about Amazon?
    • prepend 6y ago
      I make products that use that package. I want all the packages I depend on to be compatible with my license. I don’t want to run into an audit years from now during due diligence that I have some liability from an incompatible license. I can’t afford lawyers to determine compatibility today. And I suspect that they would say “not compatible, pay to be safe.” That’s the difference to me as a user.
      • pietrovismara 6y ago
        This sounds more like an issue with the licensing world itself than with this license, which by itself is pretty simple and won't affect you except in the case you offer your products containing Elastic as a service to third parties.
• edameme 6y ago
  Interesting, especially in comparison with other motions for Open Source via AWS. Mongo is the other big name that comes to mind, as well as Redis.
• samfisher83 6y ago
  It seems like Amazon is using their retail strategy here. It is basically white labeling the product. Just find a popular product. Copy the apis and call it amazon x. Open source license make it even easier.
  • sn_master 6y ago
    Which is fine as long as they respect the license e.g. keep the result software open source. Amazon is selling compute hours, not software.
• Isognoviastoma 6y ago
  In short, Amazon don't follow law of trademarks. Then, Elastic instead of enforcing their rights in court, changes license in hope that Amazon will follow law of copyright. How do they expect it will work? I don't get it.
  • mrkeen 6y ago
    > We’ve tried every avenue available including going through the courts
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Pet_Ant 6y ago
  > Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us. I feel like I just said this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849 The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. ElasticSearch is trying to remove what makes open source appealing to businesses. No one wants to build their infrastructure on something with expensive IBM/Oracle-costing support. Basically, from now on, ElasticSearch has removed that benefit from their product and businesses are at risk. It's now much less appealing... is the remaining niche profitable? Only time will tell. Note, why businesses find open-source appealing is not why developers find it appealing, or private individuals.
  • tw04 6y ago
    I'll be honest, I've never heard a single business say the reason they use open source is because support is commodified. It's generally cost or functionality, and quite frankly they want a go-to support expert, not a list of support options. Redhat didn't become huge because people had all sorts of options for third party support. In fact, I can't say I've ever come across a single enterprise who: uses third party support for their RHEL installed base, has asked for third party support for their RHEL installed base.
    • Pet_Ant 6y ago
      CentOS and WhiteBox Linux were 3rd party sources of RHEL and to a large part Linux distros are interchangeable which makes them commodities. Not perfect commodities, but still close. RHEL with subscription vs Debian & burdening yours ops guys are choices available. VMS has no such choice.
      • tw04 6y ago
        But he didn't say: businesses use open source because they can find compatible binaries from multiple entities. He said it commodified support. CentOS and WhiteBox never promised or offered enterprise support agreements that I'm aware of. And if they did, I can't say I ever ran across anyone utilizing it in the wild.
• sireat 6y ago
  Elastic has the same problem that MongoDB has with Amazon: Amazon is commoditizing their product on a massive scale. "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Not sure what other alternatives are there besides changing licensing.
  • Seb-C 6y ago
    Given that aws just built DocumentDB, I am not sure if the licensing changing anything. I would even say that this choice actually hurts MongoDB because I am less likely to choose it since they have less practical hosting solutions.
    • RSZC 6y ago
      If Oracle wins against Google, presumably DocumentDB would be infringing in the same manner, as DocumentDB also is a drop-in replacement adhering to the same API.
      • Seb-C 6y ago
        I still didn't decide if it would be a good a or bad thing actually.
• LukeEF 6y ago
  AWS have recently invested in DevRel and open-source evangelist type employees (to be found on twitter much of the time). I assume they understand better than anybody that the dev and startup dollar is enormous and crucial to their future success. This type of thing - and their past willingness to leach off open-source - has to have a marketing and sales impact - at least at the 'startup' top of the funnel. Is it sufficient to push AWS to change direction? Would be good to see a RocksDB, Cassandra or the likes emerge from AWS.
• longhairedhippy 6y ago
  Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If I'm a business that may be impacted due to the licensing change, it would seem my safest (legal) option would be to freeze on the last version with a friendly license and then transition to the Amazon fork, since it will probably stay under a more open license. While maybe not the smartest technical decision, from a business standpoint it seems like a reasonable insurance policy, at least until someone else tests the waters in court. Amazon doesn't have any interest in making their version closed because they want the money from hosting. Even if the product isn't that great, it's super easy if I'm already 100% in on AWS anyway (not necessarily reality, but it is an easy conversation to have and the service should be big enough to warrant investment from AWS). I applaud the stand they are taking and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
  • znpy 6y ago
    > Could this potentially drive users to the Amazon fork? If they're dumb, yes. As stated in their blog, changes apply pretty much only if you're either embed or redistribute elasticsearch/kibana. And these are two specific use-cases btw. If you're already a customer, nothing changes.
    • paxys 6y ago
      Find me one lawyer who is going to be convinced by this blog post. There is a blanket no for using SSPL software at every company I know.
  • shawnz 6y ago
    Open Distro is not a fork but simply a repackaging of ES with some additional modules. However there doesn't seem to be many options left now but for Open Distro to become a complete fork of ES.
  • c0l0 6y ago
    The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream release of ElasticSearch, as published by Elastic. Also, if you take a closer look at Open Distro, you will quickly come to the conclusion that you really do not want to deploy what drops out of there. The RPM package does CRAZY stuff that made me exhale audibly enough for coworkers to notice - like spawning a postinstall shellscript that `wget`s a .so for/from an optional library that the Open Distro release team put into an S3 bucket, and then `mv`ing that downloaded file (iirc even without any content verification; so the content could be your proxy's captive portal markup, for all they know) into (again, iirc) /usr/lib. That is from WITHIN AN RPM PACKAGE, mind you, where you could and should really just carry that file yourself. That and other minor troubles with the tooling surrounding the actual product (ES) made me abandon Open Distro fairly quickly. Which is a shame, since a really freely licensed spin of ES with "Enterprise" features would indeed be very nice to have.
• holstvoogd 6y ago
  Since AWS implies that Elastic is involved in the offering, I'd sue AWS for defamation. Having your name associated with a AWS service, and such a shitty service at that, cannot be good for your business.
  • colechristensen 6y ago
    Well they are using elastic code freely given away with a few small additions, is that not involved enough?
• sub7 6y ago
  AWS is basically just rebranded open source on a centralized admin dashboard, there's an infographic somewhere breaking it down. True genius is always making someone else's blood and sweat into a package that gracefully solves a big pain point and Amazon building up AWS has been nothing but genius.
• pyb 6y ago
  This is tangential, but, speaking of intellectual property, was MongoDB entitled to strip the FSF copyright in the SSPL ? (as per https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compared-to-AGPL.pdf https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compare... line 5)
  • pritambaral 6y ago
    Given that the text of the SSPL amounts to a minor edit to that of the AGPL (at best): no. The SSPL text is still a derivative of the AGPL text, which is copyrighted and licensed under the following terms (from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html): Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <https://fsf.org/ https://fsf.org/> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
    • pyb 6y ago
      I thought so. IANAL, but it looks like a blatant copyright violation to me. This indicates that the SSPL may not have been written by a lawyer.
  • gpm 6y ago
    The FSF gives people permission to modify the GPL as MongoDB did https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL They do not require in that license to modify the GPL license that you keep the original copyright attribution around. (IANAL - not legal advice, etc etc)
• picodguyo 6y ago
  This blog post strikes me as poorly written, overly emotional, and light on reasons to care. While not Amazon-sized, Elastic is itself a rather large company. Am I supposed to be upset that you're having difficulty getting even larger because of Amazon? Considering you're the experts on this product, shouldn't you be confident in your ability to differentiate from someone offering it as an afterthought? If anything, Amazon's poor support of their Elastic offering amounts to lead gen for a properly run solution. Finally, feel free to change your license now that your original license is no longer conducive to your growth aspirations, but whining that "not OK" Amazon forced you to do it just comes across as sour grapes.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    > shouldn't you be confident in your ability to differentiate from someone offering it as an afterthought? They are. What they aren't confident in is their ability to differentiate from someone who offers it moderately competently, while not having to pay a single cent in development costs, unlike Elastic, which have to pay for almost all of them.
  • jjeaff 6y ago
    They probably aren't worried about not becoming larger so much as getting swallowed whole by AWS. AWS has the economies of scale to severely undercut pricing. Especially considering they aren't spending anything on development cost. They can just let elastic search deal with that.
  • netdur 6y ago
    he tool a loan to register trademark, he is speaking personally.
  • Vaslo 6y ago
    I have to agree and came here to say this - the “Not OK” thing feels like we are all being lectured. This is an (one) unfortunate side effect of social media. The author doesn’t hear how he sounds, and can’t see the cringe on some of the audiences to realize it’s an awful (cringeworthy) tactic. Could have come across better, but otherwise I support the authors assertions.
• yrgulation 6y ago
  The cringe on this thread is appalling. Elasticsearch B.V. owes you nothing. The source code is still open source, but you should pay for re-selling or providing hosting services around it. They have salaries to pay. Period. Too many open source "believers" find themselves out of pocket, taking time away from their families and lives, only for companies like Amazaon and other WAANKs out there to make billions in profit. Time for this to stop. Starve them of your hard work and make them pay if they want to use your software. For sharing knowledge, code can still be freely readable, but should not be free of charge.
  • R0b0t1 6y ago
    Agree, the amount of people who license things as MIT is terrifying. There has been a couple of posts/rants on HN about this. A large company doesn't care about you, and licensing your code as MIT doesn't mean they're going to pay you. GPL actually gives you some teeth.
    • sn_master 6y ago
      We're in the era of big platforms that can pick and choose the winners, and the winners have to play with those rules. see: GPLv3 ban on Tivoization. It makes anything v3 radioactive to any company seeking to make $$$.
      • R0b0t1 6y ago
        The argument is that those people were never going to pay you money anyway so don't cater to them. All you can do is try to make it seem like it is cheaper to pay you for a license exception than it is to reimplement, but some places will reimplement anyway.
        • sn_master 6y ago
          SaaS in big cloud is the way most people prefer to consume services. Few people enjoy setting and maintaining a large elastic cache cluster.
    • 6y ago
• brainzap 6y ago
  why not make a license that requires to pay
  • pritambaral 6y ago
    Then they'd lose customers. Many people use their Open Source products because it's free (as in beer). The fact that the products are also free as in speech is merely co-incidental to them. Elastic Co. does not want to lose those customers. On a broader note: Elastic Co. used Open Source as a marketing point for their product, but now no longer want to be held to the same standard.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  This is the huge issue with open source. The way to make money is to offer support or hosting. However, many businesses would prefer support and/or hosting from a big enterprise. For example, a lot of CTO’s would prefer Amazon Elastic Search vs a separate agreement with Elastic if for no other reason than that there is a single bill and a single entity to call for support. You don’t want Elastic saying it’s an AWS issue and Amazon saying it’s an Elastic issue. In addition, the fact that API’s are not copyrighted makes this even more in favor of the big enterprises like Amazon, as they can release something with the same API. Honestly, the problem of how to sustain an open source business in this environment is an open question.
• mcintyre1994 6y ago
  > We collaborate with cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud, and others. We have shown we can find a way to do it. We even work with other parts of Amazon. We are always open to doing that; it just needs to be OK. I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into this but it sort of feels like they don't want/expect to keep offering the proper AWS integration that their elastic.co product has now. I know at work we have something hosted by them in AWS and I assume that's inside our VPC and we'd need that feature to keep using them. If they do still think that feature is important then saying they "work with other parts of Amazon" feels like it's really under-selling that collaboration/integration with AWS.
• stavros 6y ago
  Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. They were hoping to make money off their product, which I don't think anyone can fault them for, but instead Amazon came in and took a bunch of that money while not giving anything back. Now Elastic is not happy, and I wouldn't be either. As an end user, I'm grateful the circumstances exist that allow companies to make a living from OSS, and I want to encourage that. AWS is the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how blaming Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is anything other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is OSS at all, and we should want an environment where companies that produce OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for wanting to get paid for the work that they release freely into the world. Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I think Amazon is.
  • delfinom 6y ago
    Amazon is executing EEE in modern times, it's brilliant nobody sees it. They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.
    • VoxPelli 6y ago
      They seems to be a lot better when it comes to cooperating with eg Envoy and Kubernetes communities though? Not sure how good they are with eg MySQL and PostgreSQL, anyone know?
      • detaro 6y ago
        communities is the key word. Neither have one company behind them whose income they are eating.
    • dayjah 6y ago
• mrsuprawsm 6y ago
  I recently ran a project to compare AWS Elasticsearch and Elastic-hosted ES. Surprisingly, we found that AWS did better for our use-case. Better IaC - easy to set up clusters with Terraform, and associated alerts. Better monitoring and easier setup. Better price/performance. AWS is obviously lower friction from a purchasing point too once you're already an AWS user. This makes me curious if Elastic are shooting themselves in the foot a bit here.
  • mintplant 6y ago
    Why would they be shooting themselves in the foot? From their perspective, Elastic doesn't get anything out of your going with the AWS offering, and Amazon's behemoth-level resources allow it to outcompete Elastic's own hosted offering, as you found, while contributing nothing back to cover development costs of the software itself.
  • donretag 6y ago
    I have been using Elasticsearch for over ten years and have seen a few of the hosted versions. For many years, AWS was running way behind. A few major versions behind, almost no options. No one used it. The ES version was not great, but it was way better than the AWS version. Fast forward to 2021 and the AWS version is as seamless as most of their offerings. Works with the VPC, backing stores. You can set it up with CloudFormation/CDK. ES has stagnated.
• throw8932894 6y ago
  I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living. Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for me (backport stuff to code generator). But it works great and nobody noticed anything. Practically any serious use of my library has to go through me now. And I am the hero because my code is virtually without bugs. Magic!!! :) I become disillusioned long time ago. Also people told me several times unit tests do not matter... but in reality they are most valuable part of know how.
  • fuball63 6y ago
    This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the point of it being open at all if it is prohibitively difficult to develop on without tests? To me it seems like a happy medium of being accessible while still protecting your livelihood.
    • BossingAround 6y ago
      > This is a pretty interesting approach, but what is the point of it being open at all if it is prohibitively difficult to develop on without tests? Personally, I wouldn't use a proprietary library/framework unless absolutely necessary. I think it's a great strategy, actually; OP is sacrificing outside contributions while making it much more difficult for someone to just fork the project and bypass them entirely.
      • throw8932894 6y ago
        I am not sacrificing much. Project was fully open for a while, bot no coauthor emerged. I only get minor patches. Contributions are happening outside core project, some people build pretty awesome stuff on my library, I also get connectors etc... I would say this approach fits great for one-men projects.
    • 6y ago
• perfobotto 6y ago
  Amazon’s version of sherlocking
• nova22033 6y ago
  This isn't about the product itself. If I use AWS ESS, I don't need Elastic Professional services. That's probably where they make money.
• VoxPelli 6y ago
  If they just wanted to stop AWS they would just put the BSL on top of their previous license: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ That way Amazon couldn’t use their code to provide a SaaS until after 4 years and after that time it would be business as usual and be proper open source. The license they used now is forever non-opensource, which is a much larger change than what’s merited here I think.
• sm4rk0 6y ago
  Not defending anyone here, just adding another (AWS) perspective: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...
• supernihil 6y ago
  this post from a year ago: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/launching-open-distro-for-elasticsearch-security-features-on-amazon-elasticsearch-service/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/launching-open-distr... sums up amazons stand pretty much, they talk about how they are suffering from "Elasticsearches bullying behavior" but in reality Elasticsearch were abusing Elasticsearch in their marketing ("partnering with ES.." lies), they created their own fork instead of offering back to upstream, they partnered up with a company that were stealing enterprise code from ES and selling it as their own product, i mean AWS does not have the privilige to express themselves as opensource evangelists.
• jbverschoor 6y ago
  Maybe microsoft and google would like to pitch in some legal support
• JCM9 6y ago
  Elastic’s arguments are problematic considering the history of the codebase. They didn’t invent “elasticsearch” from scratch, rather they took someone else’s codebase (Lucene) and made it better. Fundamentally that’s what AWS did too... they took open source code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed service front but aren’t offering up strong reasons for this being “NOT OK”. Elastic was happy to use code and concepts from others to build their product but seem annoyed when others did the same to them. I don’t get it. The brand name thing might have more weight but it will come down to if they were truly enforcing the name the whole time they owned it or are just annoyed with AWS. If the name fell into common use they they likely won’t have much luck protecting it.
  • nrmitchi 6y ago
    I'm really starting to dislike this notion of "Oh well Elastic deserves this since they build on an open source project, Lucene!" There are two main differences here. 1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement. 2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you think there is so little differentiation between the product you built and the product you built off of, that you are better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made any meaningful differences.
  • Yeroc 6y ago
    Lucene is a pretty low-level search library. It has no concept of clustering etc. etc. What ElasticSearch built on top is far from trivial. Furthermore, ElasticSearch pays a number of people to contribute back to the Lucene project. As far as I know AWS hasn't contributed any code of note back to ElasticSearch or Lucene.
    • nirmalc 6y ago
      Aws/amazon employs lucene contributors ( including Mike Mccandless). Not sure if amazon sponsors their work.
• neilsense 6y ago
  Why does this read like a child wrote it?
  • netdur 6y ago
    emotion / hurt
  • sn_master 6y ago
    I agree, I felt it was written very quickly without much editing or review.
• CaptArmchair 6y ago
  I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It also means that you have to find alternate ways of making revenue e.g. by providing consultancy, building services or licensing the trademark (which is an entirely different ball game from open sourcing the code!). The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way. Of course, the founders of ES could never predict how successful their product would become after a decade. There are plenty of open source products engineered by commercial companies that never catch the eye of behemoths like Amazon.
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    > The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".
    • spinningslate 6y ago
      true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.
      • nicoburns 6y ago
        Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.
• RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
  Elastic is a 14 billion dollar company[0] with 43% revenue growth YoY[1]. Amazon may be eating into their SaaS market share but Elastic are hardly struggling. Relicensing for competitive business reasons is absolutely fine, but it's silly to pretend that they are doing this for any motive other than making more money. Certainly this is not some altruistic move on the behalf of the open source community. I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source project proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users will flock to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the end of Elastic unless they reverse this decision. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/ [1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/ESTC-Q2-FY21-Earnings-Deck-(POST).pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...
  • whoisjuan 6y ago
    It's really hard to have sympathy for anyone here. On the Amazon side, they of course are pushing on that ethical gray line by using Elastic's name and track record to build their own offering based on Elastic's Open Source software. On the Elastic's side they simply seem to be mad that Open Source is working exactly as it's supposed to work in favor of a big company that happens to be a competitor. It's like they want to have discretionary control on who benefits from Open Source and who doesn't.
  • retzkek 6y ago
    > Elastic is a 14 billion dollar company I believe this is the real driver of this decision. $ESTC's PE is -100 and PC is -2500, they need to drive a lot of business to their hosted cloud or sell many more licenses to support their valuation [^1], and they're not getting the subscriptions they need from the platform add-ons like Machine Learning, APM, and SIEM (43% YoY revenue growth is great, but I don't believe it's sustainable, and this licensing decision suggests neither does Elastic). Base Elasticsearch and Kibana are sufficient for a large portion of use cases, including mine. Many other of the "ecosystem" tools they sell have other, established commercial or open-source options (e.g. Splunk vs SIEM, Jaeger/OpenTracing vs APM), and these options won't tie you into the Elastic environment. > I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source project proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users will flock to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the end of Elastic unless they reverse this decision. 100% agree. We're going to see an open-source fork, whether from Open Distro (which may have too much baggage) or a new, rebranded project, and many users who don't need Elastic's value-adds will flock there. ^1: Admittedly everything tech is severely overpriced right now.
• Karunamon 6y ago
  I don't understand how the SSPL is substantially different enough from AGPL to warrant being called "non-OSS" as has been done multiple times in this thread. It is literally the AGPL, with even stronger copyleft provisions. It is anti-proprietary in the strongest conceivable way. How is that not open source? It does not infringe upon, and goes out of its way to protect, the four freedoms.
  • ensignavenger 6y ago
    https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd See in particular items 5, 6 and 9.
    • Karunamon 6y ago
      That doesn't parse. The SSPL does not discriminate against a person, a group, or a field of endeavor, any more than the GPL "discriminates" against people who distribute modified versions of a program by requiring them to distribute the source code of the changes. Further, the requirement of the SSPL does not cover "distributing with", so point 9 doesn't seem to make sense either.
      • richardwhiuk 6y ago
        The main problem is that the license is bad, in the sense that it's vague.
        • kemitchell 6y ago
          AGPL is GPL with some changes. SSPL is AGPL with some more changes. There is plenty of vagueness in open licenses. Familiarity over time doesn't make that vagueness go away.
          • Karunamon 6y ago
            The argument that it's vague indeed makes sense, but I can't make heads or tails of the one that claims it's not an open source license at the end of the day. If anything, it's more open source than the AGPL.
• no_wizard 6y ago
  I never understood why its so hard for Corporations (specifically, US Corporations) to just give back to these projects via corporate charity contributions. I know, this takes away from other worthy causes too in some ways, however, I think we could get massive boosts that help all tides in the long run. After all, US corporate giving, from a cursory search, in 2019 alone was 21.09 billion USD[0] if even 1% of that made it toward open source, that would fund an overwhelming amount of projects overnight. Just 1%. And it would be extremely effective per dollar in terms of what society gets back in return. I don't know why tech companies don't see it this way in particular. [0]: https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/#:~:text=Corporate%20giving%20in%202019%20increased,a%2013.4%25%20increase%20from%202018.&text=Foundation%20giving%20in%202019%20increased,a%202.5%25%20increase%20from%202018.&text=In%202019%2C%20the%20largest%20source,or%2069%25%20of%20total%20giving https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-g....
  • jahewson 6y ago
    Open source software development isn’t regarded as a social good (legally in the US), it has to be fulfilling some broader charitable purpose. But such a system would completely change the dynamics of open source, likely in undesirable ways. Keep the money out, I say.
    • no_wizard 6y ago
      The whole issue with OSS software is there isn't any money coming in with significant quantity to fund projects, many, many of which are fundamental to technologies we all take for granted, take the OpenSSL story for example, as alluded to in this press release when corporations got shamed for taking advantage of this project with little funding: https://web.archive.org/web/20160610144229/http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2014/04/amazon-web-services-cisco-dell-facebook-fujitsu-google-ibm-intel https://web.archive.org/web/20160610144229/http://www.linuxf... Now imagine if projects like this could receive real, significant ongoing funding. Maybe charity isn't right, (non profit would be a better word here I think). I see it as a net gain. It doesn't mean it wouldn't be complicated and add more overhead to certain projects of x size though. Please do elaborate more though if you think it would strongly result in a net negative.
• cactus2093 6y ago
  What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Or what every hosting provider including AWS does with the Linux kernel, sell access to a service that is running that software. I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released open source software and now are mad that it is taking on a life of its own that they don’t 100% control. That’s the whole point of open source as far as I’m concerned, other people can do stuff you might not have expected with your code. Now they’re making it more closed going forward, which is fine and is certainly their right to do. But this argument is so bizarre, instead of saying that we tried to do this open source but unfortunately it makes it too difficult for us as a business so we’re closing things off, they’re trying to spin it as they are the true, good defenders of open source fighting against the forces of evil by closing off their licensing further.
  • jamra 6y ago
    Did you read the blog post? They are mad about trademark violation and an allegation that their commercial code has been ripped off by Amazon through a third party. They have Elasticsearch trademarked and you can't use their name with your name on it. In their mind, it is a violation.
    • cactus2093 6y ago
      Yes but how does changing their license affect a trademark? If they are legally in the right and this is a violation of their trademark they should win their lawsuit about it regardless. Also my initial question was not purely rhetorical, I would assume "Linux" is also trademarked so I'm wondering what is the difference there and why Redhat selling RHEL has not been the same problem.
      • Omie6541 6y ago
        I think it's not the same problem because Red Hat contributes heavily back to Linux kernel
      • 6y ago
• blabitty 6y ago
  Sounds like Amazon did misrepresent their relationship with elastic intentionally, which is abusive. It was also unnecessary in my opinion because the AWS service is so much easier to use - no licensing to worry about at all as an end consumer. Compare with running ELK yourself where you quickly discover that you will need to buy a license and possibly support to get any usable enterprise features at all.
• nickjj 6y ago
  Thank you for writing this up. It kind of hit home for me because I recently had an issue with an unrelated company that has gotten 100 million+ in funding take advantage of my work by removing my name from the content, openly discredit my work under false claims and attempted to steal money from me multiple times while I've done nothing but help grow their business and ask for nothing in return other than our agreed upon compensation. What I got from this write up is there's always going to be people and corporations out there who do their best to take advantage of you for the sake of profiting off your work using whatever means necessary, even if it's maybe illegal. I pity companies like this, especially the people who are making the decisions because that's the legacy they are leaving behind and if they happen to have children, they are probably forcing that mindset onto them as well.
  • newusertoday 6y ago
    name them so that others are careful in dealing with them
• dustinmoris 6y ago
  I really like Elasticsearch. I run it myself hosted in a Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes Operator developed by Elastic, so I'm one of the people who uses Elasticsearch extensively without being a paying customer, but to be fair that is part of the reason why I opted for it. I think Elastic has become victim of its own success if I may say so. Running Elasticsearch self hosted is fairly easy, either on actual hardware or VMs or in a container cluster. Their documentation is exceptionally good and the wide adoption means that a lot of issues people might run into have already been solved or answered on StackOverflow and other online forums. If Elasticsearch wasn't such a great product then Amazon would also struggle more with providing a managed version in their cloud. I think trademark violations are pretty bad and a real punch below the belt, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that is actually happening. Amazon also offers Redis as a service, so does Azure. They both have Redis in the name. They also offer MS SQL as a service, however that has a proprietary license which the end customer pays for so it's an unfair comparison. I wonder if the monetisation strategy, which is basically Elastic Cloud, is the best option for Elastic. They are essentially providing a mini managed Elasticsearch cluster which is away from the rest of the infrastructure which development teams are already maintaining. Of course they will be competing with Amazon then and likely going to lose, since Amazon has so much more. Other OSS products have found more lucrative and less costly monetisation models than operating your own cloud hosting provider. I hope Elastic will find a way to sustain themselves in a way which makes the owners happy, because their product is really good.
  • hello_moto 6y ago
    > If Elasticsearch wasn't such a great product then Amazon would also struggle more with providing a managed version in their cloud. They do struggle a little bit on their AWS ES offerings if you go across certain threshold. > I wonder if the monetisation strategy, which is basically Elastic Cloud, is the best option for Elastic. Redis has RedisLab (cloud) and I can tell you AWS EC Redis does eat some of their customers through various reasons.
• emphatizer2000 6y ago
  Lots of hosts offer "Wordpress Hosting" - is that fundamentally different from offering Elasticsearch? I don't think merely using the name of an open source product is such a huge ethical issue? It's the same all those Wordpress hosts do. The other things (claiming a cooperation exists, stealing from commercial code) seem more questionable, but also unrelated to the actual open source license.
• sn_master 6y ago
  Does Microsoft charge for using the Windows trademark for Cloud providers, or does it charge only for the software license? If they only charge for the software, then how is this situation any different?
• orestis 6y ago
  As an AWS user, it bums me out how much vendors don’t integrate better with the marketplace and cloud formation stacks etc. What I’m after is being able to pay a 3rd-party vendor to do all the work of setting up a cluster of machines, deal with HA, backups, upgrades, support etc - but stay out of my data, so that I don’t have to force all our enterprise clients to sign updates to our DPA. I would gladly pay elastic.co for such a service. The only vendor that I’m aware that does is Cognitect with Datomic Cloud: https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/index.html https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/index.html
• blackbrokkoli 6y ago
  A lot of comments here are discussing the greater implications of OSS and the like - which is appropriate. But can we take a minute to talk about AWS' specific, egregious behavior? Blatantly stealing the trademark, not even entering negotiations. Lying on Twitter about being in a partnership with a company when they are not is the kind of behavior I expect from a shady sneakers reseller on Reddit, not AWS. In my book, this is shockingly unprofessional and indicates some serious rot as a company...
• 015a 6y ago
  The SSPL is a sham of an open source license. Its written (and named!) in a way to convince shallow readers that its just a service-oriented version of the GPL, but its practically impossible to fulfill the terms of this license in a way which enables third parties to legally host the so-called "open source software". That's the point of the SSPL; to make sure the company who created the so-called open source software is the only company that can monetize it. Does that sound like the state Linux is in to you? The core legal requirement the GPL puts on distributors is that modifications must also be made open source. That's powerful, and attainable. The core legal requirement the SSPL puts on "third-party distributors" is the requirement that all the source code for that distributor's service must be made open source. First: It doesn't even apply to Elastic. Second: Binaries are discrete; services are networked, often involving many pieces, and there's no strong legal definition for what "service" means in the SSPL. MongoDB invented it, submitted it to OSI for approval in 2018, then withdrew the application in 2019. Its still not an OSI approved license. Every major linux distro ceased distributing MongoDB upon the relicense, under concerns that its not actually an open source license. Elastic wants to keep the conversation focused on AWS. Look, I like AWS, but they can be pretty icky, I get that. However, this is not a dichotomy. Elastic betrayed the open source community. They started with open source as a major selling point of elasticsearch, used that selling point to gain traction and users; many of whom did not pay elastic for the service, to be sure. When they had secured a moat of success, they flipped the license to one that is not open source, and now those users are forced to come to elastic for support. Elastic should be able to make money. In the spirit of that, we just need to be clear: They're effectively no better than, say, Algolia. Yeah, I can read the source code. I can't really change it in a meaningful way. I can self-host (which I can do with many closed-source products). I can't sub-contract a specialist like AWS to manage it for me. Them switching to the SSPL is "fine". They're just not an open source company anymore. This is not an "AWS is evil, Elastic is great" situation; this is a "they're both companies who do some good things and some evil things, but above all else they care about money" situation. There are true open source projects which aren't like this; elasticsearch was one of these, it isn't anymore, and we should focus on supporting products which support their users back, not ones which are built to support The Company.
• wolframhempel 6y ago
  In a more general way, the Elastic/AWS case proves a more fundamental vulnerability of Open Source as a business model. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this article called "Why I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one." trying to make this case and point out a couple of systemic pitfalls in OS as a business model (Apologies for the self-promotion, but I felt this might be relevant): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-wouldnt-invest-open-source-companies-even-though-wolfram-hempel https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-wouldnt-invest-open-sou...
  • alextheparrot 6y ago
    In your post you talk briefly about licensing -- effectively (1) MIT/Apache are common and very permissive (2) AGPL sometimes gets shut down by legal (3) Changing licenses is hard. Given these primitives, do you think one solution to the problem is just what we see here, a new licensing structure for some types of open source? Elastic's move here, attacking the issue through licensing, is one way that this sort of business model is becoming more robust over time and would be instructive for other founders looking to create revenue generating software that is also open source. As a developer, the main reason I _love_ open source is that I help patch issues or inspect the code to get a better understanding. Which is great because the changes Elastic are making to their license are orthogonal to the value prop for your average developer.
    • wolframhempel 6y ago
      I wouldn't assume Elastic-style licenses to be a solution going forward. Elastic can use this license model now that they've already achieved considerable popularity and success - but I doubt that they would have gotten to where they are, had they started out with this license.
      • alextheparrot 6y ago
        I think your historical assessment is fair, as usually legal has an allow-list of licenses and anything else is non-trivial to integrate. Moving forward, though, with multiple companies trying to solve issues via licensing (Mongo, Elastic, Confluent), I think we could see some of the new licenses become legal allow-listed (Which allows for some of the moment open-source can give as you mentioned in the link). Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Elastic-style licenses moving forward is API compatibility. It is just a question of how much money is at stake for a company like Amazon to go from just operationalizing ElasticSearch to running and maintaining an API-compatible fork, just as they've done with Mongo. It would actually be a bit hilarious if Amazon open-sourced said fork with a more permissive license, given that their buck is usually made off of ops.
• ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
  Can someone help clarify something: the ES license change only affects future releases, right? The previous releases under the previous license are still valid, right? If so, then my bet is Amazon will begin to treat ES like they do Aurora, namely, they will run their own fork of ES that from this point forward will be a separate code base and will evolve independently but will be "compatible" with anything that would otherwise expect the server to be a normal ES server (like how Aurora is compatible with MYSQL).
• r-w 6y ago
  I wonder if you can send them a cease-and-desist.
• wazoox 6y ago
  Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and everyone loses in the end but the handful of plutocrats that control Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.
  • kstrauser 6y ago
    > Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Those are interesting and specific accusations. Got any proof?
    • wazoox 6y ago
      That's right in the article.
    • patch_cable 6y ago
      There is a link in the article to a separate post: https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-including-amazon-elasticsearch-service-open-distro-and-others https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin.... I think this is what it is referring to.
      • nenolod 6y ago
        I read that article and it is very redolent of what SCO argued back in the day. If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin.
        • joshuaissac 6y ago
          > I read that article [...] If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin. The first sentence of that article: > Back on September 4th, we filed a lawsuit against floragunn GmbH, the makers of Search Guard, a security plugin for Elasticsearch
• lawwantsin17 6y ago
  Go get em!
• sjg007 6y ago
  Elasticsearch has to enforce their trademark otherwise they will lose it. This is crucial. Preserving their trademark will forbid Amazon from advertising their service as elasticsearch which may help them find and retain customers. Elasticsearch should lobby for an antitrust investigation into AWS. Here the market is cloud computing is AWS. This is similar to antitrust in the mainframe market or the PC market etc... However, right now it's not clear what the antitrust remedy will be. In those markets things evolved, most recently from desktop PCs to cloud delivered web apps etc... Beyond that Elastic needs to innovate or join up with someone bigger.
  • hallqv 6y ago
    Why antitrust? The cloud market is highly competetive and AWS only have about 1/3 market share.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      You could read the Senate report: https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editorialfiles/2020/10/06/investigation_of_competition_in_digital_markets_majority_staff_report_and_recommendations.pdf https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editoria...
• kache_ 6y ago
  It's the same deal with cloudant and IBM cloud. Rebranding couchDB as their own. Putting on a web UI on top of it and rebranding it entirely.
• thayne 6y ago
  > We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon I am sympathetic to many of Elastic's complaints, but not this one. If you make an open-core product, you have to expect that others will attempt to make competing, possibly open source, alternatives to your proprietary components.
• ralmidani 6y ago
  As mentioned in another discussion, I used to be a Copyleft Zealot, but I've come to realize an absolutist insistence on "Free as in Freedom" and the "Four Freedoms", without allowing businesses a viable path to profitability, is an obsolete attitude. It has become incredibly easy and cheap to distribute copies of large programs, even as a service over the internet. Sure, hobbyist projects and foundations for FOSS software still exist, but important infrastructure projects like Mongo, Redis, and now Elastic have all recently changed their licenses from "true" FOSS to "some rights reserved". One might argue that the point of FOSS is not to make money. But GNU/FSF have said repeatedly that it's OK to "sell" your software. How do you do that when a FAANGMO can easily out-scale you and put you out of business? If I were to start an actual software company, I would give very serious consideration to licenses like Polyform[0] over "true" FOSS, at least for the important, money-making parts where it would be impossible to compete with a FAANGMO. [0] https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
• 0xmohit 6y ago
  This reminds of a somewhat recent instance: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service [0] https://twitter.com/tim_nolet/status/1317061818574082050 https://twitter.com/tim_nolet/status/1317061818574082050
• pronik 6y ago
  I'm not surprised, having had the exact same debate about MongoDB a couple of years back. Elastic has iterated over and over, taking years to remove obvious problems with their products, building heavily on the community for input about their needs, but still managing to ignore them for a long time. I still remember searching for anything that's not Kibana since their interface has been dreadful (and probably still is). I remember people turning away from Logstash to Fluentd and others pretty early, but don't know the exact reasons. I remember when pretty important and frankly "core" stuff like authentication and authorization among others moved into Shield and other specialized commercial plugins. They have leveraged almost a decade of developer good-will to cope with their inherent architectural problems and to fight for introducing "weird open source software" in their respective companies and ultimately give them their street cred of "logging aggregation == ELK". Now, after most of their stack "just works" like people expect it to, they throw it all away, putting people who fought for them in license jeopardy while pointing the finger at Amazon? I don't have any sympathy for this. It's your business, if it fails, nobody is at fault but yourself, especially if you a 14B behemoth. May the exodus begin, it's long overdue.
• mcdoker18 6y ago
  Interesting, how many there are such 3rd party's products that AWS offers as a service? Who will be the next for license changing, Redis?
• alexkidd 6y ago
  Waiting for some FAANG employee saying that "Elastic didn't understand the open source ideology"
• tareqak 6y ago
  I remember there being a few posts about companies/foundations relicensing their code in about the last three months. Their approach was relicense to be AGPLv3 for their OSS license and allowing interested parties to pay for a commercial license. However, contributors had to license their code as both AGPLv3 and BSD if I remember correctly. Does anyone using the above approach have any comments about how well this approach is working for them?
• hallqv 6y ago
  Open source provider complaining that it's software is being used openly. Am I missing something?
• dd_roger 6y ago
  I have a hard time understanding the point of the author. If Amazon is infringing a trademark (which indeed seems to be the case in my non-expert eyes), reparation should/could be obtained before a court regardless of the license of the code. If the author has a problem with his FOSS software being used by an entity he doesn't like then he is in disagreement with the FOSS ideal at its core, this is a perfectly respectable opinion but don't blame it on Amazon.
• kureikain 6y ago
  From time to time, I see some cool application and I really want to see how they done it. It's ok if it's "truely OSS" I just want to see how they did it, what trick they made. An example, a few years ago I saw a few mac app that show you network metered in status bar and little snitch. I don't know how they did that. I wish I can read their code, even if it's truely OSS. To me, the value that ElasticSearch give to us is great. And when I do some cool thing, I myself want to share too but I don't want other to take my code and make money off it without contributing back to me. I think Elastic, as a company, doing a good thing here, and AWS is the bad actor here, they even lie about their collaboration between them and Elastic.
• tardyp 6y ago
  So what happens with https://sematext.com/ https://sematext.com/ ? Outside of AWS, they use open-distro and do compete with elastic.co. Will they just go out of business by not being able to upgrade elastic?
• runningmike 6y ago
  “Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.” Change to AGPL was imho the logical solution...
• qalmakka 6y ago
  I don't understand why companies obstinately keep adopting the SSPL when it's obvious it makes no legal sense and it is unenforceable. The only reason why nobody has shut it down in court yet is because the companies they are complaining about have plenty of resources to maintain their own forks. By adopting the SSPL they are just pushing corporate developers away and weakening their offering.
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  Does this mean Elastic has withdrawn its legal actions wrt it’s trademark and alleged use of proprietary code?
• onenightnine 6y ago
  i met someone who talked about how amazon aws appears bigger than what it is
• quotemstr 6y ago
  > We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon The rest of Amazon's behavior aside, there's nothing wrong with cloning a feature. Cloning features is in fact an essential part of competition.
• nenolod 6y ago
  Incidentally, the fact that it is OK to use Apache-2 licensed components inside projects licensed as SSPL is probably a net negative for free software moving forward as there will be more of these companies which do this in the future. It doesn't end with Elastic.
• dang 6y ago
  Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781&p=2
• pabs3 6y ago
  If Amazon violated their trademark and proprietary license, how do they think they will be able to stop Amazon from violating the new proprietary license?
• samblr 6y ago
  What gets often never discussed in these debates is below : The sheer inability of OSI to provide a new-age license that can counter AWS. Can anybody knowledgeable shed some light on this topic ? Like what OSI license can counter AWS & if there are none why aren't OSI doing anything.
  • kemitchell 6y ago
    I'd argue this is pretty much what SSPL was supposed to be: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/06/13/SSPL-Not-Commons-Clause.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/06/13/SSPL-Not-Commons-C... It's no secret AGPL was written to solve "the Google problem". SSPL tried to solve "the AWS problem" with copyleft, rather than just banning the use case, which is what Commons Clause did.
  • andrewshadura 6y ago
    Because what Amazon does here is perfectly okay and in the spirit of open source.
• kuon 6y ago
  I am working on SAAS, and I want to open source the codebase. But I'd like to avoid a big commercial entity to run my software as a competitive service. What is the best license to use for this use case? I want to allow as many uses of my code as possible, like on premise deployment, schools, ... But with the exception of using it commercially to run the same service as me.
• ramoz 6y ago
  Think this is just where tech is headed. Software eating itself. Big OSS will need to shift if their value is in providing licensed commercial versions. This is like a new modern evolution of internet. Cloud, data, apps, etc all becoming utilities in a highly-automated/converged platform. For the platform providers, it looks like a new oracle lock-in era, but instead of dotcom boom for the rest, its a net-negative because developer jobs and integrators will find most of their work automated (not necessarily a bad thing, just, whats next?). --- tangent --- AI becoming a commodity should really open our eyes. Need to realize that most enterprise and commercial apps facilitate a digital process. Our need to "build", "analyze", or "iterate" through processes are becoming areas of automation / embedded analytics. Cool potential for new user experiences and capability in new era modern apps. Also wonder what the future need for digital apps even encompasses vs augmented reality experiences.
• chynkm 6y ago
  Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-belong-to-Elastic.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...
• chynkm 6y ago
  If your organisation uses the Apache v2 licensed Elasticsearch or Kibana in its projects or products, it must now assume that it is at risk one way or another. It can upgrade to version 7.11 of these projects, thereby accepting the terms of SSPL and potentially also being required to release the code for its entire stack (a great deal of which it will not have the copyright over and will be unable to release, thereby potentially being in violation of SSPL). It can remain on version 7.10, but then it will no longer receive future updates, including important security fixes, thereby taking on another sort of risk. https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearch-and-kibana-are-now-business-risks https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/01/14/elasticsearc...
• ineedasername 6y ago
  How does something like this work? Is the license retroactive and therefore impacting AWS's current use, or is this just on any use of updates going forward?
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  It's pretty clear from the post that Amazon is not acting in good faith and very short-sighted. If they destroy ElasticSearch as a company, their foundation will erode: no more updates, no more improvements, no more bug fixes. All for another cool billion. NOT OK
• Jerry2 6y ago
  >We have seen that this trademark issue drives confusion with users thinking Amazon Elasticsearch Service is actually a service provided jointly with Elastic, with our blessing and collaboration. This is just not true. NOT OK. I do not understand why they're not suing Amazon for a trademark violation. Imagine if they called themselves Elastic Amazon Search... Amazon would send them a cease and desist within a week. Also, if you don't protect your trademarks, you will lose them! They're playing with fire here by not taking action. [1] Anyway, send them a cease & desist for misusing your trademarks, Elastic! [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2013/02/28/failure-to-enforce-trademarks-if-you-snooze-do-you-lose/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2013/02/28/failu...
• T3RMINATED 6y ago
  who dis clown? Where is the lawsuit? No lawsuit means you dont really care, get out of grandmas basement boy.
• ggm 6y ago
  Lie down with a dog, wake up with fleas. Sup with the devil: better use a long spoon. The list of aphorisms for trading with/under/via Amazon is .. large
• thethought 6y ago
  Alternatives https://github.com/tantivy-search/tantivy https://github.com/tantivy-search/tantivy https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve
• didibus 6y ago
  I don't get why not just keep their license as-is, but add a "Except for Amazon" clause?
• exabrial 6y ago
  ActimeMQ, Mongo, Elastic... Probably time to stop giving these people your money
• moonraker 6y ago
  It's worth noting that MongoDB made the same change to their licensing due to a similar move by AWS 2 years ago... it made them a stronger business though (and enabled them to create even more value for their current/future customers). More info at the link below https://stratechery.com/2019/aws-mongodb-and-the-economic-realities-of-open-source/ https://stratechery.com/2019/aws-mongodb-and-the-economic-re...
• belval 6y ago
  > We think that Amazon’s behavior is inconsistent with the norms and values that are especially important in the open source ecosystem. It is not, Elastic does not have a monopoly on what open-source is or mean. > Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us. Therefore they admit that their market strategy was bad to being with. A lot of open-source technology is being used extensively by AWS/Azure/GCP. I don't see the maintainers of Kubernetes, MariaDB, [insert your favorite OSS project] or even Linux arguing that they are somehow owed money for a product they voluntarily distributed under a permissive license. > When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion. Then sue them and be done with it. Every time this particular subject comes up I get slightly riled up because it is just a display of misplaced after-the-fact outrage over poor business development planning. Elastic grew because of that open source license and benefitted from a wide adoption because of it. Now that they realized that giving away software isn't a great way to make money they pull this bait-and-switch and expect "the community" to blame the big bad company.
• senthilnayagam 6y ago
  the few services which is not offered by AWS on its own but have paid EC2 images include Neo4j, if they made everything 100% open source , there would be AWS Neo4j edition . open source founders should have some monetisation opportunities. if big companies take everything away it’s not cool
• nijave 6y ago
  Another angle: Elasti Co gives away their IP presumably as a marketing ploy to get adoption and lock in. AWS comes along and uses free software to build a platform users want. Elasti Co gets mad they aren't in full control of the software they gave away and now want to control its usage Some other thoughts Where do you draw the line between "cloud", consulting, and just hiring your own engineers to run it. One is fully outsourced and one insourced but the result is the same (someone is managing an Elasticsearch cluster and making money doing it) It's in Amazon's interest to contribute some of their changes back or they end up with an incompatible product that becomes a less attractive "Elasticsearch" alternative.
• fangorn 6y ago
  I don't think you can have an open source product. In this particular case, Elasticsearch is an open source project that Elastic is a custodian of and has been monetising by building products around it: support, consulting, proprietary extensions, hosting and maybe other things. Now an industry behemoth has decided to directly compete with one of their products. That's tough, especially that it's done in a typically heavy handed way, but... Elastic's reaction seems highly disingenuous, basically a PR dance around "we love open source but we didn't realise it allows competition to eat into our revenue stream". Elasticsearch is great precisely because it's an open source project, not a product. Otherwise it would be a yet another proprietary black box thingy, with a hefty price tag and a bunch of corporate users. As a project, it thrives, enjoys trust, dedicated community, contributions, enthusiast adoption effect, and so on. I'm sure they could still make plenty of money from their other products, introduce new ones, maybe even get a huge new stream of support contracts from AWS customers. Instead they decided to cannibalise the main source of their success: their brilliant open source project.
  • GreenWatermelon 6y ago
    In the end, what Elastic did is making it so " You can do anything, except selling this product" which imo is fair.
• chikens 6y ago
  Don’t forget the CEO has cashed out ~$200M in stock the last two years alone and still holds $1B worth of stock, yet complains about AWS making money and changes the license so he can make even more. He likes to quote a tweet from 2015 from the CTO of AWS when they launched the Elasticsearch service in AWS. That was 6 years ago! They have had time to build a better offering with heir commercial licenses have failed. Elastic is trying to sell security now, what happens when they lose there too, change the license so any SIEM or analytics vendors have to pay them too? Elastic made a promise that the code would ALWAYS be Apache 2.0 and they went back on that promise, they lied to the community that helped build it, their customers, employees, partners and investors. The blog post about the license titles “Doubling Down on Open” is an insult to peoples’ intelligence, they are trying to play the victim because AWS is a mean bully. Well that’s business, if the CEO/founder didn’t see it coming then maybe he shouldn’t CEO? Take his billion dollars and go start something else and hand the company leadership over to someone who knows what they are doing.
• horovits 6y ago
  SSPL is NOT an open source license. OSI (Open Source Initiative) released a statement to clarify that, and also respondED to Elastic's claims. https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099 The community has invested in Elasticsearch and in Kibana, and we need to keep it open source. really open source. Check out this initiative: https://logz.io/blog/open-source-elasticsearch-doubling-down/ https://logz.io/blog/open-source-elasticsearch-doubling-down... (disclaimer: I'm a developer advocate at Logz.io) If you also want to take part, email open-es-k@logz.io (or reach out to me @horovits) Let’s keep Elasticsearch and Kibana open source!