5 ms·

This smells to me like puritanical, idealized FOSS for a perfectable world, as opposed to pragmatic FOSS for the real world.

lewiscollard 6y ago
> as opposed to pragmatic FOSS Call it whatever you like, but it's not "pragmatic FOSS", it's not "FOSS" at all. It is neither free (by the FSF's definition, which goes back to at least 1986), nor open source (by the definition first published in 1998, derived from the DFSG published in 1997). > for the real world The "real world" in which Elastic's revenues, as the article points out, were $427 million last year. And please don't use this cheap rhetorical trick wherein anyone with different priorities must get back to the "real world" (defined loosely as "whatever I say it is").
- frenchy 6y ago
  > it's not "FOSS" at all Source? I don't remember the url, but the other day someone posted a link to an opinion posted by someone at OSI back when Elastic was thinking of getting certification that basically said: "This licence would probably satisify the OSI defintion, but it's a bad license because it's too vague and you should use the AGPL-3 instead".
  - lewiscollard 6y ago
    I have not read the opinion you refer to, but Elastic themselves admit "it is not an OSI approved license and is not considered open source".[0] > but it's a bad license because it's too vague That has historically[1] been a reason for the free & open source communities to reject licenses; nobody wants cavernous uncertainties about what you can and cannot do under a license's terms. [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification [1] See, e.g., why the FSF rejected the original Artistic License. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLicense https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLi...
rpdillon 6y ago
Some years ago, I chose Elasticsearch for the main search engine at one of my previous jobs. Hoping to support open source, I avoided Amazon's offering and paid for hosting from Elastic, telling management that not only would it support the company that created the software, but also would put us in contact with engineers that knew the product extremely well. I even went to Elasticon! It worked really well, but as our query rate increased, our queries' geographic component, which we would search using Elastic's geohashing, created high CPU usage on our cluster. We soon learned the CPU demands for each query were significantly higher compared to more traditional full-text search queries. Elastic simply had no way to allow us to optimize for CPU heavy workloads in their hosted product. We talked with their product team and engineers, and they were good, and promised they were working on it, but ultimately my team needed to move to a hosted solution that offered better instance selection so we could optimize for our particular workload while keeping costs under control. So, we moved to AWS. This required navigating some weirdness with request signing, but overall worked great. While I'm sure the hosting issues have since been addressed, this lesson taught me that the licensing of the software impacts my ability as an engineer to find alternative hosts with a variety of hosting and pricing models, and this move to a more restrictive license will likely add friction for those providers that will reduce the number of companies that will offer hosted Elasticsearch. I think this is a material practical concern. It does leave an open question about how to fund open source, which is also a practical concern. It's probably another discussion, but I have a hunch that rather than forcing third-parties to open source their hosting stack, it makes more sense for the open-source business to make their hosting stack proprietary (Elastic's already is, IIRC), and provide an awesome developer experience with the hosted product, so hosting providers can compete on the SaaS experience and share the underlying open-source product. Just a hunch, though.
- rognjen 6y ago
  It's quite simple to set up on EC2. The ansible playbook works well.

lewiscollard 6y ago

> as opposed to pragmatic FOSS Call it whatever you like, but it's not "pragmatic FOSS", it's not "FOSS" at all. It is neither free (by the FSF's definition, which goes back to at least 1986), nor open source (by the definition first published in 1998, derived from the DFSG published in 1997). > for the real world The "real world" in which Elastic's revenues, as the article points out, were $427 million last year. And please don't use this cheap rhetorical trick wherein anyone with different priorities must get back to the "real world" (defined loosely as "whatever I say it is").

frenchy 6y ago
> it's not "FOSS" at all Source? I don't remember the url, but the other day someone posted a link to an opinion posted by someone at OSI back when Elastic was thinking of getting certification that basically said: "This licence would probably satisify the OSI defintion, but it's a bad license because it's too vague and you should use the AGPL-3 instead".
- lewiscollard 6y ago
  I have not read the opinion you refer to, but Elastic themselves admit "it is not an OSI approved license and is not considered open source".[0] > but it's a bad license because it's too vague That has historically[1] been a reason for the free & open source communities to reject licenses; nobody wants cavernous uncertainties about what you can and cannot do under a license's terms. [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification [1] See, e.g., why the FSF rejected the original Artistic License. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLicense https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLi...

rpdillon 6y ago

Some years ago, I chose Elasticsearch for the main search engine at one of my previous jobs. Hoping to support open source, I avoided Amazon's offering and paid for hosting from Elastic, telling management that not only would it support the company that created the software, but also would put us in contact with engineers that knew the product extremely well. I even went to Elasticon! It worked really well, but as our query rate increased, our queries' geographic component, which we would search using Elastic's geohashing, created high CPU usage on our cluster. We soon learned the CPU demands for each query were significantly higher compared to more traditional full-text search queries. Elastic simply had no way to allow us to optimize for CPU heavy workloads in their hosted product. We talked with their product team and engineers, and they were good, and promised they were working on it, but ultimately my team needed to move to a hosted solution that offered better instance selection so we could optimize for our particular workload while keeping costs under control. So, we moved to AWS. This required navigating some weirdness with request signing, but overall worked great. While I'm sure the hosting issues have since been addressed, this lesson taught me that the licensing of the software impacts my ability as an engineer to find alternative hosts with a variety of hosting and pricing models, and this move to a more restrictive license will likely add friction for those providers that will reduce the number of companies that will offer hosted Elasticsearch. I think this is a material practical concern. It does leave an open question about how to fund open source, which is also a practical concern. It's probably another discussion, but I have a hunch that rather than forcing third-parties to open source their hosting stack, it makes more sense for the open-source business to make their hosting stack proprietary (Elastic's already is, IIRC), and provide an awesome developer experience with the hosted product, so hosting providers can compete on the SaaS experience and share the underlying open-source product. Just a hunch, though.

rognjen 6y ago
It's quite simple to set up on EC2. The ansible playbook works well.