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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

• joana035 6y ago
  TL;DR AGPL your software, kiddos!
  • SXX 6y ago
    AGPL wouldn't help against AWS making money off hosted version of your software.
• benatkin 6y ago
  Amazon is used to being hostile, so I'm not surprised they've started a hostile fork.
• paxys 6y ago
  Going to start the first actual tech discussion here – the codebases can be naturally expected to diverge, but will AWS keep the APIs the same? I can't imagine the fork will be successful without leveraging the massive Elasticsearch ecosystem. And what bearing does Oracle v Google have if they do "steal" APIs from future SSPL-licensed code?
• PradeetPatel 6y ago
  >Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community). I'm a bit out of the loop here, can someone please tell me why Elastic decided to enact this seemingly Anti-OSS license?
  • jawns 6y ago
    The announcement: https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change The "Why" behind the change: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS tl;dr Elastic alleges that Amazon is infringing on their trademark and is offering Elastic's products as a service on AWS without being a good partner. From Elastic's summary of the license change: "The SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, with the simple requirement that if you provide the product as a service to others, you must also publicly release any modifications as well as the source code of your management layers under SSPL."
    • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      > The SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, with the simple requirement that if you provide the product as a service to others, you must also publicly release any modifications as well as the source code of your management layers under SSPL." The magic is in the "management layers" part. True copyleft says "you can use this software in your product but you have to open source any changes to the software". Okay, fine. This "poison pill proprietary license dressed up as copyleft" is saying "if you sell a service that uses an UNMODIFIED version of elasticsearch, you have to release every piece of software around elasticsearch, including your hypervisors, kernels, os image...the list goes on". It's very clearly an attempt to make the requirement so odious that no-one would risk triggering that clause. Which is why functionally all they did was force Amazon (and other organizations like Wikimedia who don't sell Elasticsearch as a service but do refuse to run proprietary software) to have to fork.
  • dboreham 6y ago
    Because they want to make money?
  • hehehaha 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781
    • saurik 6y ago
      (On this thread, I think the top comment from StavrosK is particularly poignant.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523
      • hehehaha 6y ago
        Yes that comment really stuck with me. Because in many ways cloud (in current form) wouldn’t exist without OSS licensing in general.
  • aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    I see a couple other people shared links, but for future reference, the Algolia search box at the bottom of most pages is a great way to answer these sorts of questions.
  • alexchamberlain 6y ago
    Rightly or wrongly, they are joining a long line of OSS maintainers trying to protect themselves from the clouds profiting from them. It seems reasonable to me at least to say: you can use this software for free, but you can't resell it. If you want professional support, please support someone who is maintaining the software.
    • my123 6y ago
      It is not OSS if it does that, because you limit what the software can be used for. It becomes just source-available software. Being open-source to get a user base and then change the license isn't that great, they should have started as proprietary and that'd have been fine.
      • alexchamberlain 6y ago
        I don't think they were disingenuous here: I think they probably chose a license somewhat randomly (acknowledging it wasn't copy left probably?), then got developing. Down the road, they saw someone using the software in a way they didn't like and decided that as they were now bigger, they could afford to get a license drawn up with their values in mind. I doubt there was a nefarious plan to use a licence for it's reputation. Now, I do think we are missing a standard license in this space - everyone seems to be writing their own, which limits those that can use them to larger projects.
        • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
          I absolutely reject the notion that they chose Apache 2.0 "randomly"...indeed it's what Lucene, which they use as their kernel of sorts, is licensed under. You use Apache 2.0 when you explicitly don't want copyleft. But here's what's great: copyleft wouldn't even stop Amazon, so they have to use SSPL which is a proprietary license masquerading as copyleft. Also, one way they were clearly outright reneging on their promise was that Elastic explicitly promised the community that the parts of the codebase that were Apache 2.0 licensed (the 'open core') would never be made proprietary. They broke that promise for this move. And what's doubly hilarious is from a business perspective it's an awful move. It won't stop Amazon from making money - they'll just fork 7.1.0 and develop under Apache 2.0 like they just did, and keep operating their service just the same. And by the way, it's Amazon's right, legally AND ethically, to be able to operate AWS Elasticsearch for profit - just as Elastic is right both legally and ethically to use Lucene as a necessary part of Elasticsearch.
  • jimmydorry 6y ago
    They couldn't compete with practically free (Amazon hosting their software as a service), and allegedly Amazon weren't commiting anything back into their repo. Elastic appeared to make their money through hosting their own instances and selling professional licenses, which Amazon was in direct competition with.
  • fishtoaster 6y ago
    The short, charitable version: Elastic's business model is "make + distribute ElasticSearch for free, then offer hosted ES for money." AWS (among others) offers hosted ElasticSearch as well - Elastic feels this isn't fair, variously because: AWS may have violated trademark by calling theirs "Amazon Elasticsearch Service", or because AWS doesn't contribute enough to the open source development of ElasticSearch, or one of a few other grievances. So they're changing their license to one that protects against this sort of "abuse" of the Apache license. The less charitable version is that since Elastic's business model revolves around selling hosted ElasticSearch and AWS is outcompeting them there, they're switching to an "Open Source, but you're not allowed to do that anymore" license. But because Elastic values the goodwill they get from being "open source," they're trying to convince the world that this is a principled, moral stance instead of a run-of-the-mill self-interested decision to make their business more viable.
• m00dy 6y ago
  If you are Elastic, how could you compete against AWS even if it is your own software ?
  • crb002 6y ago
    Lower cost. AWS usually has huge premiums over the raw EC2/S3/EFS costs.
    • tw04 6y ago
      Unfortunately lower cost will do nothing to get you in the door at an enterprise that has a committed spend with AWS. I'm sure Elastic has been finding this out the hard way.
    • mushrew 6y ago
      Elastic’s SaaS offering is incredibly expensive vs AWS Elasticsearch
    • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      Better quality is a better answer. AWS charges a big premium for Elasticsearch and I don't think they'd drop their prices to try to squeeze Elastic - for one, it would be unlikely to even work - but even so it's always best to differentiate on being the better quality/"value" than the lowest cost. Having used AWS Elasticsearch, it has a lot of deep problems with it in its current state so Elastic can compete on value just fine. In other news, I think the Elastic licensing change beyond being ethically a dick move (legally it's their right), is just horrible business strategy. I said on this site several days ago that Amazon was just going to make an Apache 2.0 fork and keep chugging along, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
      • SXX 6y ago
        > AWS charges a big premium for Elasticsearch and I don't think they'd drop their prices to try to squeeze Elastic Your margin is my opportunity. (c) Though AWS still growing too fast atm so they value quantity of services over quality. But once they have capacity they can squeeze out of business almost anyone.
• crb002 6y ago
  Elastic was suing them for trademark breach. Hosting didn't bother them - it is FOSS. Lying that they were in partnership with Elastic did.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    >Hosting didn't bother them - it is FOSS. They literally changed the license to one that's only different in not allowing people to host it the way Amazon did.
    • ksec 6y ago
      Precisely to fence off Amazon from using their Open Source with their Name on it?
      • marcinzm 6y ago
        The new license does not say "X applies if you use our name". It says "X applies if you use our source code under any name."
  • rdtsc 6y ago
    That's the interesting thing to me, why they were so openly dishonest about it. https://twitter.com/Werner/status/649738362086027265 https://twitter.com/Werner/status/649738362086027265 --- Introducing the Amazon Elasticsearch service, a great partnership between @elastic and #AWS --- How was it a "great partnership" if one side didn't even know about it...
    • CapriciousCptl 6y ago
      AFAIK, that tweet from Vogel is the only time someone representing AWS claimed to have a partnership with Elastic. He was wrong, but I don't think it's fair calling it "dishonest."
• dijit 6y ago
  And I, for sure, will never use them. The AWS version of ES has been abysmal- it’s only saving grace is that it’s “in the ecosystem”- I was convinced by an AWS zealot on my team. Never again.
  • uncledave 6y ago
    I’ll second that. Complete pile of excrement. Edit: See my comment further down for an extrapolation. This one lacks merit which was a bad call on my part.
    • afandian 6y ago
      What exactly is wrong? And did you switch to something else?
      • uncledave 6y ago
        Outages during scale out, weird insurmountable restrictions on cross region replication, cost, backup and restore doesn’t work properly, cluster irrecoverable corruption and it is 100% opaque whenever something goes wrong. This results in escalation to AWS support who barely understand it. The big sell was easy deployment and cost management but the negatives outweighed that. We tried Elastic themselves but the sales and technical process was a nightmare. It was virtually impossible to work out what we were going to have to spend. We needed X-Pack (RBAC and SSO) but the enterprise licensing is all over the place for it. Ergo we didn’t bother and stuck with our DBMS FTE stuff. It’s crap but the ROI is better.
      • ArchOversight 6y ago
        Part of the issue is lack of visibility into what is going on, you don't get a lot of ability to debug. Company I was at switched from AWS's ElasticSearch to hosting it ourselves on top of EC2 instances so that we could control the memory/CPU/disks and see logging/understand more about the internals to help understand why it was slow for our use case.
  • core-questions 6y ago
• jasonrojas 6y ago
  This thread has some interesting links.. https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/t/recent-elastic-co-licensing-change-announcment/4583/40 https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/t/recent-elastic-co-...
• humbleMouse 6y ago
  Amazon, ruining everyone's favorite open source apache projects one at a time.
  • crb002 6y ago
    Bezos is executing better than the original SAAS vendors that FOSS community editions. You want to compete with buff Jeff then make sure you support Azure/GCP too and can price below Bezos' margin above raw EC2 - usually means you have to get creative with spot instances and avoiding cross data center network.
    • jimmydorry 6y ago
      Amazon can, and will price you out of the market regardless of what you do. And if your idea is novel enough, they will just make their own version of it (or fork it, like in the original post!).
      • googlryas 6y ago
        Is that wrong? The computer revolution was ignited by other companies essentially copying the designs of microprocessors and reselling them as their own.
    • dathos 6y ago
      You say this as if it's not a sign of a monopoly.
• PunchTornado 6y ago
  There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally. A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to the project.
  • crb002 6y ago
    They breached trademark in a press release lying that they were in partnership.
    • choeger 6y ago
      Maybe I watched too much of suits, but is that not illegal for publicly traded companies?
      • MauranKilom 6y ago
        And that's why there's a lawsuit. Who knows when that will be resolved though. In the meantime Amazon could keep doing what they're doing and just ignore whatever Elastic is asking of them. So Elastic drew the consequence and have stopped extending goodwill to Amazon.
        • greatpatton 6y ago
          OK but AWS already had Elastic xxx named product before Elastic search even existed. So the trademark issue can go multiple way in front of a court.
  • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically. They're creating value for their customers, and releasing open source software while doing so. Indeed it's Elastic who tried to get all the positives of open source with none of the negatives (as evidenced by them making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source) BTW, not that it's super relevant but the narrative that Amazon is driving Elastic bankrupt is farcical. Elastic pulls in $500MM in revenue and is valued at $15B+. Elastic's doing fine. Note: One thing Amazon did do that was unethical was claim that they had "collaborated with Elastic" when they announced AWS Elasticsearch long ago. That is indefensible. But there is nothing wrong with them forking.
• plasma 6y ago
  Is the crux of the issue AWS is making money off ES and not paying Elastic a royalty (because the license doesn’t need it)?
  • mirthflat83 6y ago
    If you don’t want that, maybe don’t open source your code with a license that allows others to do that?
    • iimblack 6y ago
      Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open-source) part of their product. > I took a personal loan to register the Elasticsearch trademark in 2011 believing in this norm in the open source ecosystem. Seeing the trademark so blatantly misused was especially painful to me. Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK. > 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. > 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. > 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. https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS
      • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
        > Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open-source) part of their product. Sure, but that allegation has absolutely nothing to do with Elastic breaking its earlier promise to the community and making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source. Indeed, the license change will have no effect on Amazon except to make Amazon's fork more successful because it's now been made necessary.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• snoshy 6y ago
  This seemed inevitable, as Amazon has done this several times now when asked to pay to support the organizations behind large enterprise OSS offerings.
• turbinerneiter 6y ago
  Wow, just wow. They think they are the good guys. Incredible.
  • parasubvert 6y ago
    Because, they are are the good guys? At least if you believe in open source, not the fake stuff that Elastic is peddling.
    • turbinerneiter 6y ago
      AWS is ruining one of the few working business models we had to support Open Source.
      • Chris2048 6y ago
        If Amazon is ruining it by not acting in opposition to its market incentives, then the business plan doesn't work.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• evilsnoopi3 6y ago
  The fact that AWS doesn't link to the Elastic License is hilarious to me. The plain reading of the license is "APLv2 but AWS Can't Sell a Hosted Version" so of course AWS forks the last APL version and plows ahead. Note, I'm not trying to side with either AWS or Elastic here and I fully recognize that both Elastic re-licensing and AWS forking are within each org's rights. I really just think it is funny how beside the point AWS's press release is here. EDIT: an apostrophe
  • macksd 6y ago
    To be fair, it was actually extremely difficult for me to find the license text after Elastic's announcements too. All the announcements and FAQ's etc. seemed to omit a link to the actual text.
    • jrh206 6y ago
      For those, like me, who were curious and wanted to take a look: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/licenses/ELASTIC-LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/license...
      • macksd 6y ago
        Thank you! I had actually tried to find it after posting my comment and couldn't find it through their website. The day of the announcement Github hadn't been updated yet, and I gave up when I saw this didn't say where to look: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE....
• Havoc 6y ago
  >Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch Seems like a rather disingenuous way of announcing it given the reason for the license change is (allegedly) a direct response to Amazon. Not that I'm a fan of Elastic's stance either...
  • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    No, you've got things reversed - as do most in this thread. Elastic's original announcement was disingenuous, they titled their blog post "Doubling Down on Open" when they were making Elasticsearch and Kibana no longer open source. Furthermore, Elastic promised in the past that ALL FUTURE VERSIONS of the open core of Elasticsearch would remind Apache 2.0. They broke that promise when they switched to proprietary licenses only with 7.1.1. BTW, while the reasoning from Elastic is that they did it because of Amazon, the actual effect is just to make organizations like the one I work for (a non-profit that refuses to run proprietary software in prod) have to use one of these Apache 2.0 forks, while not stopping Amazon from operating their Elasticsearch service at all (since Amazon is always free to operate an Apache 2.0 service and indeed that's the whole damn point of the license)
• markphip 6y ago
  I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been widely used and successful. It is up to Elastic to come up with a business model that works, not blame others if it is not.
  • mirthflat83 6y ago
    Understandable, because a lot of people open source their code under a permissive license because it’s a cool thing to do, not because they understand what truly open sourcing their code means.
    • belval 6y ago
      And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub.
      • justizin 6y ago
        Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to. It seems like a lot of us perhaps rushed to discussion before reading this article, which is about Amazon forking ElasticSearch so that an OSS version would remain available. Honestly, this is a shitty move by Elastic and I’ll be advocating against new uses of it, though /because reasons/, I doubt this will come up for me in the near future. ;)
        • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
          > Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to. Actually, you can totally use Apache 2.0 code as your kernel and then make the whole thing a restrictive license. In fact, that's why we're having this discussion right now. Elastic just made their Elasticsearch/Kibana codebases entirely proprietary, even though they rely on Apache 2.0 Lucene as their kernel. Which to be clear is totally fine, I'm just pointing out the obvious.
• juanbyrge 6y ago
  The audacity of these AWS folks patronizing elastic about open source despite AWS making millions of dollars off of their open source project just reeks of entitlement. Glad I am never going to use AWS.
  • blibble 6y ago
    I suspect the era just before the cloud was the peak of open source software these days you'd have to be a fool to start a company offering an open source server based product under a liberal license Amazon is a parasite, plain and simple
    • tannhaeuser 6y ago
      The whole point of "The Cloud" is to profit from F/OSS. And Elastic, Redis, Mongo, and also RedHat have indeed already adapted their licenses or offerings accordingly.
    • paxys 6y ago
      Large companies have monetized open source for decades, ever since open source has existed. Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon..the list is endless. I can't imagine why people will quit the open source movement now because they realize they can't make money from it – that has always been true. Writing FOSS to get rich has always been an oxymoron.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • arp242 6y ago
        It's not about "getting rich"; it's about being able to make a living. Those are not the same things.
  • driverdan 6y ago
    This is satire right? Do you say the same thing about Linux? nginx? WordPress?
• dtrailin 6y ago
  I would bet on AWS in this case as they will also likely have the support of anyone who wants to make a hosted service of those products. It will be interesting to see if eventually AWS starts making new APIs that diverge from the Elastic or if they chose to keep the product maintenance mode.
  • tortila 6y ago
    I understand that this is not what you meant, but AWS ES service has a different API than the one in the official Elastic documentation already - mainly that it’s a smaller subset of it. What may seem like a good decision for “aaS” product in general, is a real pain with ES specifically, because of how delicate it is for tuning.
• azurezyq 6y ago
  >>> "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software." So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid OSS license? What a pirate logic here. EDIT: I think I made a mistake here. SSPL is really a weird license here, not really friendly.
  • autarch 6y ago
    The SSPL is not an open source license. This is quite clear. The Open Source Initiative, stewards of the term "open source", have said so at https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099. While AWS may be disingenuous, the statement you quoted is 100% correct.
    • azurezyq 6y ago
      Read the link. I think you are right here. SSPL is definitely a weird one.
    • vrtx0 6y ago
      Nobody wants the SSPL (not even MongoDB), but Amazon is forcing companies to do this while contributing nothing. These projects are still open source, and actually contribute to the libraries they depend upon. As a former developer of MongoDB who watched this happen, I’ve contributed to a variety of open source projects. MongoDB also couldn’t just lay everybody off and let Amazon grow their monopolies (much like Oracle’s behavior). But please don’t suggest I’m any less a part of the open source community than I was 20 years ago.
      • autarch 6y ago
        I'm not defending Amazon here, just pointing out that they are correct to say that the SSPL is not open source. I _do_ think it was very shifty of Elastic to say that switching to the SSPL was "doubling down on open".
        • vrtx0 6y ago
          If you don’t believe the SSPL is open source, then you definitely don’t believe the GPL (and related licenses) are open source. The definition of open source Amazon points everybody to is not the same as what’s defined by the FSF and other organizations. Nobody gets to own the term “open source” — that simply means the source code is available for you to modify, build learn from, etc. The details Amazon mentions only come into play when trying to make money off of an open source project.
• Chyzwar 6y ago
  They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs of total 41000 in elastic repo. They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.
  • gnfargbl 6y ago
    AWS's model seems to be to take a popular OSS product, do _just_ enough to make it work with AWS, make tons of money out of it, contribute a minimal amount back... and then act all surprised when they're painted as the bad guys. Take postgres. RDS is a core AWS product. They absolutely rely on it. But if you take a look at https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/, are any of the current major contributors at AWS? If they are, I can't see them. It's okay to behave like that when you're a small or even medium sized tech company. But when you're the world's number one cloud service, by quite some margin? Hmmn.
    • sjwright 6y ago
      Other people have chosen to license their own work with the license of their choice. The license is being complied with by AWS in fact and in spirit. If you don't agree with the spirit of the Apache license terms, that's fine. You can draft an Apache-for-everyone-except-AWS license and lobby for its use by others.
      • Tostino 6y ago
        You are missing the forest for the trees. I don't see many (really any) people saying that AWS went against the license terms. Simply that their actions do not benefit these projects in any proportional way which they rely on heavily. I'm sure many of these projects would much rather just have more collaboration and support from AWS than to have to think about and deal with a major player being a bad actor. Edit: I am much more talking about projects like Postgres than companies like Elastic.
• izolate 6y ago
  We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but par for the course for Bezos's company.
  • geofft 6y ago
    The fundamental "open source sustainability" problem is capitalism, or at least our incarnation of it, and everyone dances around it. You can't license your way out of this problem. You can't services-company your way out of this problem. The fundamental issue is that it is good for the world for skilled developers to spend all day writing software and giving it away, but they can make much more money writing software and not giving it away. And I'm not even necessarily advocating we change our system of governance - we can do it fine with our current one. Even the culture of academia would be fine here. There certainly are skilled scientists who find it more profitable to do secret work in for-profit labs, but far less so than in software. (In large part, that system works because of government-funded universities and government-funded research grants.)
    • parasubvert 6y ago
      If you think capitalism causes problems with people getting paid for good work, I think you might be glossing over the historical failures of the alternatives relative to the ultimate goal of free / open software: user freedom. Even in a socialist system, how does it solve the problem of competition, free ridership, and economically non-rival/non-excludable goods like software source code? You still need to collect money but no one has to pay it unless you erect laws that restrict user freedom.
      • pietrovismara 6y ago
        Criticizing capitalism doesn't require being stalinists, so please stop with this cliche, it's old and extremely boring by now.
        • parasubvert 6y ago
• dang 6y ago
  The major threads on this so far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25794987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25794987
• philip1209 6y ago
  Elastic reaped a lot of benefits from open-source software. It's unfortunate that this is happening, but their decision was self-serving for much of the company's life.
• Thaxll 6y ago
  9 commits in almost 3 years, what a joke...
• caymanjim 6y ago
  AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source. Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money off the product. They're free to do that, and create restricted-license or closed-source versions for future enhancements. But the community doesn't have to buy into that and continue to contribute to what is no longer truly an open source product. AWS is forking it and continuing with the original, truly open source license. This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product. AWS does plenty of things worth criticizing, and one can even criticize them in this particular instance for not working with Elastic to provide more support to whatever it was they were asking for. And Elastic may very well have a legitimate gripe about trademarks. But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for. You can't create an open source project, wait for it to gain market dominance, decide to be less open source, and expect the community to continue contributing. Elastic shot themselves in the foot and now they can either revert their decision or get left behind as the community moves on to what will ultimately end up being the better product.
  • riku_iki 6y ago
    > This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product. This is controversial example, in my understanding MySql creator requested to agree with his terms for all OSS commits, which gave him copyright rights on codebase, then sold his rights to Sun, and only then created MariaDb - OSS fork.
    • paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Where is the controversy there? Did he sign a non-compete? NextCloud and OwnCloud Jenkins and Hudson More software is good. I'd say the MariaDB-is-better conclusion is controversial since the improves to Oracle's MySQL are substantial. At least around Innodb, and disregarding their embarrassingly bad bugs.
• asim 6y ago
  Amazon are the masters of theivery. The hypocrisy is not going unnoticed. Amazon contributed nothing of value to open source, then they basically stole the hard work of others and again contributed nothing back and now they're going so far as to preach about open source. Please. The sad part is, users won't care and customers won't care because at the end of the day ease of use wins. Elastic are taking drastic measures which will in the short term impact then but hopefully in the long term everyone will give more thought to what licenses they choose. Open source is no longer just about the freedom of choice but now a marketing and commercial strategy for big tech. Just keep that in mind if you ever want to build something of value in the open.
  • senko 6y ago
    > Open source is no longer just about the freedom of choice but now a marketing and commercial strategy for big tech. It always was, that's how Elastic got to IPO. > Just keep that in mind if you ever want to build something of value in the open. Or just keep in mind that "it's open source, but it's MY open source" isn't a valid business plan.
  • fastball 6y ago
    > open source > stolen ??? https://supernotes-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/image-uploads/8eb44ed9-d244-4b38-a1be-410d5e251d66--image.png https://supernotes-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/image-uploads/...
    • mirthflat83 6y ago
      Lmao
    • BizyDev 6y ago
      Since open source != free, yes it can be stolen. Conclusion : have a look on your meme.
      • fastball 6y ago
        Open source (by most people's definition) means anyone can use the source... so who exactly would it be stolen by, if it is open for anyone to use?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• myth_buster 6y ago
  There behavior with Elasticsearh [0] seems similar to what they did to sellers with Amazon Choice and their other knockoffs [1]. > 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. > Recently, we found more examples of what we consider to be ethically challenged behavior. We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon, telling us their behavior continues and is more brazen. NOT OK. 0: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS 1: https://archive.is/9TIu6 https://archive.is/9TIu6
  • t0mas88 6y ago
    Elastic tried to use open source as marketing and then cripple the open source version by making things like access control and encryption only available in their non-open source version. That's of course completely within their rights, but you can't complain if AWS recognises these things as important to their customers and adds them to their version. It's nice of AWS to open source that, they wouldn't even have to do that according to the license.
• oxinabox 6y ago
  ESH
• paxys 6y ago
  The sad part is that while I really want to support Elasic here we are likely going to have to move to Amazon's Apache-licensed fork for our internal use because SSPL is incompatible with our company's open source policy.
  • atonse 6y ago
    Same here. I manage a handful of projects (10+ websites) and won't touch Elastic with a 10 foot pole now that they aren't Apache anymore. It actually doesn't matter how much they yell about their "intent." – It's an unproven license with some restrictions and I don't even want the headache and cost of having to talk to lawyers about why "it'll be fine!!" or even waste a minute during a meeting about the license impacts of solving any of the problems we face. The ambiguity is just simply not worth the cognitive overhead. I have enough to worry about without this silly game Elastic's playing where we (customers, users) are left having to figure out the legal ambiguities and wink-winks of their new license. And right now, we're actively searching/researching a self-hosted log analysis solution. And we've been looking at Elastic's offering and comparing it to self-hosting. Not anymore.
• PaulWaldman 6y ago
  How much is the Elastic Search business worth to AWS? I'd image now AWS will have to put significant resources to maintaining their fork and keeping it current. Couldn't that money have been applied to a licensing deal with Elastic instead?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• therealmarv 6y ago
  AWS has a point there (although I personally don't like their wording, open source is only a side effect here, it's more about how Amazon can charge for it also in future). It only makes me sad that AWS makes a lot of $$$ with their elastic SaaS because of their size and for that reason can monetize it better than the original authors. Feels very Amazon like for me. At end I have the feeling it could be all avoided if Amazon paid a little bit royalty to Elastic and both sides would have talked more and better together.
• CapriciousCptl 6y ago
  Steve Jobs said something like Dropbox was a feature, not a product. I think Bezos feels the same about literally everything. AFAIK Azure/Google have actual partnerships with the Elastic stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides and have staying power. Part of me wonders if AWS always had planned to do this, and they were just waiting until it made business sense to fork (ie they had features and a new direction in mind but neglected to implement them because Elasticsearch was good enough as is). The alternative part is just 2 big corporations not finding a way to get along. Which means without clear direction and careful stewardship I'd expect the forks to just be cleanroom reimplementations or something like that.
  • redisman 6y ago
    > I think Bezos feels the same about literally everything. That sounds weird. Comparing the "productization" of ES+Kibana to any AWS database stack is night and day. And not in AWS'es favor. ES and Kibana are much more of a product.
  • mcintyre1994 6y ago
    > AFAIK Azure/Google have actual partnerships with the Elastic stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides and have staying power. Can you elaborate a bit here? We deploy from elastic.co into AWS and it seems to be fully supported. I'm not sure what they'd be doing with Google Cloud/Azure that they're not doing with AWS. Their homepage seems to still equate them all "Run where and how you want. Deploy on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services with Elastic Cloud."
    • CapriciousCptl 6y ago
      I may be wrong. I'm reading into this that was on HN the other day-- "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." https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS.
• soheil 6y ago
  To Elastic: if you're a $15B [0] company you don't get to be a victim by appealing to your customer base to whine about how your competitor is profiting "unjustly" from a decision you made that led to your growth in the first place. Choosing Apache2 license ensures your OSS gets traction, but then you'll have to live with its consequences when Amazon comes knocking on the door. [0] https://google.com/search?q=estc https://google.com/search?q=estc
  • arp242 6y ago
    That's just a valuation, based on expectations, hype, and chicken entrail readings, and not really all that useful. It's not like they have anywhere near $15 billion lying around. They made a net loss of $75 million last year.
• brasetvik 6y ago
  While it's great that AWS has indeed contributed fixes to upstream Elasticsearch, they link to 9 PRs that are generally on the trivial end of the scale. (Though I don't doubt the PR that adds a missing synchronized keyword might have been gnarly and time consuming to debug, and that diff size does not necessarily correlate to importance) For a project AWS was making hundreds of millions in revenue on four years ago (as per an ex AWS employee), patting your own shoulder for such a trivial amount of contributions is a bit disingenuous. They might have contributed more, but if there was something significant, they probably would have mentioned. Notable new features like "ultrawarm" they did not attempt to contribute upstream, nor open source at all: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/aws-announces-amazon-elasticsearch-service-ultrawarm-general-availability/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/aws-annou...
  • t0mas88 6y ago
    A lot can be said about AWS and open source, but it is clear they have created some "secret sauce" on the networking, storage and virtualization side of things which is their core business. Unlike Elastic they never promised open source and never used it as marketing. So it completely fair for them to keep those things closed as they provide a big part of the competitive advantage to their cloud. Those components underpin things like Aurora (which does tricks with storage and replication that MySQL can't) and this warm/hot storage. So there is probably no practical way to open source those elasticsearch changes without opening up their storage system as well and even then it wouldn't run outside of AWS.
    • catmanjan 6y ago
      The way I see it is the secret sauce is just black boxing it so you don't have to/can't worry about those things...
      • t0mas88 6y ago
        There is a slideshare about their networking approach for VPC somewhere it's quite clever. But I can't find anything for EBS and what features it might have that make Aurora replicate the way it does.
• motiejus 6y ago
  I don't trust aws will do a good job with the fork. Can anyone tell me a FOSS project led by amazon that's not for accessing their services (boto)? Now that elastic.co is going sideways, sphinxsearch (best search server experience I've had) non-foss since circa 2017, what are the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo search? Edit/disclaimer: former aws employee
  • stonemetal12 6y ago
    I see this as similar to Corretto. AFAIK they have done a good job supporting Java 8 well past what Oracle is willing to do.
    • elygre 6y ago
      Corretto is explicitly not a fork, though. They take the source code from openjdk, and builds their own distribution. This is how the openjdk is meant to be used, and all parties are happy.
  • snikolaev 6y ago
    > what are the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo search? Manticore Search is an actively developed GPLv2 fork of Sphinxsearch since 2017 - https://manticoresearch.com/ https://manticoresearch.com/
  • dvnguyen 6y ago
    https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker Disclaimer: current AWS employer. My job is not related to ES or Lambda.
• RocketSyntax 6y ago
  This feels like a spin? Isn't AWS biting hand that feeds them? They need a win-win strategy for open source devs. It's hard enough to compete with their version of your service (spark, kafka) without them forking your project. what's next, are they going to fork spark and kafka?
  • weeks 6y ago
    Apache Spark and Apache Kafka? It doesn't seem likely that the Apache Software Foundation would consider implementing the SSPL instead of the Apache License.
    • RocketSyntax 6y ago
      I'm saying AWS offers EMR and MSK. Which puts Databricks and Confluent in a weird spot.
  • ryanisnan 6y ago
    I mean, if you're a contributor to Elasticsearch or Kibana, you now have a choice on which project you are going to make contributions to. Apart from dislike of AWS, I can't see why anyone would choose the version with the more restrictive license, which is SSPL.
• jrockway 6y ago
  This is an embarrassing anecdote, but I thought I'd share. I started using Elasticsearch because it showed up in the AWS console along with all the other "Elastic" things ("Elastic Compute Cloud") and I figured it was a thing they made themselves. Only later on in the process did I realize that there was a company called Elastic that named it. Very unfortunate. Probably a lesson about naming your company after a common English word.
  • dinglejungle 6y ago
    The company Elastic was created 2 years after the release of ElasticSearch.
    • greatpatton 6y ago
      And 6 years after the release of Elastic Compute Cloud.
• jlawer 6y ago
  I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch v(FORKED_VERSION). Their continued trying to associate it to ES is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well. I am actually quite surprised they haven't just hired a small team of core devs for it and try and out compete Elastic. The groundwork is laid, I could easily see AWS being able to maintain a "Fast Follower" + AWS Optimisation approach and be able to offer a substantial portion of the value for a fraction of the costs. Try and pick up the open source community now while there is concerns around the license. Additionally at this point the AWS core platform is different enough then GCP / Azure / other clouds. I imagine they could build optimisations for AWS in and be able to save costs on providing the service. (i.e. it might be worth doing some work in FPGAs / ASICs, giving faster performance while only being economical when your the scale of AWS). I kind of am surprised AWS hasn't grown to attempt to have a guiding hand over many of the open source projects that are effectively their vendors. Many projects have a handful of core contributors and a hiring a key person will ensure your able to influence development in a way that assists you (assuming it is neutral to beneficial to the project). Edit: I should probably say I don't love the idea (morality) of the "Fast Follower" capturing the value of an innovative project and screwing the people involved in making the project successful. However it is how competition works and how many other businesses operate in other industries. Since elastic and AWS can't seem to come to a mutually beneficial agreement, then I would prefer them to sort it out in competition.
  • that_guy_iain 6y ago
    > I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch v(FORKED_VERSION). Their continued trying to associate it to ES is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well. Have you seen the names and logos for AWS services. They can't brand crap. Amazon can barely Brand anything? They got where they got via customer service not via branding. And now they're so big it doesn't matter what they do, it's got Amazon on it and we're all buying off of them anyways.
  • 6y ago
• sradman 6y ago
  I think this is a negative sum outcome. The key metric is customer value and the Apache License had previously struck a balance between commercialization and customer lock-in. The Cloud gorillas (AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba) have disrupted this balance but they too are delivering customer value. I'm not sure if OSS vendors like Elastic need to modify their business models, Apache needs to address the suboptimal situation, or if the Cloud gorillas need to change their business tactics but something has to give.
• xenadu02 6y ago
  The time-tested model for a situation like this that benefits everyone is big company offering X as a service hires/funds N developers in proportion to the popularity of that service on their platform. That helps ensure the project is sustainable, gives back to the community the big service obviously benefits from, and is certainly a form of "good karma". I think a lot of people are upset due to the perceived violation of that social contract, though it obviously isn't a legal issue and may not even be a moral one depending on where you draw the line. AWS has the appearance of benefitting enormously from many OSS projects but rarely funds contributions - funding that would be a rounding error to the AWS budget. The ball is entirely in Amazon's court. They've earned this reputation (fair or not). They can make the problem go away at any time if they want to spend a little money.
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    > The time-tested model for a situation like this that benefits everyone is big company offering X as a service hires/funds N developers in proportion to the popularity of that service on their platform That model would have worked nicely if Elastic.co had created a Foundation (like Google with k8s) and/or donated their core to a Foundation (like Hortonworks and Cloudera with many projects). They couldn't let go off their iron grip on it, even though they commoditized the core themselves by F/OSSing it.
• rcconf 6y ago
  I am so delighted to hear this. Open source wins again. Open source is the right for you to do whatever you want with the software, AND YES, that includes monetize it. I've been sitting on the sidelines reading the different perspectives, but I just cannot see how you can be on the side of Elasticsearch. How can they take all the work from the OSS community and add a clause that THEY only can monetize it? I will tell you right now, I have NO desire to ever contribute to the closed version of Elasticsearch and I will gladly jump on board and contribute to the AWS version. We are watching in real time the OSS community being degraded by these ridiculous licenses. The greed here is on Elasticsearch and not on AWS. If you wanted to have a closed source piece of software that you have the only rights to monetize, then you should have closed it off from the beginning instead of taking all the work from the OSS community and giving the rights for ONLY you to monetize it.
  • annilt 6y ago
    So after witnessing all these problems, more projects will start closed source or with restrictive licenses(GPLs) instead of OSS or more permissive licenses. This is how OSS community is being degraded. A few tech giants are disrupting entire OSS community. It may be legal/morally ok(or not I dont care) for AWS to do this but it is for sure we’ll have less OSS because of this.
    • andrewshadura 6y ago
      The GPL is an open-source license.
    • john4532452 6y ago
      Closed source software will not attract talented developers unless a lot of money is poured in to it. It is okay to have closed source, but its not okay to take the contributions of the open source and then later make it closed source.
  • kemitchell 6y ago
    If all you want is Apache 2.0 Elasticsearch, period, there isn't really much good news here. Amazon declared an intention to compete with Elastic NV. But the race hasn't even started yet. It remains to be seen whether Amazon's fork will keep up, whether the forks will remain compatible, whether they'll both last, long-term. Whatever happened to that pure-AGPL fork of MongoDB?
• machawinka 6y ago
  This is why I like GPL.
  • SXX 6y ago
    GPL wont help if there is CLA.
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  So... if Amazon's fork is still Apache 2.0 license, which is a permissive license... Elasticsearch is welcome to take any code they want from it and port it into their copy, no? Correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, we all know this is a lot of work, and will be a manual process if it wasn't coordinated, increasingly manual as the codebases diverge. But, anything especially valuable Amazon does, ElasticSearch can copy if they want. The same is not true in the opposite direction of course.
• ignoramous 6y ago
  Ominous. AWS is going to pay premium to acquire services of those core Elasticsearch developers, aren't they? The blog post also signals an intention to make sure there's parity in terms of API surface with mainline Elasticsearch. Also, AWS' decision to create a committee is something Elastic.co could have done... Alas, this is where we are. Would be interesting to see which of these forks take off. The developer community is likely to rally behind F/OSS. I can also see a lot of IaaS/PaaS upstarts like RailwayApp [0] prefer OpenDistro. I'm half-expecting AWS to announce a managed Solr service and prompt an exodus to it with lower pricing and free data migration. [0] https://railway.app/changelog/2021-01-15 https://railway.app/changelog/2021-01-15
• tomaszs 6y ago
  What I understand is that Elastic is upset AWS used the name for it's service promotion, stole propertiary code and alleged business partnership with Elastic. So Elastic felt loosing due to AWS using is assets, so changed the licence to compensate. Now AWS announces it cuts ties with Elastic by forking Elastic. So what AWS seems to announce is that it will continue to earn from Elastic , still will be using the name and further more it will openly compete with Elastic? It is an extremely aggressive move, take all and destroy, or am I missing on something?
  • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    It's literally the obvious move that anyone who has been paying attention predicted. I predicted this myself days ago, and trust me it didn't require any genius. Elastic is just fundamentally in the wrong here. (I'm not talking about the trademark dispute; that's irrelevant to the licensing changes, frankly)
• zbobet2012 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand Amazon's game theory on this one. Anything they contribute to their Apache License branch can be used by Elastic, but not vice versa. This means Elastic can continue to differentiate from Amazon without worry. Amazon however can keep the code they've not contributed back internally, but they could always do that. Perhaps this is simply an image move they don't plan to actually enhance or maintain the fork? Also Elastic moving from Apache to (essentially) GPL is not making it closed source. Just as Amazon was within their rights to maintain an internal fork, so is Elastic to move to a GPL model. Demonizing either over business decisions is dumb.
  • z77dj3kl 6y ago
    It guarantees a future for open-source Elasticsearch. If there are contributors that want to use ES under an open-source license, now there is a steward for that code that will guarantee the code's long term support and open-sourceness. And no, SSPL is nothing like the GPL. The purpose of GPL is to keep the code open-source. The purpose of SSPL is to others from using the software in certain ways (to make money), and its wording is not clear enough (and it does not have legal precedence) to make it clear what its actual limitations are.
    • zbobet2012 6y ago
      Anyone may, and many people do, have open source forks of Elastic on github. 18.9k of them on github alone. There was no need for "another" other than PR. I feel compelled to note that your summary of SSPL is wholly inaccurate. SSPL is very clearly a GPL derivative. It's language though leaves a lot to be desired, but the intent was clear. It does NOT prohibit making money offering the software as a service. It does require to contribute your changes back to the software if you are doing so. The real failure is that companies have danced well enough around the edges of GPLv3 for so long that Amazon running a service which is basically just the software with modifications, but without the source code being contributed to open source, is feasible. This is even becoming a problem for Linux. The reality is that Amazon Elasticsearch is clearly a derivative work under copyright law, and under GPL should be re-contributed. But major companies have "danced" the line so it does not have to be. SSPL is an attempt to bridge that gap, a poor one, but an attempt. The OSI appears more interested in defending their license than helping resolve this egregious situation. The SSPL sucks, but not having a solution for it sucks more.
• z77dj3kl 6y ago
  There is an important thing that gets ignored a lot in these conversations where an organization that stewards an open-source project close-sources it. That software grew largely because it was open-source, and it really makes a difference. It's not only those who contributed to the software and made PRs (which is sometimes a surprisingly small number of devs), but the software often only exists because it was taken up by a large number of projects that then created an ecosystem and a userbase around it. Importantly, software is never "finished", so when the single large company behind a popular open-source project close-sources it, it often means the end of that project as an open-source alternative. It's frustrating if for example the existence of that killer open-source project in the past stopped other projects from blossoming. The close-sourcing of several projects has made me cautious nowadays about using software that is backed by a company that exists only around that product.
  • franciscop 6y ago
    It is normally one of the main points I see mentioned in these conversations, specially by people going against the closing of the source, not something ignored.
• waynesonfire 6y ago
  perfect response, this is exactly, by design, what open source is about. now this is just the beginning; for they will need to throw money at their fork to make sure it's successful. And isn't that ultimately what this was about, money? Now Amazon has the opportunity to hire the core engineers to contribute to the TRUE open source project. Everything by design as intended. Go Amazon. Don't start an open source projects if that's not what you want to be. Or did you forget what made you successful to begin with?
• mikesabbagh 6y ago
  What will happen next? AWS will poach elastic developers. AWS will need to show the open source community what happens when someone revolts. They now need to destroy elastic at any cost. I hope elastic has some large releases coming up, or some tricks up their sleeves
  • fastball 6y ago
    Do people really believe Amazon is as predatory as this comment makes out? Amazon is winning because they've been delivering a better product in general. AWS was a game-changer when it came on the scene. They continue to add new services all the time. AMZN is not MSFT. Why would Amazon need to nerf the other guys when people like them better in the first place?
    • smokey_circles 6y ago
      I don't think their intention is to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but I also think it's a side affect of being such a behemoth with a much better offering. I can't think of a way to offer an OSS product and make money in the "traditional" means of support when Amazon is around. You just can't compete with them because you're right: They are a MUCH better product. Not because they understand the software better than you (although I'm not saying they don't either), they just have more resources. Why can't we work together instead of being in direct competition, you know? There must be a way to do that
      • fastball 6y ago
        Well that is what the other major cloud providers arranged with Elastic (licensing deals). AWS chose not to, and that's OK too. Elastic still pulled in $500M in revenue last year, so clearly you can compete with AWS in the market.
• JCM9 6y ago
  Elastic really shot themselves in the foot here. AWS is calling them out as they deserve too and now AWS is going to run with a true open source codebase moving forward. Ironic considering the, generally baseless, accusations that AWS just takes open source stuff but doesn’t contribute back to the community. This all just comes across as Elastic having sour grapes for being out competed on managed service offerings and trying to save that with shady license moves. With a separate fork, now they’re going to have to compete on the codebase too as, ironically, the proprietary model against the open source community the claim is being hurt here.
• m3kw9 6y ago
  What mongodb did and similar to how AWS responded
• spion 6y ago
  There has to be a way for an OSS project / companies to offer licences to managed service providers in a way that gets them supported financially. That would be a massive win for everyone Something like: okay yes, this is OSS, except if you want to offer it as a managed service, in which case you need to purchase a licence.
  • sjwright 6y ago
    That's the AGPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
    • spion 6y ago
      so why didn't they switch to that.
• realdense 6y ago
  Elasticsearch is now being released under a proprietary license. The last FOSS version got forked by Amazon. This is a good thing if you care about software freedom. Sure, under Amazon it may be a "throw over the wall" model but at least there are open opportunities for the source code to be forked again, and in the meantime at least it's being maintained under an FOSS license.
• arusahni 6y ago
  I'm extremely skeptical of AWS's ability to deliver a compelling, featured ES fork up against Elastic. Unless they actively hire contributors, they're going to get lapped functionality-wise.
  • reducesuffering 6y ago
    They are already drowning trying to support the ops load of their managed ES that is far behind Elastic's. Without a major shift in poaching Elastic employees and adding many more devs, I agree AWS doesn't currently have the ability to do this. Disclaimer: Amazon employee
• Jouvence 6y ago
  As individuals, we (mostly) want companies building open source to thrive, particularly if they aren't behemoths of the industry. Ultimately though, efficiency matters more than sentiment. Companies rightly prefer a "good enough" product from a single source; even just avoiding a second enterprise agreement negotiation would make the AWS version worthwhile. Throwing unusual licenses into the mix, I guess new custom for Elastic Co is mostly going to be passed along by the other cloud providers feeding the anti-AWS prejudice within some customers.
• rammy1234 6y ago
  You can’t have a business only based on open source software. As a company you need to provide bit more than what is there in open source world. Just technical support won’t cut it. What elastic provides can be very well mimicked by other players if they want to and have money for it. I believe Elastic Realized their business model is not working and so they changed their license. But AWS has money and man power to fork it.
• williesleg 6y ago
  Weasley move
• nijave 6y ago
  I'm not sure how the "AWS is stealing Elasti Cos product" holds up. AWS is willing to dedicate the time and infra to maintaining a copy of the last "freely" available version. It is surely a significant investment on AWS part and they're even maintaining the Av2 license. At the end of the day, we have a huge, highly profitable company backing and a better license
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ralusek 6y ago
  Has AWS ElasticSearch service gotten better? Last I used it, and last I've heard, it was horrible
• donretag 6y ago
  I had meetings lately with AWS regarding the license and was told about the fork. They mentioned something to the effect that Elastic was being greedy with open-source software. I am an early contributor to Elasticsearch. I probably have more commits to the core product than most employees. It is now incredibly difficult for a non-employee to have any PR looked at unless it is a bug. I stopped contributing after their last "we are open" debacle but did have one outstanding feature PR open. Over two years later, still not merged. You will have others commenting that they would like the feature, but Elastic sits on it. Not blaming them, but at this point, it really is being driven by them. I give up trying to contribute.
  • softwaredoug 6y ago
    Both companies are doing things in their self-interest and "greed" For Amazon, they are "being greedy" because large scale cloud vendors primarily benefit from commoditized open source as they can provide the cheapest offering at scale...
• ilikehurdles 6y ago
  This is Node.js and IO.js. vi and vim. vim and neovim. In other words, it’s just another perfectly fine software fork. If Elastic can’t sustain a valuable product they created, someone else will. If it it’s not valuable enough to invest in, something better will replace it. I don’t see why quarreling over software licensing is a valuable use of their time, especially when the foundation of their software is more open source software.
• forty 6y ago
  For context, I recommend reading that part too if you haven't: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS
• ralmidani 6y ago
  First we had GPL, then some people noticed the “over a network” loophole being exploited, so AGPL was born. Has the time come for FAGPL (F*** Amazon General Public License)?
• throwarayes 6y ago
  Isn’t this an open and shut case of Trademark violation? Elasticsearch is a trademark of Elastic, right?
• throwarayes 6y ago
  AWS has known all along what they are doing with this OSS strategy. They are the only provider that doesn't lose by having heavily commoditized, open source backend software - they can support profitable operations at a much lower cost point than these mid-sized companies like Elastic/Mongo Elastic, and the "open source business model" companies certainly should have seen this coming. But the attitude in the early 2010s was 'lol open source fun, figure out business model later' and somehow VCs bit and a company like Elastic could take off. They shouldn't have been surprised. I would rather live in a world where a mid-sized company like Elastic could thrive than an AWS monoculture. Most things Amazon make me feel icky... but I also feel like this is the reality of open source... its not really open source if it's entirely associated with one company..
  • redwood 6y ago
    This comment really sums things up thank you
• bane 6y ago
  This is really clearly a case of Elastic wanting to have its cake and eat it too but also of the existential challenge that faces the open source community -- how do developers of open source software pay to keep the lights on? There's a bit of a myth that OSS is lots and lots of volunteers spending their free-time to contribute bits of code here and there. But the reality is that most of the current major open source projects are all basically corporately sponsored. It's not the Cathedral and the Bazaar, it's the Cathedral and the anchor tenants at the local mall. And they're all contributing funds to build the Christmas display and Take-pictures-with-Santa spot near the fountains. It's open to the public, but the moment somebody starts busing in hundres of tourists they get upset.
  • Chris2048 6y ago
    > How do developers of open source software pay to keep the lights on How about a non-commercial-use licence (or one that applies to smaller businesses only), and then offer commercial licenses for payment? Ok, it's complex b/c some large biz might not get a lot of revenue out of it, but seems like a good system to me.
• kotxig 6y ago
  Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed single deployment scripts), the value of having someone navigate the artificial complexity for you vanishes, and thus the value to the customer. You have to question what value Elastic is offering its customers on top of the opensource project. Why is it that people complain about AWS devaluing the commercial services of Elastic but none of you complain about opensource devaluing the development of code in general. I can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code. I think the proliferation of opensource is probably worse than some of you imagine. I'm not writing any opensource that isn't sponsored because I refuse to spend my time devaluing software development. The vast majority of the profits from opensource all end up in the hands of massive tech companies anyway. If we could skew the commercial advantages to the developer our industry would be a lot more pleasant.
  • alexchantavy 6y ago
    Are you saying that most software engineering jobs in your experience are about integrating existing projects rather than building anything interesting?
    • icelancer 6y ago
      I would generally agree with this sentiment.
    • throwarayes 6y ago
      I mean I was an embedded C dev, I "integrated" a compiler, an x86 chip, and a bunch of proprietary hardware. All software can be described as a kind of glue (luckily glue can be interesting lol)...
    • loteck 6y ago
      Integrating existing projects and building something interesting are not mutually exclusive.
• ttam 6y ago
  Recommended listening: https://a16z.com/2019/10/21/free-software-and-open-source-business/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/21/free-software-and-open-source-bu...
• nojvek 6y ago
  This reminds of now node was forked into iojs. Somehow they found middleground and joined back. Elastic seems to have shaken the AWS beast and they forked (which is legal). I wonder what will eventually win with the community.
• crazysim 6y ago
  I'm very curious how trademark stuff with work with this and if the whole "<something> for <existing trademark name>" naming scheme will continue to hold. E.g. Windows Subsystem for Linux. What if someone searches for Elasticsearch and finds Elastic's docs and there's confusion as to why something is different from AWS's Opendistro for Elasticsearch? How would that relate to trademark dilution?
• mekster 6y ago
  I'm afraid there may be less open source projects in the future as if you become successful by being community driven open source, you get run over by AWS once you get big enough and the project will end up being more closed to only offer highly priced corporate targeted SaaS to survive and one might just start off as closed to begin with.
• vrtx0 6y ago
  Wow. Amazon is blatantly misleading people here. They know the SSPL was created specifically because MongoDB had the same issues with Amazon’s service. I worked for MongoDB. Nobody wanted the SSPL, but Amazon was relentless. MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing nothing to the project. They even linked entirely to MongoDB’s comprehensive documentation. “Anticompetitive” is the kindest description I can offer of Amazon’s behavior. Just remember —- the SSPL and similar licenses are still completely open source. Amazon knows they’re forcing companies to change licenses, but shaming them as being “unacceptable to many in the open source community”. This is political rhetoric, and I’m shocked anybody outside of Amazon would support this. The people who started these projects and surrounding businesses are generally very good people — I’ve been disabled with a neurological condition for 6 years now, but live can afford to live relatively comfortably thanks to the people at MongoDB. And I contributed code to the project before I started working for them (10gen at the time). So I’m admittedly biased, but it really seems like Amazon has become the Trump of Silicon Valley. I’m done with political rhetoric like this. All opinions are my own.
  • smokey_circles 6y ago
    > Amazon is blatantly misleading people here I'm not so sure I agree about that, presuming you're talking about the open source comments. If not, you can ignore the rest of the comment (except the last paragraph, pertinent question for you) The SSPL is not an open source license [0], and that's all there is to it. There must be a better version of it out there somewhere. Something to the tune of "use our software as you wish, however you may not offer it as a hosted solution without a license from us. This license entitles you to direct support and other goodies to justify such a stance". I can't think of those "other" goodies but that's why I'm not a business type :D I don't think I'm making a crazy statement here, am I? Maybe I'm just being young and naive. Can you shed some light on your experience with trying to work with Amazon to address the problems? I imagine they didn't listen (they're just too big to care it seems), but I'd like some first-hand experience to gauge with. [0]: https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099
    • 6y ago
• mrskitch 6y ago
  > This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be. It’s not free for AWS going forward, however. Why is it that Amazon has such a hard time paying for stuff they use and commercialize? There’s no issues here with other providers (GCP, Azure, etc.), so clearly the problem lies with them. While they’re at it, they should also get off this “open and free” high horse they seem to be on. A few patches here and there don’t qualify as big time contributor status. If they want to show that they’re committed, how about the release their infrastructure code that runs all their services? That’d definitely go a lot further than “big bad Elastic changed their license and we’re defending users.” Get outta here with that nonsense, history shows otherwise with all the other tech that’s been ripped off. I also don’t get all the criticism for Elastic doing this. They own the software, and they can do whatever they want. Should they have done this license from the start? Maybe, but it’s not exactly easy getting a project off the ground without some way to gain attention. If you’ve got no users, you’ve got to show at least what your code is doing, and picking software licenses is not exactly a straightforward task. They changed their license to fight back, and it’s entirely within their right to do so. Hate to feel like I’m venting, but AWS is being the bully here and feigning that they’re pro-user, which is frustrating to witness.
  • oneplane 6y ago
    Just because AWS is being an asshole doesn't mean they are also completely wrong. SSPL isn't Open Source per that old definition AWS themselves points to, or the one Fedora seems to take. On the other hand, if you mean to say "I want to be able to read the source code" then yes, we can still do that. But from a legal perspective that is not even close to the same thing.
    • mrskitch 6y ago
      > But from a legal perspective that is not even close to the same thing. Very true. However, my rebuttal would be that the majority of folks reading this are of an engineering background, and seeing the words “no longer open source” can land quite differently.
  • 6y ago
• The_rationalist 6y ago
  Elastic has more than 1000 employee, I don't see AWS investing enough human resources to outcompete them on their own software.
• lolive 6y ago
  How can people honestly think that big innovations will come out of the Amazon’s Elastic fork? There is not fundamental technical reasons for that fork. Call me hippie, but a project is all about love and dedication. And I hardly think Amazon is that much in love with the Elastic codebase and roadmap. Time will tell...
• steve_mcdougall 6y ago
  lmao just pay elastic they damn money
• IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  there are 2 distinct issues here (1) Ethical and (2) Tort. Ethical is the question of good corporate practice to do what's right to your partner. As a key executive of a company, I am expected to call any CEO and say - you know what CEO Joe, that contract we signed 2 weeks ago, we goofed. Can we please re-cut ? And because Joe is interested in a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts a long time, that's what usually happens. Enter the FAANGS. Clearly, it was Elastic's mistake to operate on a open license that lends to FAANGS literally imploding Elastic market share. Elastic mistake, OK . However, it is not ethical for a FAANG to profit off errors, just as it is not ethical for a Bank to charge overdraft fees over overdraft fees from a grandma. They can, but they really shouldn't. What is legal is not ethical. In the middle east it is legal to stone a female adulterer to death. That's not OK. 2) Tort. It will be argued in court that AWS misappropriated the Elastic TM. That's where AWS is going to pay. AWS clearly stepped over the line. It is just a question of how costly that mistake was.
• francesca 6y ago
  The biggest flaw in the piece is "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software." The SSPL is an open source license. It's just not the license that can help Amazon make money.
• francesca 6y ago
  "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software" Elasticsearch is open source. the SSPL is open source. It just can't help Amazon make money.
• elango 6y ago
  for Elastic to be truly open source, we will need adoption and push by major players and the key difference is Google cloud and Azure not looking at Elastic opportunity
• kdtsh 6y ago
  At the end of the day, all this really demonstrates is that the business model of producing open source software for free and charging for support or hosted solutions either does not work or does not scale. Part of the point of open source software is that anyone who uses it can inspect the source and make changes. If your business model depends on users not providing their own services for the software you have developed, that is on you. This is also why, if you have a customer or competitor who makes changes to the software and does not release those changes if they convey the software to others, you are not protected by using a permissive open source license. If AWS was allegedly not committing back to Elasticsearch/Kibana, they are within their rights to do so, whether Elastic like it or not. Elastic should not have used a permissive open source license like APL. The only thing that protects users here is strong copyleft, in this case a license like AGPL. At the end of the day, these licenses protect users. Maybe something else is needed to protect the interests of businesses which also respecting users - whatever that is, it is not necessarily one of the stated goals of free or open source software, so assigning an open source license and expecting support to cover the costs is not going to end well for you if you get big enough to matter.
• odilontalk 6y ago
  Excellent reflection business changes in opensource here: Death of an Open Source Business Model [1] [1] https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-busin...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• xyzelement 6y ago
  This may sound heretical but the idea of open sourcing commercial offerings always seemed like bad business to me. We are seeing it come to roost now with cloud providers selling a more desirable version of an open source platform that the makers of the platform. If you strip everything down to first principles, you get paid because you have a valuable asset. That asset may be your skill, your time, a piece of land, a patent, etc. With open source, you give away your key asset and then you have nothing except the wish and hope that nobody takes it and eats your lunch with your own fork. Which is clearly what is happening in this case. I am all for things being done as open source because you believe in the freedom of it, or it's fun for you, but it seems like a really bad way of getting programmers and businesses paid, if you're into that sort of thing.
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    Yes, F/OSS works great for your core product's complements, and not necessarily for the core product itself. https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
• systemvoltage 6y ago
  It seems like a lot of companies want to open source their software which would otherwise be a key secret sauce in order to get popularity, recognition, and traction. Once they're well known, in this case, Elastic; they are complaining about how others are taking advantage of their position. It's shooting themselves in the foot. It's kind of like an Uber model - offer taxi services while bleeding cash to wipe out the entire Taxi industry (Short term success) to get fame and popularity, get AOUs and ARPUs going; and then have a difficult time monetizing their mistakes.
• sitkack 6y ago
  Lay in your Apache Bed comrades. The Apache, MIT, BSD licenses are not what you think they are.
• realchucknorris 6y ago
  > They believe that restricting their license will lock others out of offering managed Elasticsearch services, which will let Elastic build a bigger business. meanwhile AWS is fighting for what?
• bww 6y ago
  I have no affection for Elastic Co, but why should they sit there and let Amazon eat their lunch? Maybe I’m forgetting something but I can’t think of a single significant open source project created by Amazon. As far as I can tell they prefer to keep their differentiating services proprietary to their platform. That’s about as far from open source as you can get. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I do think it’s pretty rich that they’re going to try to claim the high road in a dispute with a company that actually has created something as useful as Elasticsearch and released it as open source (with caveats, yes). It’s pretty easy to be high and mighty about open source when you’re on the taking side. It seems to me that if companies like Elastic can’t defend their ability to make a profit from companies like Amazon there’s a good chance we’re all going to miss out. I think it’s pretty obvious that Amazon’s not going to create the next Elasticsearch and release it as open source.
  • bigphishy 6y ago
    amazon is eating open source, it's messed up.
  • kreeben 6y ago
    The reason Amazon is eating Elastic's lunch though, is because Elastic offered a eat-all-you-want buffet, a decision that was applauded by people who think food should be mostly free, but they didn't expect a guest to arrive who had unlimited appetite. They asked the guy: please sir, would you care to have just one last serving of rib-eye and then we'll offer coffee and desert and then perhaps you could leave? But they didn't leave. They just grabbed another plate full of rib-eye and told the desert people to stand down, stand by. On the one hand you have someone who tried to make an offer nobody could refuse. On the other hand you have someone who tried to take advantage of that offer to its capacity. If Amazon had been a small operator, perhaps even a startup, HN would be completely and 100% on their side.
    • Chris2048 6y ago
      Software costs nothing to duplicate, Amazon isn't taking advantage of ESs resources (as someone losing food might). It's leveraging it's own resources, which it created at substantial cost. People look at the money Amazon is making with ES, as if it's making money off ES, rather than off ES & AWS. The money Amazon would otherwise leave on the table wouldn't necessarily go to ES, I doubt ES has an claim to being worse off. It's "unlimited" service usage taps markets that might be out of reach for ES otherwise.
• sandGorgon 6y ago
  The issue here is that it's quite impossible to compete with AWS if it offers even an inferior version of a service. Because of network egress pricing. You are most likely on AWS already. And even if elastic offers a 2x better product at 1/2 the price, your cost of traffic for an external service will easily 4x versus using AWS services. And that's really the frustration for these service providers. You can NEVER compete. Ever. Against an equivalent service offered by AWS because the egress pricing acts as a pricing barrier.
  • pradn 6y ago
    And there's not a way to remove the egress pricing moat because it's so natural. Of course it costs less money to move data within a datacenter than outside of it. So, why wouldn't it cost less to do everything inside AWS? Egress pricing is probably multiples of this actual discrepancy to erect the moat even deeper. It really does feel hopeless to run an open-source service that isn't running on an existing crowd. Perhaps that's one reason Snowflake is doing well.
    • boulos 6y ago
      See my sibling comment. Snowflake actually has historically run as a multinenant service with access to say your S3 bucket, so the majority of data transfer is VM <=> S3 in the same Region (so included/free). As a snowflake customer, you would submit queries (and data ingestion) as Egress pricing (roughly $.01/GB though assuming it was using the private link or similar) and then the smallish results come back as Ingress (which AWS charges for, we do not, but whatever). I hope someone corrects me on the AWS side (I really thought that there was a way to do zero rating for same “AZ” third-party services), but it’s not fundamental.
      • sandGorgon 6y ago
        no this is not free. Because what you would do is setup a "peering" between Snowflake cluster and your own. Even if it is the same region, there is a cost - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/peering/vpc-peering-basics.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/peering/vpc-peering-b... That cost acts as a barrier if AWS launches its own Snowflake competitor. Basically AWS taxes you for not using other AWS services, once you are inside AWS.
• budu3 6y ago
  Can someone explain how Amazon is able to use the Elasticsearch name when it is owned by Elasticsearch BV?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• xiaodai 6y ago
  disgraceful
• xiaodai 6y ago
  this is why OS is never going to work. Cos corporate greed $$$ is going to exploit the good will of OS developers
• damm 6y ago
  The irony here is that AWS offers licenses for some products but nothing for Elasticsearch. However how AWS is doing this is ugly and my hope is it will make people stop using AWS managed services.
• skyzyx 6y ago
  Amazon has a history of forking open source software and using it to crush the upstream project. I know — they did it to me.
• laurgentiu 6y ago
  I've finally created a HN account so I can upvote this. Nice move AWS.
• thayne 6y ago
  Hopefully they change the names. Even if keeping the old names isn't legally trademark infringement (IANAL, so I don't know), using those names without Elastic's consent is a low blow. That said, being able to make a fork if you disagree with the direction of an open source project is one of the great things about open source. AWS clearly has the resources, and the motivation to maintain a fork of Elasticsearch, at least they are making their fork open source instead of keeping it proprietary. It probably would have been a better situation if AWS had created some kind of reciprocal partnership with Elastic and Elastic hadn't felt the need to change the license, but it is likely too late for that now.
• vardhanajay 6y ago
  Save your favorite article, links, images, etc in one dashboard. meet 'linkish'
• gt565k 6y ago
  Ah, this will be yet another case-study in patent and license law. Reminds me of the cisco router firmware fiasco. Looks like a few elastic lawyers are about to get sacked.
• smokey_circles 6y ago
  I understand the question mark about what it is that Amazon did wrong here, and for the most part I agree that they've done nothing wrong. But I am not Amazon's side here. This is my very subjective take on the matter and by no means am I claiming to be correct. Amazon represents and existential threat to the open source business model. To those who say otherwise: How do you compete with a company with the incredible amount of resources available to Amazon? They could outprice you (running at a loss) and use that as leverage to bring your customers into their ecosystem. I'm not saying Amazon is actively hostile towards opensource. I recognise that they even submit contributions to the stacks they use (at least the ones I've seen). But there's no argument that I could host a better instance than Amazon. That would be one hell of a grandiose delusion. I don't know what the answer is here for open source. Maybe a license that allows free use, but prohibits you directly competing (offering a paid solution for support of the product) without a license. I don't think that's unfair stance to take, it doesn't punish Amazon for being such an incredibly successful and powerful hosting provider (I like AWS, I really hope I'm not sounding hostile towards them) but it creates a symbiotic relationship instead of a directly competitive one. Maybe I'm being naive and overlooking something, but I don't see what choices Elastic had here. I don't agree with the arguments that Elastic made a killing last year and therefore they should shut up and be grateful. Be grateful for what, exactly? That a behemoth of a platform is taking business share from them? You can't expect them to be OK with that, surely. I don't agree with their response either, but I think it's time the open source community acknowledges that we're in a different era now and we need a license to reflect that. 1. Don't punish Amazon, they haven't done anything wrong (and you can very easily nuke small businesses that offered support too, nobody is whining about them). Open source should belong to all of us. Making money off of that should really belong the original authors. I don't think that's a wildly ridiculous opinion. 2. Protect your business model, or maybe even come up with a new one that works hand-in-hand with a hosting provider like Amazon, rather than waiting for them to drain your market (which is not their intention but you can't ignore that it's happening). An example I can think of for 2) is building a version of the product that's more suitable for Amazon, which might help relieve overhead for them setting that product up. Then charge them for supporting that codebase. I'm imagining a twist of the "enterprise-grade" tier with extra features for enterprise-grade users. Have a "cloud-provider" tier on top of that (that supports replication, multi-instance, easy-up-down state or whatever you can think of). Again: I'm just a dude who thinks there's a growing elephant in the room that can be addressed in a manner that's beneficial to all parties. I don't mean to attack Amazon or Elastic, but I think this incident is a harbinger for what's to come ----- EDIT: Maybe the right move is to approach the cloud providers as an OSS provider and ask them to work with you on your business model. Don't wait for Amazon to build your product into an offering, build it with them. Take a cut of the revenue. Maybe?
• nprateem 6y ago
  AWS slagging off Elastic in this post really isn't a good look. I expect more of them. There's one thing putting spin on their decision (which only non technical managers will be fooled by) but whinging about Elastic writing a 'blustery blog post' and doing something 'fishy' etc is pathetic.
• daitangio 6y ago
  It is like Chess ElasticSearch move was very easy to conter-attack. Amazon does not lack smart guy to its side. Anyway the way cloud providers are using open source project can become a issue and "drain" day by day the open source community, especially smart startup creating a value in the day by day. I think there is some space for new ideas and new startup to find out a way to balance these forces and find out a deal in a win-win scenario....what do you think?
• JsVAR 6y ago
  Great
• staticelf 6y ago
  Fuck Amazon is all I have to say. This just adds yet another reason why I would never use AWS. People that defend Amazon are the ones ensuring no other companies will release their software as open source since you'll get exploited by shitty companies like Amazon.
• ezoe 6y ago
  Well, I think people have various opinions on this one, but if you restrict supposedly free software with the trademark, fork happens to get rid of trademark. This isn't the first time and certainly not the last.
• bergstromm466 6y ago
  What a joke. Unfortunately capitalist firms privatizing tech, exploiting working class labor, and locking up/monopolizing humanity's shared inheritance, is nothing new. The original developers will shortly be completely replaced by Amazon developers, and Amazon's Elasticsearch fork will be repurposed for Amazon-specific use cases only. Goodbye any use cases beyond what Amazon approves. Amazon say: "Thanks original developers, farewell! We will take over from here." I think this can act as an important reminder to license your (group) project as GPLv3 or AGLPv3, it's a trojan horse and helps the open source/free software revolution.
• gadders 6y ago
  I'm as capitalist as anyone, but you do have to wonder how much money is enough. AWS/Amazon has plenty of money to do the right thing and pay ElasticSearch fairly but they'd rather rip off their work to keep Bezos in his billions.
• jojo2000 6y ago
  aws steamrolling at its best. big tech at its worst. Even worse is the PR stunt "for the community". Lies lies and lies. Wake up. They could have done things by the book by collaborating with the ES team. They didn't. Don't ever let them feed on lack of true knowledge. Build infrastructures that can be deployed anywhere. Support the OSS products you buy if you can. Reevaluate.
• AnotherRainyDay 6y ago
  Can you have a license that cuts AWS, Amazon and all of their subsidiaries from doing this? It feels predatory and although Elastic is a huge company by the numbers that keep getting touted here, they're a rounding error on Amazons scale. Amazons practice in sections of their online market place has been clone / re-brand what's selling well in the market, slap an amazon basics logo on it. Then harass, ban or in the best case put the margins so low (or in the negative until the competition bleeds out) that the original seller can no longer compete. To me, this feels like the OSS equivalent. I'm anti-Amazon though and not sure if I'm just jaded at this point.
• tachiste 6y ago
  How "good" they are, you can gauge that by the fact that they are actively removing all discuss comments in linked blog post that points out to their hypocricy. Don't believe me, just go ahead say something negative and see it get removed within 30 minutes.
• habosa 6y ago
  So is there a standard license people can use to prevent this? Something like "Apache 2.0 but the only thing you can't do is resell this service as a managed cloud product"? I think that would be valuable and the right choice for many projects.
• zby 6y ago
  The problem is much more fundamental. Free Software is about users having the right to understand and modify the software that they use. This is my understanding of 'the printer story': https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201.... With hosted solutions the software runs on the supplier servers - so if the user wants to modify it he has to resign from the hosted solution (or maybe negotiate a special case - this does not seem very realistic). This is a fundamental limitation. If the software is Open Source the user still can copy it, modify and run it on their own servers (or on some other cloud supplier who would agree to the change) - but it is a lot of hassle (and hassle is important - after all with enough work you can always decompile a binary so it is only the hassle that differentiates source code from binary). Maybe if there was enough competition between cloud providers - then this could work - but I think the economy is against it.
• user5994461 6y ago
  Hint for ElasticSearch: The AWS fork is hosted on github https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch If I were working at ElasticSearch/Kibana, I would be filling a DMCA takedown on GitHub against all the offending repos. This is how to defend your copyright and trademark. And yes, it's getting into aggressive territory and not everybody might agree with that strategy, but that's how the game is played. It's a full on conflict and the result might very well kill elastic in the long term if no action is taken now.
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    https://aws.amazon.com/codeartifact/ https://aws.amazon.com/codeartifact/
  • nulbyte 6y ago
    > This is how to defend your copyright and trademark. The DMCA will not help you with trademark enforcement, and the license under which Amazon received ElasticSearch allows distribution of both the original and derivative works.
    • user5994461 6y ago
      It can do. The case is more complex than just copying some original work. Get a lawyer for a week, they will find 7 angles to defend the company. If not the DMCA there are a other simple procedures that big players have to follow. ElasticSearch is a billion dollar company. It's the least they could do.
• senthilnayagam 6y ago
  what if more developers start thinking like elastic , big tech will benefit from their code but not leave any business for them to survive on. AWS would be a multi-trillion company by then, will buy these companies and make that code proprietary. they have no incentive to let their competitors win.
• popcorncowboy 6y ago
  Haha bravo Amazon, you couldn't have scripted a more perfect response. Well done. Game on etc. Elastic is a 15 billion dollar MONSTER of a publicly traded company doing hundred+ million revenue per quarter. By market cap they'd be a ~top-20 biggest company overall and contender if not title-holder for the biggest tech company in the UK, Australia, and most other non-US countries. They are not some plucky feel-good startup fighting the good fight against nasty/unfair big-corps that are drinking their milkshake. That multi-billion dollar corporation does not own ElasticSearch 7.10 any more than Amazon does. Elastic have taken 7.10 and released it under a new license that prevents others from doing stuff with it. That's allowed. You could do that too. It's allowed. And some plucky startup in a garage (or say, Google, or MS, or Amazon) could decide they'll make changes to 7.10 and release it open source. All fine. All allowed. If your argument is that AWS is a form of mono/duo/oligo-poly and there are antitrust matters at play due to distorted market power being used illegally to crush a competitor... great make that argument. Most of the other arguments boil down to variations on an anti-capitalist theme.
• indymike 6y ago
  First, the dispute between AWS and Elasic is a trademark dispute. Second, ES had always been incomplete in it's open source form. No auth or access control (this feature requires an x-pack subscription) is included. It's also important to point out that ES relies on other open source software (Lucene) for its core functionality. Its hard to feel bad for either party here.
• zcw100 6y ago
  If you hire someone to build a moat around your castle don’t be surprised if they build a bridge over it next.
• arendtio 6y ago
  It seems a bit unfaithful, not mentioning that the behavior of AWS played a key part in the decision of elastic[1]. They didn't even link to the announcement. Instead they act as if they are the saviors, upholding the open source status of elaticsearch and kibana: NOT OK [1] https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/why-license-change-AWS
• perlgeek 6y ago
  I'm a bit disappointed by all the good guy/bad guy judgement going on here on HN, when both players are working with the market forces to get the best result. From AWS' perspective, taking an OSS Project and offering it as a hosted solution is legally fine. Elastic isn't happy about the fact that AWS make more profit from their OSS product than themselves, so they recognize that OSS isn't their best approach anymore, and do it differently. AWS decides that forking and maintaining the their own OSS version is more profitable in the long run than paying license fees. What changed since Elastic's original license choice? Hosting an SaaS version was possible back then, but it didn't happen at the scale that it is, so it was more of a theoretical problem. Now it's a very practical problem. This is a bit of a simplistic take, and there seem to be a lot of side shows (like trademarks), so more details lurk in the shadows. If I were to try to make a value judgement, my premise would be the flourishing OSS is a good thing. AWS's actions have have driven Elastic to make their product no longer OSS, which is not good. OTOH they maintain an OSS fork, which is good. But the interesting broader question is: would it have been beneficial for OSS if Amazon were paying some license fees to Elastic, for an OSS product? I think we need to find some model whereby OSS shops are not forced to rely on the whim of a giant to make their money. Whether this can be done sustainably without restricting usage rights remains to be seen, IMHO.
• dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  The amount the dialogue has been moved to open source and "who's in the right" is a bit scary. These are billion dollar companies making decisions and writing Mean Girls-type blog posts about each other in the hope of chasing profits, but their use of the term "open source" repeatedly makes the community act like this is what matters to either of them?
• disposablethrow 6y ago
  Elastic is a for profit business. Steven Schuuman [1] was CEO before Shay Bannon. Schuuman (who made 450MM from selling SpringSource to VMWare) is a billionaire. Stop pretending this is about "OSS" and not 'hey, that's my mad money Jeff!'. If Elastic was a company that was fully owned only by "OSS Developers", then fine, this would be an opportunity to support that sort of enlightended for profit corporation and fellow developers. But the stakeholders here are Billionaires and millionaires. No doubt Elastic took very good care of software developers (lots of perks) but since this is about money (lest we forget) it would be interested to see a breakdown of just who made what from this "OSS" "project". (And yes, not even a fan of Amazon.) [1]: https://www.forbes.com/profile/steven-schuurman/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/steven-schuurman/
• thih9 6y ago
  I don’t like how opinionated these articles are, both the announcement from Elasticsearch and AWS. I’d prefer a simple summary of changes and reasons for these changes, with as much objectivity (and as little blaming) as possible.
• dragosdev 6y ago
  I believe no party is in the wrong here. Elastic has the right to take the code private. Basically they are making a fork. AWS also has the right to create their fork and contribute to it. If we're playing the game of "who's the bigger dickhead" I would say it's Elastic. Before these 2 forks, many companies benefitted from hosting Elasticsearch for their customers. From their reasoning, it seems that only they should benefit from the code. Which is not Elastic's by the way. It belongs to the world.
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Christ, AWS is swimming in oceans of money. Just buy the companies.
• AcerbicZero 6y ago
  Eh, good for AWS I guess, but I wouldn't trust them with anything critical. Too unreliable as a provider.
• arpa 6y ago
  And this is how opensource dies; not with a bang, but with a whimper.