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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 servic

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.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    What are better alternative licenses that also wouldn't deter contributors?
    - belval 6y ago
      I am not sure that there are, but that's also the point. Open source software does not guarantee or even offer a business model. If you want to license your project with a "do what you want, no warranty" license that is attractive to contributors, you cannot also add a clause to limit something.
    - eloisant 6y ago
      So you're looking for a license that would give you all the benefits but still encourage people to contribute - so only you get their work for free?
      - hanniabu 6y ago
        Yes and no. I think I remember hearing about a license before that would require anybody that forks your project to create a PR for any changes they make. While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project, but it would at least force them to pass on any of their changes.
        jasonlotito 6y ago
        > While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project... ...it would deter them, which is what your original question was asking. Preventing and deterring are two completely different things.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  I don’t think VC-backed startups do that. They open source code because open source materially benefits adoption and mindshare, which grows the potential market for services, and that’s how they end up with big valuations selling premium services on top of their open source core. Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables other people to sell premium services on top of the open source core, and sometimes those other people can make more money because they are major incumbents that integrate other offerrings. But that doesn’t mean the startup would have been better or grown faster or sold more of its own services if it hadn’t been open source. It also doesn’t mean closing-up negates that competition: once the value of the product is proven, the major incumbents also have had proven for them the potential value of funding a fork with its own dedicated team, which can reap the community reach benefits of open source and compete with the relative upstarts now-proprietary offering.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    This is a pretty important point. That AWS can make something a big business does not mean a small startup could have done the same without AWS.
floatingatoll 6y ago
Interpreting your point to be "If it's legal, it's automatically acceptable", I can offer you clarity on why some people are coming down on AWS here: They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.
- fastball 6y ago
  I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge. It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose. This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it". Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!" and now they are mad because... someone did X with their software? If the Apache license allows morally unacceptable behavior... why did they choose that license?
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    Fundamentally, these people do not believe in the core principles of capitalism, such as the notion that free trade makes both parties richer and that profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon. Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. They've also basically been brainwashed to think that the word "monopoly" means "any time a large company competes in the same market as a smaller one". Which is ironic because, they also at the same time believe that Elastic is entitled to all the profits, and wax philosophical about "but how will any company be built around open source if we don't carry Elastic's water for them?" It's just all so farcical.
    - ksec 6y ago
      >Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. It is very unfortunate that this is the modern day main stream view of Open Source and Tech sector in general. Especially in Silicon Valley. And it is funny because Tech is also the most profit making industry. And they are also earning Top End salary.
mminer237 6y ago
Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.
- aaronblohowiak 6y ago
  Why Elastic and not Lucene or OpenJDK ?
  - pojzon 6y ago
    Money
  - Chyzwar 6y ago
    They already have fork of OpenJDK (Amazon Corretto)
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Which is perfectly alright, there are plenty of Java implementations, including full commercial ones, just like with ISO languages.
    - elygre 6y ago
      Corretto is not a fork, but a distribution.
- MisterPea 6y ago
  This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.
  - worldsayshi 6y ago
    My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again. So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.
weego 6y ago
It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you here.
- jeswin 6y ago
  Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original team. Instead, AWS takes all their customers, keeps 100% of the revenue, and passes on nothing. Terrible.
  - rileymat2 6y ago
    I generally agree, but isn’t the ability to do unforeseen things one of the powers and major wins of being a user of open source ecosystem? I don’t disagree about, what I would say charitable, instead of decent thing to do is.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      The issue is, I think, that acting in such a manner is supposed to cost you in community good will. The potential for bad PR can force you to act in a more ethical manner, but there's a big separation between the people with the checkbooks and the folks who are aware of the issues here. The courts are there for extraordinary circumstances but it's generally better for all parties to settle a dispute without litigation and AWS could just shovel some money in the direction of elastisearch.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    AWS didn't undercut anyone. They offered their customers exactly what they wanted. Many of these software vendors have delayed offering their own cloud-hosted versions, often years after AWS, even when these vendors should be better equipped at running them. Elastic is also infamous for data loss and still has consensus problems so maybe proper priorities are the real problem.
marcinzm 6y ago
Your right to do something does not remove my right to call you a dick for doing it. There is a large difference between what is legally allowed and what should be encouraged for the good of society.
- imgabe 6y ago
  Sure you can call someone a dick for abiding by the terms of the agreement that you set out, but that doesn't mean you're right. "Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying me." "Ok, we'll use it and not pay you" "What, how dare you?! You dick!"
  - petejohnson 6y ago
    That's not the exactly what's been happening. I'll give you a more accurate timeline Elastic: Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying us Community: Awesome! ... years go by and the community is loving it, Elastic is loving it everything is great AWS: Wow! Free, popular software. Millions of dollars already invested in it so we don't have to. We'll take it for free and sell it. ... years go by Elastic: Hey AWS! So glad you like our software but we can see that your actions are hurting our business which will hurt the software and the community in the future if we don't do anything. What do you think about making a deal? AWS: Lol, suck it. ... years go by where other cloud providers make deals with Elastic Elastic: Okay AWS, from now on we are changing our license so you and other companies similar to yours cannot re-sell it AWS (and their fans): What, how dare you?! We've made millions by reselling it as our own, and not you are going to restrict us doing exactly that. You dick!
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      > AWS (and their fans): What, how dare you?! We've made millions by reselling it as our own, and not you are going to restrict us doing exactly that. You dick! The latest event is more like AWS: Ok, your choice, we'll keep developing and making available an open-source version with the original license.
MrStonedOne 6y ago
The trademark side absolutely kills any credibility or goodwill they could hope to have.
riku_iki 6y ago
> it probably just would not have been widely used and successful also tested and fixed for free by community contributors.
xtf 6y ago
With Apache License they don't have to contribute back and it is questionable/unlikely they'll do.
hehehaha 6y ago
Well it could disincentivize others from keeping things open sourced or making meaningful contributions.
tw04 6y ago
Because an 800lbs gorilla is trying to crush an open source project? They could've come up with some agreement to oem Elastic and they both could've benefited. Instead they decided to just build a competing service at the expense of Elastic. It's the same reason most of the community had no time for Oracle forking RHEL. >AWS contributes improvements to the project. Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't verified). For a company the size of Amazon, unless it was one heck of a PR that's basically nothing. *Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  You’re confused. This isn’t about crushing an OSS project: it’s about ensuring there actually IS an open source project. What Elastic is doing with its licensing is not open source. You might argue that if Elastic Inc dies then the project dies, but then it wasn’t a very robust project.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a project would die if it’s original developper community dies. Some projects survive that shift, but it’s the exception more than the rule.
- paxys 6y ago
  Elasticsearch isn't two scrappy guys in a garage writing code out of the good of their hearts. It's a VC-backed $15B company which now needs to make money. Open source is the last thing on either of the two gorillas' minds.
- hyperion2010 6y ago
  Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are writing open source software, especially if their moat is a proprietary shim that any of the big providers could rewrite in a month if they cared. Adding a rider to your open source that says "oh, and only the original authors at this one company are allowed to implement those shims" may play well with the HN crowd, but it isn't open source anymore. I will also note that is clearly not enough competition in the cloud provider space, if there were more competition then elastic might be able to make money from the platform providers by implementing ES for each platform as you suggest.
swiley 6y ago
People get upset about the GPL but this is exactly why it was created.
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  Precisely why GPL is the way it is. If a company released Apache or BSD code they must understand that the code can be used and extended for commercial purposes and they don't have to offer those extensions back to the community. If you want to ensure those who derive benefits from it also contribute back, you choose GPL.
  - frant-hartm 6y ago
    GPL doesn't require you to give back to the community, only to your users. That's a huge difference and that's why GPL is generally ok for internal projects.
    - 8ytecoder 6y ago
      I didn’t say any differently. A company like Amazon would have to release their enhancements/changes/ modifications. It doesn’t matter if it’s to their users - they can’t prohibit their users from sharing it which for all intents and purposes is contributing back to the community.
pjmlp 6y ago
Agreed, next time learn what using non copyleft licenses mean in practice.
gorgoiler 6y ago
You’re legally allowed to call me an asshole to my face, but in a world where we expect civility... ...well, there is no but. The price I pay to live in a free world is that I can’t do anything about anyone else’s bad behaviour. I just have to put up with it because the alternatives are worse. At least I get a free world out of it. I hope Elastic get something out of the free world in which they exist. Patches from early contributors, I’m guessing. Certainly a brand and adoption they wouldn’t have enjoyed had they remained closed source. It’s a better world than one where we lack high quality open and free software, even if we have to live alongside the Amazons.
rdsubhas 6y ago
Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package. Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance. AWS taking advantage of this — yeah sure it may be legal, like how business lobbying senators for obvious policy hacks is legal — but doesn't mean it's fair or acceptable. It's totally OK to call them out here and not reward them for it.
- fastball 6y ago
  Then Elastic should've come up with a non-Apache-2.0 license at inception. Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes morality is in any way objective).
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    And frankly, I don't even buy the morality argument. It is a moral good to provide value to customers such that they voluntarily choose to give you money in exchange for that value. These people have this bizarre fusion of capitalist and communist reasoning, I really can't reconcile it. On the one hand they seem to think profit is fundamentally evil, but on the other hand they seem to think the problem is that Elastic isn't being allowed to monopolize all the profit. Well, which is it? Did Elastic release non-restrictively-licensed free software out of the goodness of their hearts, giving it away with no expectation of a return? Or did they create this codebase purely for profit, and thus have no claim to moral highground? It's all so silly and childish. And the biggest irony is, Elastic is already a successful business. They're trying to pretend their business model is not viable as long as Amazon keeps operating, which is just gaslighting.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
syshum 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. Something being legal does not make it ethical, many people see what AWS did, including profiting off the TradeMark of Elastic Search with zero compensation to the project is unethical AWS is clearly in the wrong here, I am surpised by the number of people that defend AWS, this is why FOSS continues to struggle AWS is a leech on Open Source, like many other large companies. I will be SHOCKED if AWS fork has any actual feature improvements, my guess is it will be a pure maintenance fork with security updates (maybe)
ksec 6y ago
Forgive me, which part of [1] even mentioned Profits, Revenue, Business Models, CopyLeft ? And which part of the same article ever said Elastic are not OK with Amazon providing a Services using their Open Source Software? Which they are legally allowed to do so with Apache 2.0? They even mentioned and I quote: "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." What they are not happy with was the TradeMark. Amazon usage of that Trademark to mislead customers and this isn't some recent things either. It has been going on for 5 years. ( And yes the court should be used to settle that. ) So majority of HN; including its previous threads with 1000+ comments, is basically making allegation that Elastic is making the changes because of their Business Model. Until that can be proved, allegations remain merely assertions. But right now it is being stated as Facts. And it is now being spin into ethical debate. And I was under the impression, should Amazon be forced to fork it, which they did as announced, would have to use a different name. Instead they choose to use ElasticSearch again. [1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS
- hnra 6y ago
  What is the point of the license change then? AFAICT the software license does not affect the trademark, so the only effect of this change is to disallow hosting ElasticSearch as a service.
- mathnmusic 6y ago
  If the dispute is with AWS abusing the trademark, license change is an exaggerated punishment that harms many others besides AWS itself.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
I read the first paragraph and just though jesus AWS are dicks. They literally frame it like they're doing this for the betterment of everyone when in reality they're being cheap. It is legal, but it is immoral just like lots of things Amazon does. That's why they are coming down on AWS.
jariel 6y ago
"It is up to Elastic to come up with a business model that works, not blame others if it is not. " This comment kind of implies there is this 'free and fair market' that just magically rewards better products etc.. Mostly, it's a game of power. Large companies use power to wipe out smaller one's and consolidate, sometimes to the near term benefit of consumers, sometimes not. Also - just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's fair, we really shouldn't have to state that. This doesn't mean that Amazon is 'bad' because they are big, or Elastic is 'good' because they are small or any of that, but the issue is worth consideration.
marricks 6y ago
This is how must awful actions by powerful entities are justified. I say "Rich people get huge tax breaks, why??" you say "well that's how tax law works, why get angry?" I say "I'm a small business getting exploited by a goliath!" you say "well everyone is playing by the rules so it's their fault" Systems are so biased by large actors and for some reason everyday people jump in and defend them? We should totally take everything in critically but this defense doesn't seem reasonable at all.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  Everyday people jump in and defend them because sometimes the big company is doing the right thing? Like some of us have been around since 25-30 years ago when the OSI was created and Linux was taking off. We have had these arguments for decades. There seems to be a generational knowledge gap where people of a certain age think there large actors are permanent and evil. That’s plainly untrue. Often the scrappy upstart is being unethical.
metreo 6y ago
It's a failing of many licenses where if the binary isn't modified then the rest of the software doesn't need to be similarly licensed. This goes against the spirit and intent of these licenses. Simply wrapping a OSS product in proprietary service layers is antithetical to the spirit of the open source license and not in the best interests of the community.
Pfhreak 6y ago
Is it not consistent with a dislike of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Entinguish approach? While what AWS is doing is (probably, IANAL) within their legal rights, it's arguably immoral because it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." Which, given AWS's widespread adoption, puts the OS version in peril. Edit: Thanks for pointing out that AWS will be releasing the code under an Apache 2 license. That does change my opinion somewhat, though I'll leave my original comment for posterity.
- brown9-2 6y ago
  > it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." No, you won’t be charged to access their fork on Github. If you want them to host your Elastic or Kibana service you’d have to pay for the service, but that’s not related to access to the Apache licensed source code.
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  > charge people to access our version Aren't they sharing the fork? Sounds more like "we like it but its no longer free to use, so we're making it free. btw you can pay us to host it for you"
- anothernewdude 6y ago
  Using any AWS extension or hosted service that isn't immediately replaceable is a really stupid move.
- treesknees 6y ago
  It's not. Sure, Amazon is continuing to charge for their existing ES managed services. But they're open sourcing the project behind it. So quite the opposite of what you've said. You can access this open source version of ES free of charge (once it's release on GitHub." From the article: "Our forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10. We will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic. We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices—including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors."
prepend 6y ago
I think this is actually best for users and the community. Sucks for elastic, but glad to see the project continuing as open source. Also good to see Amazon sponsoring lots of OSS development. Wish they could have done it in collab with ElasticCo, but I think that’s on them as there’s no way they can allow peers to contribute and stay in business.
kodah 6y ago
I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. From the ES perspective, their FOSS contributions were done in good faith which basically boil down to, "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free". AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported. You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate. Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.
- pronik 6y ago
  > ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. First, Elastic sells a buckload of licenses for on-premises ELK, which is a vastly bigger market than managed services. And second, how is Amazon different from "other companies" you mention? Just because they're bigger and have a ton of experience with managed services they should be forbidden from offering managed ELK?
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  >What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. Gaps in open source licensing? The license Elastic chose explicitly allows anyone to take the code, run it as they wish, and not contribute anything back. There are other FOSS licenses that are slightly more strict about this; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. And then they could have used a proprietary license from the start if they didn't want others competing with them at all using their code. Launching a competing offering using FOSS that someone else wrote is nothing new at all though. Red Hat built their business around subscriptions for and support of free software, much of which they wrote, but they hardly had exclusivity over the distribution (see CentOS and all the providers offering it) or the software they wrote. (It's all free software after all!)
asdfsfkwqe 6y ago
This comment is just like one of millions of FAKE REVIEWS on AMAZON. They do what they do best.
ergocoder 6y ago
I feel people don't actually read the accusation from Elastic. They made multiple accusations. One of them is AWS announced Elastic search in partnership with Elastic when there was no partnership at all.
intricatedetail 6y ago
But is it in the spirit of the license to have multi billion company appropriate it without paying fair share to contributors?
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monkeydreams 6y ago
> that gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. You both articulate the problem and dismiss it in the same sentence. AWS have a right to offer the service - they do not have a right to tell people that they built ES, or to say that they work hand-in-hand with ES, etc. But there is nothing that a small open source group can do without tackling the shit-ton of lawyers that Jeff Bezos can bring to bear on the problem. No matter the points of law, he can just outspend them in every capacity to get the outcome he wants.
ejanus 6y ago
Interesting. Why not buy the company then?
mythz 6y ago
Unless it's not clear yet, the biggest benefactors of OSS have become the 3 largest cloud vendors owned by 3 of the largest tech mega corps, namely: - AWS - Azure - GCP The multi-billion dollar infrastructure and network lock-in cloud vendors enjoy ensures there will only be these 3 cloud platforms (in the western world) that will enjoy most of the value derived from OSS, who are collecting rents on the backs of ISV's who developed the OSS products, because of which they're also going to be most invested in keeping the OSS status quo where they're able to repackage the resources & efforts others have invested into developing their OSS products and reap a majority of the profits by offering it as a managed hosted service on their platform, since relatively no customer using the cloud is going to want to use an external service if there's also the same managed service being offered by the cloud vendor. The fantasy that OSS allows equal competition is no longer a reality, ISV's cannot compete with a cloud vendor who uses their own investments against them in addition to their anti-competitive monopoly lock-in of already having Customers running on their cloud platform. Elastic's move to SSPL is effectively "OSS + free for everyone with the exception of exploitation by a major cloud vendor", since without it we're heading towards a mono culture future where all hosted OSS software is going to be funded and resourced by the billions major cloud vendors have reaped in collecting all the rent for hosting others OSS investments, that AWS gives nothing back in exchange for. SSPL is effectively being used a tool to force AWS to do the ethical thing and reach an agreement with Elastic to distribute a portion of their profits from using their trademarks and hosting their Software they've invested a decade in building. AWS has instead chosen the path to maintain their own fork to avoid sharing any profits with Elastic as they're obviously currently making so much from hosting Elastic's products that it's in their financial best interest to start hiring dev resources to maintain their own fork then sharing profits with Elastic to fund its continued development. Will be interesting to see how this strategy turns out, AWS may have already become to big to compete against who will be able to out resource, out fund & take over any ISV's OSS product, but it's clear the longer Elastic waits, the harder it would be to protect their own investments being used against them.
supermatt 6y ago
The real problem is that WE, as a community, demand certain licenses from the tools we use. If Elasticsearch didn't have such a permissive license, we simply wouldnt have used it, it wouldnt have become popular, and there would be no demand for AWS to provide it as a managed service. So is ES to blame for having a permissive license? Or is it AWS for making it trivial to use? Or are we to blame for dismissing any license that isn't OSI approved (and even then, we still snort at things like Affero GPL!) IMHO, if there IS a "bad guy" in this situation, its us...
NicoJuicy 6y ago
Allowed by the law does not mean it's considered ethical. AWS has changed the "new low" what an open-source project can expect if a cloud company earning billions on top of open-source can just change their project and fork it. Cloud companies taking your source are a "new thing" to consider in the world of open-source.
rohittidke 6y ago
If this continues the motivation for open sourcing your work will be lost.
ehnto 6y ago
I think people's gut reaction to this being wrong is that a conglomerate is making millions off of others work, I think that's a fair reaction. Open source software was about empowering people in particular, not corporations. It has however made it very, very difficult for individuals to make money from their software whilst the corporations reap the rewards from countless man hours of this free work across the a myriad of domains. I still think it's something we can get better at as an industry. Just choosing different licenses doesn't really solve the problem, people regularly shun paid software licenses, feeling entitled to all software for free, and I think that's an issue for the ecosystem as a whole.
terryf 6y ago
Yes, the license allows it. So, technically they can. But you have to admit that it's a bit of a dick move. The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist. How many other new interesting products will no longer be built as open source, because they know that AWS can just co-opt them and then their business will be effectively over. The laws and licences cannot possibly cover all the details of the real world, there needs to be some humanity involved, some "let's try to not be assholes" attitude. I prefer to live in a world where I'm not required to be a robot. Following all the clauses and laws to all the details will end up with that. It's not a great path. We all need more empathy.
- jasonlotito 6y ago
  > The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist Would the company and product be as popular as it is today if it was licensed this way from the beginning? I see this as a type of bait-and-switch. I invest in this open source technology, and then after I invest money into the service, they change what is being sold.
ujwaltrivedi 6y ago
We use ES and Kibana open source. Our entire infrastructure is on AWS and if AWS is managing the installation and maintenance efforts thats a great help. ES was never going to make a penny from us anyways and AWS is not making any money from the ES software itself. What they are making money is from our usage of their core services. Same goes for all the other open softwares, Kafka, Airflow, EMR to name some. Plus it would be dumb to have your infrastructure on AWS and buying ES cloud service where you'd require to send your data out of AWS as you'd have to pay for the data out.
- dzader 6y ago
  https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search#deploy-your-way:~:text=Google%20Cloud%2C%20Azure%2C%20AWS%20%E2%80%94%20you,deployment%20options%2C%20same%20great%20search%20experiences https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search#deploy-your-way:~:t....
mrharrison 6y ago
Sounds like there needs to be an Apache 3.0 license with an AWS exception in it.

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.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  What are better alternative licenses that also wouldn't deter contributors?
  - belval 6y ago
    I am not sure that there are, but that's also the point. Open source software does not guarantee or even offer a business model. If you want to license your project with a "do what you want, no warranty" license that is attractive to contributors, you cannot also add a clause to limit something.
  - eloisant 6y ago
    So you're looking for a license that would give you all the benefits but still encourage people to contribute - so only you get their work for free?
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Yes and no. I think I remember hearing about a license before that would require anybody that forks your project to create a PR for any changes they make. While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project, but it would at least force them to pass on any of their changes.
      - jasonlotito 6y ago
        > While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project... ...it would deter them, which is what your original question was asking. Preventing and deterring are two completely different things.
dragonwriter 6y ago
I don’t think VC-backed startups do that. They open source code because open source materially benefits adoption and mindshare, which grows the potential market for services, and that’s how they end up with big valuations selling premium services on top of their open source core. Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables other people to sell premium services on top of the open source core, and sometimes those other people can make more money because they are major incumbents that integrate other offerrings. But that doesn’t mean the startup would have been better or grown faster or sold more of its own services if it hadn’t been open source. It also doesn’t mean closing-up negates that competition: once the value of the product is proven, the major incumbents also have had proven for them the potential value of funding a fork with its own dedicated team, which can reap the community reach benefits of open source and compete with the relative upstarts now-proprietary offering.
- Kalium 6y ago
  This is a pretty important point. That AWS can make something a big business does not mean a small startup could have done the same without AWS.

floatingatoll 6y ago

Interpreting your point to be "If it's legal, it's automatically acceptable", I can offer you clarity on why some people are coming down on AWS here: They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.

fastball 6y ago
I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge. It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose. This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it". Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!" and now they are mad because... someone did X with their software? If the Apache license allows morally unacceptable behavior... why did they choose that license?
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Fundamentally, these people do not believe in the core principles of capitalism, such as the notion that free trade makes both parties richer and that profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon. Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. They've also basically been brainwashed to think that the word "monopoly" means "any time a large company competes in the same market as a smaller one". Which is ironic because, they also at the same time believe that Elastic is entitled to all the profits, and wax philosophical about "but how will any company be built around open source if we don't carry Elastic's water for them?" It's just all so farcical.
  - ksec 6y ago
    >Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. It is very unfortunate that this is the modern day main stream view of Open Source and Tech sector in general. Especially in Silicon Valley. And it is funny because Tech is also the most profit making industry. And they are also earning Top End salary.

mminer237 6y ago

Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.

aaronblohowiak 6y ago
Why Elastic and not Lucene or OpenJDK ?
- pojzon 6y ago
  Money
- Chyzwar 6y ago
  They already have fork of OpenJDK (Amazon Corretto)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Which is perfectly alright, there are plenty of Java implementations, including full commercial ones, just like with ISO languages.
  - elygre 6y ago
    Corretto is not a fork, but a distribution.
MisterPea 6y ago
This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the game and making the playground worse for everyone. Until we realize that generous is better again. So tying back to your comment. Yes, open source contributors doesn't expect something back but they can only hope that others at least pay it forward.

weego 6y ago

It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you here.

jeswin 6y ago
Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original team. Instead, AWS takes all their customers, keeps 100% of the revenue, and passes on nothing. Terrible.
- rileymat2 6y ago
  I generally agree, but isn’t the ability to do unforeseen things one of the powers and major wins of being a user of open source ecosystem? I don’t disagree about, what I would say charitable, instead of decent thing to do is.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    The issue is, I think, that acting in such a manner is supposed to cost you in community good will. The potential for bad PR can force you to act in a more ethical manner, but there's a big separation between the people with the checkbooks and the folks who are aware of the issues here. The courts are there for extraordinary circumstances but it's generally better for all parties to settle a dispute without litigation and AWS could just shovel some money in the direction of elastisearch.
- manigandham 6y ago
  AWS didn't undercut anyone. They offered their customers exactly what they wanted. Many of these software vendors have delayed offering their own cloud-hosted versions, often years after AWS, even when these vendors should be better equipped at running them. Elastic is also infamous for data loss and still has consensus problems so maybe proper priorities are the real problem.

marcinzm 6y ago

Your right to do something does not remove my right to call you a dick for doing it. There is a large difference between what is legally allowed and what should be encouraged for the good of society.

imgabe 6y ago
Sure you can call someone a dick for abiding by the terms of the agreement that you set out, but that doesn't mean you're right. "Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying me." "Ok, we'll use it and not pay you" "What, how dare you?! You dick!"
- petejohnson 6y ago
  That's not the exactly what's been happening. I'll give you a more accurate timeline Elastic: Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying us Community: Awesome! ... years go by and the community is loving it, Elastic is loving it everything is great AWS: Wow! Free, popular software. Millions of dollars already invested in it so we don't have to. We'll take it for free and sell it. ... years go by Elastic: Hey AWS! So glad you like our software but we can see that your actions are hurting our business which will hurt the software and the community in the future if we don't do anything. What do you think about making a deal? AWS: Lol, suck it. ... years go by where other cloud providers make deals with Elastic Elastic: Okay AWS, from now on we are changing our license so you and other companies similar to yours cannot re-sell it AWS (and their fans): What, how dare you?! We've made millions by reselling it as our own, and not you are going to restrict us doing exactly that. You dick!
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    > AWS (and their fans): What, how dare you?! We've made millions by reselling it as our own, and not you are going to restrict us doing exactly that. You dick! The latest event is more like AWS: Ok, your choice, we'll keep developing and making available an open-source version with the original license.

MrStonedOne 6y ago

The trademark side absolutely kills any credibility or goodwill they could hope to have.

riku_iki 6y ago

> it probably just would not have been widely used and successful also tested and fixed for free by community contributors.

xtf 6y ago

With Apache License they don't have to contribute back and it is questionable/unlikely they'll do.

hehehaha 6y ago

Well it could disincentivize others from keeping things open sourced or making meaningful contributions.

tw04 6y ago

Because an 800lbs gorilla is trying to crush an open source project? They could've come up with some agreement to oem Elastic and they both could've benefited. Instead they decided to just build a competing service at the expense of Elastic. It's the same reason most of the community had no time for Oracle forking RHEL. >AWS contributes improvements to the project. Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't verified). For a company the size of Amazon, unless it was one heck of a PR that's basically nothing. *Correction after looking a bit closer, I think Amazon has submitted at least 600 PRs, they only listed 9 in the blog post. That's better but it still doesn't change the fact their business model doesn't allow the companies they're building on the backs of to have a sustainable revenue stream.

parasubvert 6y ago
You’re confused. This isn’t about crushing an OSS project: it’s about ensuring there actually IS an open source project. What Elastic is doing with its licensing is not open source. You might argue that if Elastic Inc dies then the project dies, but then it wasn’t a very robust project.
- hrktb 6y ago
  It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a project would die if it’s original developper community dies. Some projects survive that shift, but it’s the exception more than the rule.
paxys 6y ago
Elasticsearch isn't two scrappy guys in a garage writing code out of the good of their hearts. It's a VC-backed $15B company which now needs to make money. Open source is the last thing on either of the two gorillas' minds.
hyperion2010 6y ago
Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are writing open source software, especially if their moat is a proprietary shim that any of the big providers could rewrite in a month if they cared. Adding a rider to your open source that says "oh, and only the original authors at this one company are allowed to implement those shims" may play well with the HN crowd, but it isn't open source anymore. I will also note that is clearly not enough competition in the cloud provider space, if there were more competition then elastic might be able to make money from the platform providers by implementing ES for each platform as you suggest.

swiley 6y ago

People get upset about the GPL but this is exactly why it was created.

8ytecoder 6y ago
Precisely why GPL is the way it is. If a company released Apache or BSD code they must understand that the code can be used and extended for commercial purposes and they don't have to offer those extensions back to the community. If you want to ensure those who derive benefits from it also contribute back, you choose GPL.
- frant-hartm 6y ago
  GPL doesn't require you to give back to the community, only to your users. That's a huge difference and that's why GPL is generally ok for internal projects.
  - 8ytecoder 6y ago
    I didn’t say any differently. A company like Amazon would have to release their enhancements/changes/ modifications. It doesn’t matter if it’s to their users - they can’t prohibit their users from sharing it which for all intents and purposes is contributing back to the community.

pjmlp 6y ago

Agreed, next time learn what using non copyleft licenses mean in practice.

gorgoiler 6y ago

You’re legally allowed to call me an asshole to my face, but in a world where we expect civility... ...well, there is no but. The price I pay to live in a free world is that I can’t do anything about anyone else’s bad behaviour. I just have to put up with it because the alternatives are worse. At least I get a free world out of it. I hope Elastic get something out of the free world in which they exist. Patches from early contributors, I’m guessing. Certainly a brand and adoption they wouldn’t have enjoyed had they remained closed source. It’s a better world than one where we lack high quality open and free software, even if we have to live alongside the Amazons.

rdsubhas 6y ago

Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package. Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance. AWS taking advantage of this — yeah sure it may be legal, like how business lobbying senators for obvious policy hacks is legal — but doesn't mean it's fair or acceptable. It's totally OK to call them out here and not reward them for it.

fastball 6y ago
Then Elastic should've come up with a non-Apache-2.0 license at inception. Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes morality is in any way objective).
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  And frankly, I don't even buy the morality argument. It is a moral good to provide value to customers such that they voluntarily choose to give you money in exchange for that value. These people have this bizarre fusion of capitalist and communist reasoning, I really can't reconcile it. On the one hand they seem to think profit is fundamentally evil, but on the other hand they seem to think the problem is that Elastic isn't being allowed to monopolize all the profit. Well, which is it? Did Elastic release non-restrictively-licensed free software out of the goodness of their hearts, giving it away with no expectation of a return? Or did they create this codebase purely for profit, and thus have no claim to moral highground? It's all so silly and childish. And the biggest irony is, Elastic is already a successful business. They're trying to pretend their business model is not viable as long as Amazon keeps operating, which is just gaslighting.
- hanniabu 6y ago

syshum 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. Something being legal does not make it ethical, many people see what AWS did, including profiting off the TradeMark of Elastic Search with zero compensation to the project is unethical AWS is clearly in the wrong here, I am surpised by the number of people that defend AWS, this is why FOSS continues to struggle AWS is a leech on Open Source, like many other large companies. I will be SHOCKED if AWS fork has any actual feature improvements, my guess is it will be a pure maintenance fork with security updates (maybe)

ksec 6y ago

Forgive me, which part of [1] even mentioned Profits, Revenue, Business Models, CopyLeft ? And which part of the same article ever said Elastic are not OK with Amazon providing a Services using their Open Source Software? Which they are legally allowed to do so with Apache 2.0? They even mentioned and I quote: "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." What they are not happy with was the TradeMark. Amazon usage of that Trademark to mislead customers and this isn't some recent things either. It has been going on for 5 years. ( And yes the court should be used to settle that. ) So majority of HN; including its previous threads with 1000+ comments, is basically making allegation that Elastic is making the changes because of their Business Model. Until that can be proved, allegations remain merely assertions. But right now it is being stated as Facts. And it is now being spin into ethical debate. And I was under the impression, should Amazon be forced to fork it, which they did as announced, would have to use a different name. Instead they choose to use ElasticSearch again. [1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

hnra 6y ago
What is the point of the license change then? AFAICT the software license does not affect the trademark, so the only effect of this change is to disallow hosting ElasticSearch as a service.
mathnmusic 6y ago
If the dispute is with AWS abusing the trademark, license change is an exaggerated punishment that harms many others besides AWS itself.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

I read the first paragraph and just though jesus AWS are dicks. They literally frame it like they're doing this for the betterment of everyone when in reality they're being cheap. It is legal, but it is immoral just like lots of things Amazon does. That's why they are coming down on AWS.

jariel 6y ago

"It is up to Elastic to come up with a business model that works, not blame others if it is not. " This comment kind of implies there is this 'free and fair market' that just magically rewards better products etc.. Mostly, it's a game of power. Large companies use power to wipe out smaller one's and consolidate, sometimes to the near term benefit of consumers, sometimes not. Also - just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's fair, we really shouldn't have to state that. This doesn't mean that Amazon is 'bad' because they are big, or Elastic is 'good' because they are small or any of that, but the issue is worth consideration.

marricks 6y ago

This is how must awful actions by powerful entities are justified. I say "Rich people get huge tax breaks, why??" you say "well that's how tax law works, why get angry?" I say "I'm a small business getting exploited by a goliath!" you say "well everyone is playing by the rules so it's their fault" Systems are so biased by large actors and for some reason everyday people jump in and defend them? We should totally take everything in critically but this defense doesn't seem reasonable at all.

parasubvert 6y ago
Everyday people jump in and defend them because sometimes the big company is doing the right thing? Like some of us have been around since 25-30 years ago when the OSI was created and Linux was taking off. We have had these arguments for decades. There seems to be a generational knowledge gap where people of a certain age think there large actors are permanent and evil. That’s plainly untrue. Often the scrappy upstart is being unethical.

metreo 6y ago

It's a failing of many licenses where if the binary isn't modified then the rest of the software doesn't need to be similarly licensed. This goes against the spirit and intent of these licenses. Simply wrapping a OSS product in proprietary service layers is antithetical to the spirit of the open source license and not in the best interests of the community.

Pfhreak 6y ago

Is it not consistent with a dislike of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Entinguish approach? While what AWS is doing is (probably, IANAL) within their legal rights, it's arguably immoral because it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." Which, given AWS's widespread adoption, puts the OS version in peril. Edit: Thanks for pointing out that AWS will be releasing the code under an Apache 2 license. That does change my opinion somewhat, though I'll leave my original comment for posterity.

brown9-2 6y ago
> it is basically saying, "We love this project so much we're going to build it into a different direction and charge people to access our version." No, you won’t be charged to access their fork on Github. If you want them to host your Elastic or Kibana service you’d have to pay for the service, but that’s not related to access to the Apache licensed source code.
vineyardmike 6y ago
> charge people to access our version Aren't they sharing the fork? Sounds more like "we like it but its no longer free to use, so we're making it free. btw you can pay us to host it for you"
anothernewdude 6y ago
Using any AWS extension or hosted service that isn't immediately replaceable is a really stupid move.
treesknees 6y ago
It's not. Sure, Amazon is continuing to charge for their existing ES managed services. But they're open sourcing the project behind it. So quite the opposite of what you've said. You can access this open source version of ES free of charge (once it's release on GitHub." From the article: "Our forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10. We will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic. We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices—including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors."

prepend 6y ago

I think this is actually best for users and the community. Sucks for elastic, but glad to see the project continuing as open source. Also good to see Amazon sponsoring lots of OSS development. Wish they could have done it in collab with ElasticCo, but I think that’s on them as there’s no way they can allow peers to contribute and stay in business.

kodah 6y ago

I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. From the ES perspective, their FOSS contributions were done in good faith which basically boil down to, "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free". AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported. You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate. Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.

pronik 6y ago
> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. First, Elastic sells a buckload of licenses for on-premises ELK, which is a vastly bigger market than managed services. And second, how is Amazon different from "other companies" you mention? Just because they're bigger and have a ton of experience with managed services they should be forbidden from offering managed ELK?
ryukafalz 6y ago
>What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end. Gaps in open source licensing? The license Elastic chose explicitly allows anyone to take the code, run it as they wish, and not contribute anything back. There are other FOSS licenses that are slightly more strict about this; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. And then they could have used a proprietary license from the start if they didn't want others competing with them at all using their code. Launching a competing offering using FOSS that someone else wrote is nothing new at all though. Red Hat built their business around subscriptions for and support of free software, much of which they wrote, but they hardly had exclusivity over the distribution (see CentOS and all the providers offering it) or the software they wrote. (It's all free software after all!)

asdfsfkwqe 6y ago

This comment is just like one of millions of FAKE REVIEWS on AMAZON. They do what they do best.

ergocoder 6y ago

I feel people don't actually read the accusation from Elastic. They made multiple accusations. One of them is AWS announced Elastic search in partnership with Elastic when there was no partnership at all.

intricatedetail 6y ago

But is it in the spirit of the license to have multi billion company appropriate it without paying fair share to contributors?

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monkeydreams 6y ago

> that gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. You both articulate the problem and dismiss it in the same sentence. AWS have a right to offer the service - they do not have a right to tell people that they built ES, or to say that they work hand-in-hand with ES, etc. But there is nothing that a small open source group can do without tackling the shit-ton of lawyers that Jeff Bezos can bring to bear on the problem. No matter the points of law, he can just outspend them in every capacity to get the outcome he wants.

ejanus 6y ago

Interesting. Why not buy the company then?

mythz 6y ago

Unless it's not clear yet, the biggest benefactors of OSS have become the 3 largest cloud vendors owned by 3 of the largest tech mega corps, namely: - AWS - Azure - GCP The multi-billion dollar infrastructure and network lock-in cloud vendors enjoy ensures there will only be these 3 cloud platforms (in the western world) that will enjoy most of the value derived from OSS, who are collecting rents on the backs of ISV's who developed the OSS products, because of which they're also going to be most invested in keeping the OSS status quo where they're able to repackage the resources & efforts others have invested into developing their OSS products and reap a majority of the profits by offering it as a managed hosted service on their platform, since relatively no customer using the cloud is going to want to use an external service if there's also the same managed service being offered by the cloud vendor. The fantasy that OSS allows equal competition is no longer a reality, ISV's cannot compete with a cloud vendor who uses their own investments against them in addition to their anti-competitive monopoly lock-in of already having Customers running on their cloud platform. Elastic's move to SSPL is effectively "OSS + free for everyone with the exception of exploitation by a major cloud vendor", since without it we're heading towards a mono culture future where all hosted OSS software is going to be funded and resourced by the billions major cloud vendors have reaped in collecting all the rent for hosting others OSS investments, that AWS gives nothing back in exchange for. SSPL is effectively being used a tool to force AWS to do the ethical thing and reach an agreement with Elastic to distribute a portion of their profits from using their trademarks and hosting their Software they've invested a decade in building. AWS has instead chosen the path to maintain their own fork to avoid sharing any profits with Elastic as they're obviously currently making so much from hosting Elastic's products that it's in their financial best interest to start hiring dev resources to maintain their own fork then sharing profits with Elastic to fund its continued development. Will be interesting to see how this strategy turns out, AWS may have already become to big to compete against who will be able to out resource, out fund & take over any ISV's OSS product, but it's clear the longer Elastic waits, the harder it would be to protect their own investments being used against them.

supermatt 6y ago

The real problem is that WE, as a community, demand certain licenses from the tools we use. If Elasticsearch didn't have such a permissive license, we simply wouldnt have used it, it wouldnt have become popular, and there would be no demand for AWS to provide it as a managed service. So is ES to blame for having a permissive license? Or is it AWS for making it trivial to use? Or are we to blame for dismissing any license that isn't OSI approved (and even then, we still snort at things like Affero GPL!) IMHO, if there IS a "bad guy" in this situation, its us...

NicoJuicy 6y ago

Allowed by the law does not mean it's considered ethical. AWS has changed the "new low" what an open-source project can expect if a cloud company earning billions on top of open-source can just change their project and fork it. Cloud companies taking your source are a "new thing" to consider in the world of open-source.

rohittidke 6y ago

If this continues the motivation for open sourcing your work will be lost.

ehnto 6y ago

I think people's gut reaction to this being wrong is that a conglomerate is making millions off of others work, I think that's a fair reaction. Open source software was about empowering people in particular, not corporations. It has however made it very, very difficult for individuals to make money from their software whilst the corporations reap the rewards from countless man hours of this free work across the a myriad of domains. I still think it's something we can get better at as an industry. Just choosing different licenses doesn't really solve the problem, people regularly shun paid software licenses, feeling entitled to all software for free, and I think that's an issue for the ecosystem as a whole.

terryf 6y ago

Yes, the license allows it. So, technically they can. But you have to admit that it's a bit of a dick move. The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist. How many other new interesting products will no longer be built as open source, because they know that AWS can just co-opt them and then their business will be effectively over. The laws and licences cannot possibly cover all the details of the real world, there needs to be some humanity involved, some "let's try to not be assholes" attitude. I prefer to live in a world where I'm not required to be a robot. Following all the clauses and laws to all the details will end up with that. It's not a great path. We all need more empathy.

jasonlotito 6y ago
> The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist Would the company and product be as popular as it is today if it was licensed this way from the beginning? I see this as a type of bait-and-switch. I invest in this open source technology, and then after I invest money into the service, they change what is being sold.

ujwaltrivedi 6y ago

We use ES and Kibana open source. Our entire infrastructure is on AWS and if AWS is managing the installation and maintenance efforts thats a great help. ES was never going to make a penny from us anyways and AWS is not making any money from the ES software itself. What they are making money is from our usage of their core services. Same goes for all the other open softwares, Kafka, Airflow, EMR to name some. Plus it would be dumb to have your infrastructure on AWS and buying ES cloud service where you'd require to send your data out of AWS as you'd have to pay for the data out.

dzader 6y ago
https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search#deploy-your-way:~:text=Google%20Cloud%2C%20Azure%2C%20AWS%20%E2%80%94%20you,deployment%20options%2C%20same%20great%20search%20experiences https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search#deploy-your-way:~:t....

mrharrison 6y ago

Sounds like there needs to be an Apache 3.0 license with an AWS exception in it.