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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 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.
merb 6y ago
what aws does is more oss than that what elastic does. elastic also did it because of $$. so neither of them wins.
- Chyzwar 6y ago
  Elastic is at least open about reasons. AWS pretend to be an OSS champion. Compared to other players Google, MS they do the least amount of OSS work. Hypocrisy is really worse than selfishness. It definitely shifted my neutral view of AWS. I can still spin ElasticSearch cluster for my backend and I have somehow open license. Where is open source version of Aurora, Dynamo, DocumentDB, Neptune or Redshift? Where is anything OSS from AWS that is useful outside interfacing with AWS services?
  - paxys 6y ago
    > Elastic is at least open about reasons. Is it though? Every single one of their blog posts have been focused on spinning their decision as being great for the open source community. What they should have said was - we are a business, have VCs/shareholders and need to make money now, so sorry but the free ride is over.
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  Elastic say they want to make money of the product they've spent money developing and literally point at the company who basically announced they were using it in partnership with them and turns out isn't and isn't paying their fair share - AWS. AWS say they want elasticsearch and kibana to be open source. What they really mean is they want to use elasticsearch without paying their fair share.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    What is the "fair share" payment for ElasticSearch under its Apache license? I'm not a lawyer but it appears to be $0. Meanwhile, how come everyone showing sympathy for Elastic's position doesn't seem to be showing equal sympathy for Apache Lucene? Surely Lucene is deserving of at least as much credit as Elastic.
alpb 6y ago
From my personal exchanges with people on Twitter on various contributions to projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, I have frequently seen that some AWS employees (and sometimes the companies they partner with) want to make it seem like AWS is _really_ doing open source with real contributions. Every time I pointed my finger and asked, I got a response from such people "you should know not all contributions to the open source are code". I'm not gatekeeping what "real contributions" are: You can fund development of OSS, you can provide Project Manager support, you can publicize and organize events (for the sake of the tech; not sales), do DevRel for something, provide UX/UXR/design support etc. They're all real contributions. But for some reason, AWS contributions to 3rd party OSS projects stops right at "it works fine on AWS". It's kind of a meme at this point. Disclaimer: I work at GCP on Kubernetes/OSS.
- _msw_ 6y ago
  Disclosure: I work at Amazon on AWS infrastructure. And sometimes I have exchanges with ahmetb on Twitter. I cannot dispute the fact that Google has more developers working on k8s than AWS does. And that AWS developers have been focused more on making sure that k8s works great on AWS, rather than the core code. I've heard folks say that they think that k8s works better on Google because of all the Google developers using it. And that might have been true at some point. But, in any case, that means that you're probably going to see more activity making k8s work well on AWS than work in other areas. But it doesn't mean that other "3rd party" packages don't see more general activity that goes beyond "it works fine on AWS". Like the work in the upstream Linux kernel to apply the retpoline approach (invented by folks at Google, but not applied to upstream Linux) to mitigate Spectre. [1] It is meme when people pick it up and propagate it. [1] https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2018-mitigating-spectre-and-meltdown-and-l1tf-david-woodhouse https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2018-mitiga...

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.

merb 6y ago

what aws does is more oss than that what elastic does. elastic also did it because of $$. so neither of them wins.

Chyzwar 6y ago
Elastic is at least open about reasons. AWS pretend to be an OSS champion. Compared to other players Google, MS they do the least amount of OSS work. Hypocrisy is really worse than selfishness. It definitely shifted my neutral view of AWS. I can still spin ElasticSearch cluster for my backend and I have somehow open license. Where is open source version of Aurora, Dynamo, DocumentDB, Neptune or Redshift? Where is anything OSS from AWS that is useful outside interfacing with AWS services?
- paxys 6y ago
  > Elastic is at least open about reasons. Is it though? Every single one of their blog posts have been focused on spinning their decision as being great for the open source community. What they should have said was - we are a business, have VCs/shareholders and need to make money now, so sorry but the free ride is over.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
Elastic say they want to make money of the product they've spent money developing and literally point at the company who basically announced they were using it in partnership with them and turns out isn't and isn't paying their fair share - AWS. AWS say they want elasticsearch and kibana to be open source. What they really mean is they want to use elasticsearch without paying their fair share.
- sjwright 6y ago
  What is the "fair share" payment for ElasticSearch under its Apache license? I'm not a lawyer but it appears to be $0. Meanwhile, how come everyone showing sympathy for Elastic's position doesn't seem to be showing equal sympathy for Apache Lucene? Surely Lucene is deserving of at least as much credit as Elastic.

alpb 6y ago

From my personal exchanges with people on Twitter on various contributions to projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, I have frequently seen that some AWS employees (and sometimes the companies they partner with) want to make it seem like AWS is _really_ doing open source with real contributions. Every time I pointed my finger and asked, I got a response from such people "you should know not all contributions to the open source are code". I'm not gatekeeping what "real contributions" are: You can fund development of OSS, you can provide Project Manager support, you can publicize and organize events (for the sake of the tech; not sales), do DevRel for something, provide UX/UXR/design support etc. They're all real contributions. But for some reason, AWS contributions to 3rd party OSS projects stops right at "it works fine on AWS". It's kind of a meme at this point. Disclaimer: I work at GCP on Kubernetes/OSS.

_msw_ 6y ago
Disclosure: I work at Amazon on AWS infrastructure. And sometimes I have exchanges with ahmetb on Twitter. I cannot dispute the fact that Google has more developers working on k8s than AWS does. And that AWS developers have been focused more on making sure that k8s works great on AWS, rather than the core code. I've heard folks say that they think that k8s works better on Google because of all the Google developers using it. And that might have been true at some point. But, in any case, that means that you're probably going to see more activity making k8s work well on AWS than work in other areas. But it doesn't mean that other "3rd party" packages don't see more general activity that goes beyond "it works fine on AWS". Like the work in the upstream Linux kernel to apply the retpoline approach (invented by folks at Google, but not applied to upstream Linux) to mitigate Spectre. [1] It is meme when people pick it up and propagate it. [1] https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2018-mitigating-spectre-and-meltdown-and-l1tf-david-woodhouse https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2018-mitiga...