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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 innovati

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.
  - glogla 6y ago
    That's a very good description. Thank you. (sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough)
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    Yeah let's talk about greed for a second. Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment. So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in. Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway. And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack. Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>? So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought. They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for. They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this: > The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
    - glogla 6y ago
- Seanambers 6y ago
  Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to contribute to free software. But when others can live in mansions because of it, maybe not so much :)
- caconym_ 6y ago
  > This is the whole point of open source. What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    I think GP meant that allowing for forks is the point of Open Source. Which I would argue is kind of a big point of Open Source -- the point isn't who's doing the forking or who's profiting -- but the point is that forks like this are intentionally allowed.
    - caconym_ 6y ago
      Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point, either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.
      - danShumway 6y ago
        Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I should rephrase to say it's a point. I could see someone arguing that forking is just a component of the deeper philosophical attitude about how people can use and distribute and modify code in general. Forking is the/a point in the sense that I can't think of a version of Open Source that is still Open Source but that doesn't allow forking -- that allowing for forking is a deliberate choice, not an accidental one.
      - bigiain 6y ago
        The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"? Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...
- sciurus 6y ago
  Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ > Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.
  - wpaladin 6y ago
    Kafka is an ASF project, and not controlled by Confluent. There is nothing stopping anyone from offering a hosted Kafka. You seem to be conflating Kafka with Confluent's own products. >No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors. I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.
cosmodisk 6y ago
How so? If the licence permits free copy/fork/whatever it's all great to expect some return but surely it's not guaranteed?
MattGaiser 6y ago
> that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making. So legally open source but socially closed source/non-commercial use?
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  I'd phrase it backwards: these people think it should have the appearance of open source and get all the benefits (contributions from community, widespread adoption), but legally and ethically speaking it's closed source and they get to make all the money. They seriously have this entitled attitude that because you used the free software project that they started, that now they're entitled to that money. It's patently absurd. Imagine if Linus Torvalds went around with that attitude, claiming he deserves to be a trillionaire because of the absurd amount of value Linux has produced. (And ironically Linux is a more restrictive license than Elasticsearch)
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    > contributions from community Good point. When I willingly contribute to open source with no compensation, it's with the understanding that it's because my contribution is available to anyone under the same terms, I'm contributing to a "commons" open to all, willingly for the public good. If anyone wants to use it for profit-making purposes, that's generally fine with me, because everyone can on an equal basis. If instead the software is licensed such that one company has special rights to profit off of it that others don't... why would I donate my contributions for free to that company? Shouldn't I get a cut?
    - seneca 6y ago
      Your comment and the one you're replying to actually just changed my mind on this topic. Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wanting to have the cake and eat it too. I love having my opinion changed. Thanks for that.
dragonwriter 6y ago
With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source users to pay you is “doing it wrong”. Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  > Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault. Exactly this. Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model. The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. Nope, it's all gaslighting. They don't need to make this license change, without it they'll still be a $50B business in a decade or less. They're just having an immature childish response because, while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is also making boatloads of money, and that's not fair in their eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a whole is, but that's another rant)
  - wyaeld 6y ago
    ES had a business model. It was open-core, but with critical features like Security and Access-Control hidden behind their paid support. The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working. Enough blame for the current situation on all sides.
    - seniorThrowaway 6y ago
      Thank you for pointing this out. I used to run elasticsearch on a project and these pay walled features were a large source of frustration to the point that eventually I recommended moving it to the AWS service because we were already paying amazon anyway and in a large organization it is a huge pain to contract another vendor.
ahachete 6y ago
> insane profits AWS is making Do you have numbers on how much AWS profits from Amazon Elastic Search service? Have you checked the profits from Elastic for their offerings? Have you compared them? How do you quantify "insane"? Honest questions. Just a data person.
__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Forgive me for expressing my frustrating for a moment here: What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give it away freely, sell it. Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with Elastic submitted patches to their codebase. Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary. Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them more money, it will just hurt their brand image and incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an open source vendor gives away their software for free, intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. It's completely backwards logic. To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you yell at someone using your free software for commercial purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't owe you any money. You people seem to think open source just means "source available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that. [/unhinged rant]
- hospadar 6y ago
  > Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug: Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining). It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, and it's not really clear to me who would (for business reasons, not philosophy) switch to solr/other just because of the license switch. It also makes perfect sense that AWS would release an apache-licensed fork - they have serious monopoly power - they con offer this service cheaper inside AWS, and the integrations can be smoother/better. So really why be mad at either party? They both made good business choices it seems to me, maybe elastic will end up loosing out, but if that happens, I can't imagine that staying on the apache license would have saved their bacon.
markphip 6y ago
Elastic forced the fork. AWS was contributing and complying with the license. Why should AWS not be allowed to make insane profits off open source?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  AWS was entirely within their rights to do what they did. If Elastic wanted AWS to stop, they just had to re-license their software. Which they have now done. If AWS wants to continue to offer the latest version of ES then they simply have to comply with the new licensing terms. Nobody has done anything wrong or unreasonable, or “forced” anyone to do anything, though it was perhaps not in Elastic’s best interest to have offered ES under the original license.
- JarlUlvi 6y ago
  With as much profit as AWS was making on ELK they should have commits up the wazoo. Instead, crickets. > That's 9 PRs vs, as someone pointed out below, roughly 41000 commits in the project.
scoopertrooper 6y ago
It's like leaving your car in the middle of the road, keys in the ignition, and a deed transferring ownership to whoever holds it under the window wiper, then getting annoyed at someone driving off with it.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  Sort of. You’d have to add a replicator button to the car so you make a copy and don’t actually take the original.
perrygeo 6y ago
The problem is that "their cut" of the profits was defined as precisely 0%, as per their original license terms.
wayneftw 6y ago
Amazon is doing all of the work of buying servers and hiring skilled professionals and setting up instances of Elastic and automating it so that you can easily rent a server to run it.
javajosh 6y ago
I agree. What Amazon is doing is clearly legal , but it also clearly violates cultural norms about fairness. I don't know much about the Elasticsearch team or company, but from a 50k ft view it seems like Amazon could and should throw them a couple mil, at least out of pity.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  They probably offered to throw them a couple of million dollars to avoid the hassle and the bad PR, but ElasticSearch is worth a lot more than that.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Are Google and OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks? Google, Apple, and Microsoft paying for WebKit?
- nix23 6y ago
  >OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL? But also LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL) OpenBGPD OpenOSPFD OpenNTPD OpenSMTPD OpenSSH
  - irishsultan 6y ago
    OpenBSD did not initially make OpenSSL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL, https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html)
    - nix23 6y ago
      And Google did not initially made Blink.
      - irishsultan 6y ago
        But OpenBSD was never involved with OpenSSL (until they forked it).

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.
- glogla 6y ago
  That's a very good description. Thank you. (sometimes I feel upvote isn't enough)
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Yeah let's talk about greed for a second. Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment. So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in. Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway. And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack. Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>? So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought. They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for. They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this: > The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
  - glogla 6y ago
Seanambers 6y ago
Yeah, i get your point, but i'm thinking many in the dev camp didn't really realize the extent of this 'principle' as in 'people are nice kinda way'. I think this will only make OSS developers more aware about what kind of licencing they choose or choose to contribute to, one thing is to contribute to free software. But when others can live in mansions because of it, maybe not so much :)
caconym_ 6y ago
> This is the whole point of open source. What is? Because I don't think the point of open source is to have big companies make money off code that other entities—in many cases individuals—made available for free. It's certainly something that happens, and I don't think it's universally bad, but I wouldn't say it's the point, either. I've heard of several high profile cases of the people who maintain high-profile projects supporting $billions worth of commercial products struggling to make ends meet, and I don't think that's the point. That's not a system working as designed, because nobody designed it and there arguably is no point—it's simply a dynamic that emerged organically from the factors that drive people to contribute to open source, and those that drive businesses to maximize their profits.
- danShumway 6y ago
  I think GP meant that allowing for forks is the point of Open Source. Which I would argue is kind of a big point of Open Source -- the point isn't who's doing the forking or who's profiting -- but the point is that forks like this are intentionally allowed.
  - caconym_ 6y ago
    Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point, either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I should rephrase to say it's a point. I could see someone arguing that forking is just a component of the deeper philosophical attitude about how people can use and distribute and modify code in general. Forking is the/a point in the sense that I can't think of a version of Open Source that is still Open Source but that doesn't allow forking -- that allowing for forking is a deliberate choice, not an accidental one.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"? Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...
sciurus 6y ago
Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ > Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.
- wpaladin 6y ago
  Kafka is an ASF project, and not controlled by Confluent. There is nothing stopping anyone from offering a hosted Kafka. You seem to be conflating Kafka with Confluent's own products. >No. Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0. The license change only applies to our Confluent software that was previously called “Confluent Open Source”: Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, Confluent ksqlDB and some Confluent Connectors. I love that they try to make it sound like they even have a choice in changing Kafka's license.

cosmodisk 6y ago

How so? If the licence permits free copy/fork/whatever it's all great to expect some return but surely it's not guaranteed?

MattGaiser 6y ago

> that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making. So legally open source but socially closed source/non-commercial use?

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
I'd phrase it backwards: these people think it should have the appearance of open source and get all the benefits (contributions from community, widespread adoption), but legally and ethically speaking it's closed source and they get to make all the money. They seriously have this entitled attitude that because you used the free software project that they started, that now they're entitled to that money. It's patently absurd. Imagine if Linus Torvalds went around with that attitude, claiming he deserves to be a trillionaire because of the absurd amount of value Linux has produced. (And ironically Linux is a more restrictive license than Elasticsearch)
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  > contributions from community Good point. When I willingly contribute to open source with no compensation, it's with the understanding that it's because my contribution is available to anyone under the same terms, I'm contributing to a "commons" open to all, willingly for the public good. If anyone wants to use it for profit-making purposes, that's generally fine with me, because everyone can on an equal basis. If instead the software is licensed such that one company has special rights to profit off of it that others don't... why would I donate my contributions for free to that company? Shouldn't I get a cut?
  - seneca 6y ago
    Your comment and the one you're replying to actually just changed my mind on this topic. Up to now I've had a sort of knee-jerk response of "it's Elastic's software, they can do what they want", but I think you're actually right. They're reaped the benefits of open source, including free work from the community, and now they want to claim exclusive rights to profit off of it. It's basically the perfect example of wanting to have the cake and eat it too. I love having my opinion changed. Thanks for that.

dragonwriter 6y ago

With for-profit corporate open source, you are either giving it away because doing so benefits you in some other way, or you are doing it wrong; expecting downstream open source users to pay you is “doing it wrong”. Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault. Exactly this. Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model. The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. Nope, it's all gaslighting. They don't need to make this license change, without it they'll still be a $50B business in a decade or less. They're just having an immature childish response because, while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is also making boatloads of money, and that's not fair in their eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a whole is, but that's another rant)
- wyaeld 6y ago
  ES had a business model. It was open-core, but with critical features like Security and Access-Control hidden behind their paid support. The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working. Enough blame for the current situation on all sides.
  - seniorThrowaway 6y ago
    Thank you for pointing this out. I used to run elasticsearch on a project and these pay walled features were a large source of frustration to the point that eventually I recommended moving it to the AWS service because we were already paying amazon anyway and in a large organization it is a huge pain to contract another vendor.

ahachete 6y ago

> insane profits AWS is making Do you have numbers on how much AWS profits from Amazon Elastic Search service? Have you checked the profits from Elastic for their offerings? Have you compared them? How do you quantify "insane"? Honest questions. Just a data person.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

Forgive me for expressing my frustrating for a moment here: What is with this new generation of developers (I don't mean new as in young since I meet people in their 40s espousing these ideas), who make all these high-minded arguments about how evil it is to profit off of someone else's work, when literally that's what proprietary software is for. If you don't want someone to make money with your code, don't give it away freely, sell it. Instead, what Elastic did was they made a beautiful piece of open source software, licensed under Apache 2.0. Because it was Apache 2.0, organizations were comfortable building Elasticsearch into their stacks because they knew that they couldn't get Microsofted. Additionally because it was Apache 2.0, hundreds of contributors who are not affiliated with Elastic submitted patches to their codebase. Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary. Now to be clear, I actually think this won't even make them more money, it will just hurt their brand image and incentivize high-quality Apache 2.0 feature-rich forks, so really it's just an absurd blunder. But I am so unbelievably frustrated that people keep espousing this reverse entitlement attitude that you espoused here: the idea that an open source vendor gives away their software for free, intentionally, so that they can benefit from the community and vice versa, and then suddenly now somehow I'm an asshole if I've been operating a service that uses Elasticsearch. It's completely backwards logic. To put it another way, as an open source maintainer, you don't owe anybody your time. You are free to tell the people opening github issues and bug tracker tickets to go fuck themselves. But similar, nobody owes you anything, so if you yell at someone using your free software for commercial purposes, now you're being the entitled asshole. They don't owe you any money. You people seem to think open source just means "source available". It's SO MUCH MORE than that. [/unhinged rant]

hospadar 6y ago
> Elastic used its position as an open source maintainer to grow Elasticsearch to be one of the most important pieces of software in the world (nowhere as important as linux or arguably lucene but still in the top echelon), and then once it did that it decided to lie to the community, pull the rug out from under them and switch to proprietary. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the sense in the "pull out the rug, it's not OSS" anymore. Sure, I agree that The Open Source Definition doesn't encompass something like the Elastic License, but :shrug: Who exactly is having the rug pulled out from under them? AWS? As they very clearly state in the article: "When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary" (presumably because they understand that the license could change, or the maintainers could just stop maintaining). It seems like it made good business sense for Elastic to switch licenses, and it's not really clear to me who would (for business reasons, not philosophy) switch to solr/other just because of the license switch. It also makes perfect sense that AWS would release an apache-licensed fork - they have serious monopoly power - they con offer this service cheaper inside AWS, and the integrations can be smoother/better. So really why be mad at either party? They both made good business choices it seems to me, maybe elastic will end up loosing out, but if that happens, I can't imagine that staying on the apache license would have saved their bacon.

markphip 6y ago

Elastic forced the fork. AWS was contributing and complying with the license. Why should AWS not be allowed to make insane profits off open source?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
AWS was entirely within their rights to do what they did. If Elastic wanted AWS to stop, they just had to re-license their software. Which they have now done. If AWS wants to continue to offer the latest version of ES then they simply have to comply with the new licensing terms. Nobody has done anything wrong or unreasonable, or “forced” anyone to do anything, though it was perhaps not in Elastic’s best interest to have offered ES under the original license.
JarlUlvi 6y ago
With as much profit as AWS was making on ELK they should have commits up the wazoo. Instead, crickets. > That's 9 PRs vs, as someone pointed out below, roughly 41000 commits in the project.

scoopertrooper 6y ago

It's like leaving your car in the middle of the road, keys in the ignition, and a deed transferring ownership to whoever holds it under the window wiper, then getting annoyed at someone driving off with it.

parasubvert 6y ago
Sort of. You’d have to add a replicator button to the car so you make a copy and don’t actually take the original.

perrygeo 6y ago

The problem is that "their cut" of the profits was defined as precisely 0%, as per their original license terms.

wayneftw 6y ago

Amazon is doing all of the work of buying servers and hiring skilled professionals and setting up instances of Elastic and automating it so that you can easily rent a server to run it.

javajosh 6y ago

I agree. What Amazon is doing is clearly legal , but it also clearly violates cultural norms about fairness. I don't know much about the Elasticsearch team or company, but from a 50k ft view it seems like Amazon could and should throw them a couple mil, at least out of pity.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
They probably offered to throw them a couple of million dollars to avoid the hassle and the bad PR, but ElasticSearch is worth a lot more than that.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Are Google and OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks? Google, Apple, and Microsoft paying for WebKit?

nix23 6y ago
>OpenBSD paying for their OpenSSL forks Do you know that OpenBSD initially MADE OpenSSL? But also LibreSSL (the fork of OpenSSL) OpenBGPD OpenOSPFD OpenNTPD OpenSMTPD OpenSSH
- irishsultan 6y ago
  OpenBSD did not initially make OpenSSL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL, https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html)
  - nix23 6y ago
    And Google did not initially made Blink.
    - irishsultan 6y ago
      But OpenBSD was never involved with OpenSSL (until they forked it).