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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.

by 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.
- brasetvik 6y ago
  > Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Looking at the various projects at https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/ https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/, the most prominent ones seem to only have a handful of somewhat active developers, almost two years after launch. If AWS hires a lot of people to work full time on their ASL2-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks, then ... that's not necessarily _just_ bad for Elastic? I doubt Elastic execs thought AWS would just fall over and discontinue something that's probably billions in revenue at this point. If AWS actually starts contributing code beyond trivial bug fixes, code Elastic can legally fold into their own Elasticsearch (via the ASL2-licensed fork) if it's good enough, then ... good for both?
  - liuliu 6y ago
    Apache 2 license doesn’t allow you to relicense. So absorbing changes from AWS’ fork won’t be clear or easy as many in this thread suggest.
    - brasetvik 6y ago
      Apache 2 license explicitly does grant the right to sublicense. See §2.
      - liuliu 6y ago
        Honestly I don't know how that works. My understanding is that you cannot move existing ASL code under a different terms other than ASL unless you are the copyright holder. All modifications you done can be subject to whatever terms you liked. This seems to match what they said http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute-changes http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute... I think this important bit is sublicense v.s. relicense, where in sublicense case, you have to retain the original terms carried for the original code. Now, Elastic relicensed the whole software stack under SSDL. So to integrate any parts AWS done, they need to license Elasticsearch back to some mixture of SSDL and ASL, which would be weird.
implr 6y ago
Elastic isn't an open source project after the license change.
myroon5 6y ago
Source? I'm only seeing a single digit number of commits from Amazon emails out of ~57k total commits: elasticsearch $ git shortlog -nes | grep -i 'amazon'
- tw04 6y ago
  I believe I was incorrect, one of the contributors I thought was an Amazon employee that I was attributing commits to isn't.
- dastbe 6y ago
  disclosure: I work at AWS You're not required to contribute with your amazon e-mail address, and I see a lot of people who don't due to inertia or because they want to avoid tying their identity their employer.
  - myroon5 6y ago
    Agreed it's not perfect, and that's why I included my methodology and asked if anyone has a better source since less substantiated claims are being quoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866653
kondro 6y ago
An open source product with a market cap of $15B. Neither party is going to come out of this smelling like roses, but ES is hardly a tiny upstart barely able to get by.

by tw04 6y ago

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.

brasetvik 6y ago
> Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Looking at the various projects at https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/ https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/, the most prominent ones seem to only have a handful of somewhat active developers, almost two years after launch. If AWS hires a lot of people to work full time on their ASL2-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks, then ... that's not necessarily _just_ bad for Elastic? I doubt Elastic execs thought AWS would just fall over and discontinue something that's probably billions in revenue at this point. If AWS actually starts contributing code beyond trivial bug fixes, code Elastic can legally fold into their own Elasticsearch (via the ASL2-licensed fork) if it's good enough, then ... good for both?
- liuliu 6y ago
  Apache 2 license doesn’t allow you to relicense. So absorbing changes from AWS’ fork won’t be clear or easy as many in this thread suggest.
  - brasetvik 6y ago
    Apache 2 license explicitly does grant the right to sublicense. See §2.
    - liuliu 6y ago
      Honestly I don't know how that works. My understanding is that you cannot move existing ASL code under a different terms other than ASL unless you are the copyright holder. All modifications you done can be subject to whatever terms you liked. This seems to match what they said http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute-changes http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute... I think this important bit is sublicense v.s. relicense, where in sublicense case, you have to retain the original terms carried for the original code. Now, Elastic relicensed the whole software stack under SSDL. So to integrate any parts AWS done, they need to license Elasticsearch back to some mixture of SSDL and ASL, which would be weird.

implr 6y ago

Elastic isn't an open source project after the license change.

myroon5 6y ago

Source? I'm only seeing a single digit number of commits from Amazon emails out of ~57k total commits: elasticsearch $ git shortlog -nes | grep -i 'amazon'

tw04 6y ago
I believe I was incorrect, one of the contributors I thought was an Amazon employee that I was attributing commits to isn't.
dastbe 6y ago
disclosure: I work at AWS You're not required to contribute with your amazon e-mail address, and I see a lot of people who don't due to inertia or because they want to avoid tying their identity their employer.
- myroon5 6y ago
  Agreed it's not perfect, and that's why I included my methodology and asked if anyone has a better source since less substantiated claims are being quoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866653

kondro 6y ago

An open source product with a market cap of $15B. Neither party is going to come out of this smelling like roses, but ES is hardly a tiny upstart barely able to get by.