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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

by 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!)
- cwyers 6y ago
  > they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close? EDIT: I do think it's fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is worse than the AGPL, but I do think it's important to point out that it's possible to believe in open source licenses and to think that the way AWS uses software violates the spirit of open source. The people who work on GNU seem to think that!
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I see it as “there are a variety of licenses from which to choose, depending on your goals”. BSD, Apache, and MIT all represent different points in space, as do GPL and AGPL. When I choose Apache or MIT, I do so for a reason and if you or Amazon use code in compliance with that license, I’m happy and you’re not “exploiting a gap” but rather “complying with the terms I offered”.
    - klintcho 6y ago
IgorPartola 6y ago
So Amazon forking ES is then ensuring that if Elastic dies, ElasticSearch doesn’t go away, right? Part of the problem here really is that if I am using AWS for the rest of my stack, why would I run my search elsewhere, introducing latency, etc? Elastic’s opportunity was to approach AWS and try to get bought. But their business model really isn’t as good as it seems.
- MoOmer 6y ago
  Elastic's Cloud offering runs in the major cloud providers [0]. https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    Is it better than AWS’s implementation?
    - patmorgan23 6y ago
      And/or cost competitive.
      - theamk 6y ago
        Looking at a single machine (i3.large, 15GB ram, 470GB SD): Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)
        IgorPartola 6y ago
        So if we assume the level of service is not much better, AWS is the more prudent choice, no? So trademark issues aside, AWS does ES better than Elastic?
        budlightvirus 6y ago
dialamac 6y ago
> I don't really get how people get this twisted. Quite condescending this attitude. I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple. And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are sometimes interesting with bit players, but the FAANGs of the world they could just build a tool like this from the ground up if necessary.
- throwaway17_17 6y ago
  I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software licenses and, it seems to be implied, that it should be seen to supersede the bare terms of a license. This reasoning is then used as the basis of ethical usage of open source software. So, when Amazon takes a piece of software and uses it not in the ‘spirit’ of open source, their compliance with licensing is irrelevant. I don’t particularly agree with this point of view, but I get the impression many people do.
  - azernik 6y ago
    When it comes to the "spirit", the people criticizing it seem to be talking about the "spirit" of Stallman and Free Software; the term Open Source and the OSI as an institution were explicitly built on friendliness to running side by side with proprietary software and to third-party commercial use.
    - owenmarshall 6y ago
      Stallman has no problems dual licensing software and selling proprietary licenses to companies. His goal is freedom zero, the freedom of a user to use the software as they want.
mixedCase 6y ago
What makes you think this is a "gap in Open Source licensing"? Is it not more easily explained as Elastic's business plan having a gaping hole instead? Don't put the cart before the horse. They built on top of a license that gave the user a set of freedoms they don't want the user to have. End of story. Now they've patched this hole, but they want to keep the goodwill that comes from Open Source licensing instead of owning up to their decision and decide to blame AWS as a scapegoat, all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition where you cannot set restrictions on specific fields of endeavor (in this case, the same field the product belongs to). Now that's not okay.
- dathinab 6y ago
  > Plan having a gaping hole instead? A hole which didn't exist in this way 10 years ago. But well you could have seen it coming tbh. > all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited? If so then why do GPL and similar exist, which are normally considered as Open Source? It's just that the landscape changed and with this the problems around it changed. While in the past bundling it into non free programs (+some committed aspects) was seen as a problem and as such GPL was created today the problem are similar but instead of distributing that bundles they are provided as managed services. In this context the Server Side Public License is as much in line with the core values of Open Source as GPL is. It's just that Amazon cares to some degree more about free software being free as in not costing them then they care about it being freely inspectable and modifiable. But cost free-ness was never a core value of Open Source, just a side effect.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    The hole did exist ten years ago, though. The AGPL was released in 2007, three years before Elasticsearch was created, to fix this exact problem. …except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies. Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the wide adoption of open source software, while also preventing people from competing with them. That's not how open source works.
reissbaker 6y ago
I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back. The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service. So Elastic switched the license to the non-open-source SSPL, which makes offering a hosting service essentially impossible (to satisfy the terms, Amazon would need to open-source effectively all of AWS). This license switch is more antithetical to the spirit of open source — that is, user freedom — than what AWS was doing, which was offering a hosted version of open-source software that competed with Elastic's hosting business. Ultimately I think selling hosting of a single piece of open-source software as a funding model for developing a single piece of open-source software (e.g. Mongo, Elastic) has proven to not be a very sustainable funding model; at least, not if you're hoping for VC-backed company sized returns. And... I can see why that doesn't feel great. At one point, hosting was believed to be the silver bullet model as compared to consulting. But ultimately I think it's just not worked out: hosting as a model makes sense for proprietary software, but for OSS, either: * You pay developers to build the software and also pay more developers to build the hosting stack — but then your competition only pays for the latter and can beat you on price, or * You only pay to build the hosting stack, but then — what's the point? You haven't solved funding the software development.
- freeqaz 6y ago
  Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?
  - fastball 6y ago
    I think this is the key. My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is: 1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES 2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES 3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software project will die. But like... isn't that the point of OSS? If a software project lives and dies with a single company, what exactly is the point of it being OSS?
tybit 6y ago
If you believe that just because you can exploit a license doesn’t mean you should, do you believe Elastic have wronged ElasticSearch and Lucene’s contributors by not compensating them(other than those that are employees)? I don’t understand the argument that a company should get to “own” all the profits for a particular FOSS project.
- elango 6y ago
  very good point on lucene contributors making money
- tebruno99 6y ago
  Its not exploited. There are several other license options Elastic could have used other than the one that says "Do whatever you want". The license communicates to others how you approve the usage of your copyright work. If you aren't communicating "do whatever you want" don't pick a license that literally says "do whatever you want".
lmm 6y ago
> 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. Or Amazon (or a third party) may take over maintenance of ES if it's worth it to them. That's the whole point of open source. > 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. There's no exploitation here. ES are grownups and responsible for their own business decisions. Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients. > 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. The whole point of "open source" as distinct from "free software" was to get away from all the ideological baggage and focus on pragmatic licensing that would appeal to businesses. Guess what: it worked.
- skywhopper 6y ago
  To be clear, Amazon is taking over maintenance of ES and Kibana. That’s explicitly what’s happening.
- skolsuper 6y ago
  > Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients. I wouldn't necessarily say AWS' ability to use ES as a loss-leader for their Data Transfer charges is better for AWS's clients in the long-run. I can certainly see the argument for calling it exploitation.
  - fastball 6y ago
    For me, exploitation has always required the exploited party not having a choice. Customers of AWS ES vs. Elastic ES definitely have a choice in this matter and have done so deliberately.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. The open core model never got much sympathy from the community or customers. The only reason there are people siding with ELK here is because the other side is the eminently unlikable Amazon. It also never worked very well. Yes, you can sustain a company with it, and even make it large. But it's limited in size and any idea that you can get VC money on a large evaluation and things will go smooth is ridiculous. The model also has a limited lifetime, after what you'll see your business slow down or you'll have to fight against your customers. It certainly can last enough to make people rich, but it's not sustainable, unless you diversify your software. None of that is caused by cloud providers.
cortesoft 6y ago
Yeah, Elastic is a 'smaller' company than Amazon, but they still are a $15 billion company. They aren't exactly a mom and pop shop.
bawolff 6y ago
From where i am sitting, it looks like a bait and switch: use the permissive open source license to get popular, once you are popular, switch to closed source license. Which is not to say what they are doing is wrong, they are just as much within their rights as amazon is. > The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" I think that's BS if you are talking about bsd-style licenses. Maybe i could see an argument about spirit violations if it was a GPL-family license, but the entire point of bsd style licenses is so that businesses can take the code and adapt it to their business needs.
sfifs 6y ago
> 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. I don't actually agree AWS violates the spirit of the license. The spirit of the Apache license is explicitly - "I don't care if you succeed with my code wildly beyond what i achieve, more power to you, just credit me in the byline". I license my own code in Apache usually because that's precisely my position. There are other licenses implying a different spirit if you want to take a different position - but complaining about AWS because they chose Apache is not a great look. They're certain to lose community developers.
eins1234 6y ago
I don't really want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective. But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term: I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good thing for society. For the longest time I dreamed of creating my own open source tools and products and simultaneously monetizing it to create a comfortable life for myself and maybe even eventually turning it into something bigger, and leave my mark on the world. However, as the years past and events like ElasticSearch v Amazon unfolded, I became more and more disillusioned on the realistic prospects of such an outcome. Today, I'm in the process of building something that would probably see more success in terms of adoption and do more good in the world if it's released as open source software, but at this point I've basically made up my mind to release it as proprietary software to have a realistic shot of monetizing it to achieve financial independence and eventually build a company around it. Basically I've weighed the tradeoffs and chose to put my own ability to capture the value of what I created over trying to maximize the value my software could create if open sourced. This was not a easy decision for me to make, but I suspect I'm not alone in having thought about these tradeoffs and reaching these same conclusions. And as more and more people witness the struggles of companies trying to build viable businesses on top of open source software, more and more people could make the same decision, and thus society would be robbed of all the value that having these pieces of software as open source could have created. I think the chilling effect these kinds of case studies have on the proliferation of new open source software, and the loss incurred by society as a whole as a result, is at the core of what we should be trying to figure out a solution for, not some philosophical discussion around who's in the right or wrong. (reposting from a comment in a previous submission that got buried)
- theamk 6y ago
  Have you considered BSL [0]? The fresh versions are source-available, but older versions convert to open source (GPL, Apache or something) after a few years. You can still build a business on your software -- as long as you keep developing, no competitor will be able to use up to date version. And people who want to rely on open source can do so, knowing that the software will get open-sourced eventually, no matter what the company decides. [0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/
moocowtruck 6y ago
>This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. FY20 Revenue of $427.6 million,Up 57% year-over-year (60% in constant currency) ?! they can't sustain developers on this?
LordHumungous 6y ago
And all of their servers run Linux kernel.
random5634 6y ago
Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES. In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license. https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-belong-to-Elastic.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...
- kodah 6y ago
  Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends. The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos. Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea. The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.
  - 6y ago
Aperocky 6y ago
> matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported. Amazon is not Google, they virtually NEVER drop a service.
nkellenicki 6y ago
> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. Therein lies the flaw in the argument. If a company decides to develop something and open source it, it's not a product. If the company chooses to assign their time and resources to help develop it, great, but the moment it no longer becomes beneficial for them to keep supporting it, they'll drop it and leave it to the community. Many companies invest time and resources into furthering open source projects without being the owner/creator of it. This is no different, whether they created it in the first place or not - they chose to open source it. Building your business around something that you give away for free will always be a terrible business model.
- signal11 6y ago
  > Building your business around something that you give away for free Although it’s great for new entrants to the market who’re looking to build mindshare and marketshare. Because it’s hard for incumbents to compete with Free. “Open Source bait and switch” has been a thing for a while now. Elastic is just the most recent/high profile example.
pjmlp 6y ago
Spirit is for those aiming for rainbows and music, this is a business.
cactus2093 6y ago
This comment kind of highlights how pointless this debate is. If you go off of what the law says, how this open source license works, and the understanding that all businesses are competing to make money, what AWS did here seems pretty reasonable and perfectly legal. If you come at it from the perspective that AWS is always evil and the little guy is always good, you’ll view this as a terrible injustice. There’s not much substance to the justifications here, seems like you had your mind made up and then half heartedly tried to backfill some sort of reasoning. Just assert that everyone else has it twisted, of course AWS always exploits, try to evoke the spirit of open source as if that’s a single, easily defined quality.
antonvs 6y ago
> a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source If your multi-billion dollar company depends on the spirit of your competitors, you're going to have a bad time.
HorkHunter 6y ago
And that's exactly what the GPL advocates have been saying for ages.
meowface 6y ago
If every legal agreement were interpreted by internet commenters' impression of its "spirit", what's the point of all that fancy language anyway? There is no universal definition of "open source/FOSS" or what its spirit might be, which is why everyone uses concrete licenses. It's Elastic's fault. I support their new license and wish they had picked it from the start; but they didn't. If you explicitly grant someone permission to use your hard work in a certain clearly defined way, you can't be surprised when someone uses it in that way.
arkh 6y ago
> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" No. Opensource was started to avoid vendor lock-ins. Maybe it's time to launch a free (as in freedom) infrastructure movement.
markvdb 6y ago
Staunch free software proponent here. Clearly, as you say, there's nothing wrong here legally. By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now. Ethically, I can't find anything wrong about this either. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a "spirit of open source". Open source is a way of doing business. Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live with the consequences. One could certainly argue far too much power is getting concentrated with Amazon and other web giants, but that's an entirely different subject...
- Closi 6y ago
  I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though. Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT. Take an example what Amazon did with Mongo - First they launch a closed-source competitor (totally fine) but then they also take Mongo's source and rebadge it as their own fully-managed DocumentDB (Mongo 1.6 but with closed source additions). It's having your cake and eating it too. There's nothing legally wrong with this, but I do think this is market abuse (because they can only do this because of AWS market penetration) just to make the worlds richest man richer.
  - signal11 6y ago
    Even if MongoDB was closed-source, it would not stop anyone from creating a product that was compatible with the MongoDB API. Put another way, your API cannot be your USP. Lots of companies offer S3-compatible APIs, for instance. They compete not on the API, but around reliability, price, features. Of course, we have Oracle v Google coming up in the US Supreme Court, so things could change, but this is the way things are now.
  - mvanbaak 6y ago
    'AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.' Well, they DID actually contribute patches as the whole ES project was 'upstream-first', this is mentioned in the post with proofs. From what I can find online, it looks like DocumentDB is actually a layer on top of the AWS Aurora PostgreSQL offering. This means they created a MongoDB compatible API, but are not offering a hosted mongodb cluster. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397)
xorcist 6y ago
> This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. That's not really accurate, is it? Few if any open source companies has survived on a monopoly on hosting the product. MySQL doesn't do it at all, netiher does Red Hat, and many others. Those who do bundle it with support services for added value. They have to compete in the open market after all. They don't claim to have a monopoly. Wordpress makes most of their money from hosting, but they don't go after AWS or any of the thousands of smaller companies all over the world that host it. Their exploding market share has been more than enough to sustain their own hosting business. And it does seem like Elastic is in a similar situation, with their hosting business still rapidly expanding. Forget Amazon for a second. I know many people in the web hosting business and pretty much everything they host is open source software. If this is a precedent, if the opinion that hosting is morally wrong gets widespread, then that would affect a whole industry.
LockAndLol 6y ago
To add a voice in support of your comment, I agree with you. Amazon and others is why we can't have nice things. I'll quote Bill Burr here: > Just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's right. And just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because of this shitty behavior, we will need to write new licenses to restrict who can do what with our software. Society moves at the pace of its slowest members. I guess for opensource, that's "at the pace of our most exploitive and cut throat business".
IAmNotAFix 6y ago
> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they can take the market like that they'll do it, that's what companies do. The limits of taking the market has never been ethics, but sales.
markphip 6y ago
I have been involved with open source since 2000. I have been a member of the ASF for many of those years and worked with Apache licensed projects throughout. I have been in the position Elastic is in where I managed the employer-sponsored team working on an employer-sponsored Apache licensed project, though thankfully not against a behemoth like AWS. I have some sympathy for Elastic, but I just do not agree that AWS is doing anything wrong or against the spirit of open source. When they run into things that need to be fixed or improved in the projects they upstream them. The majority of work AWS does is in "operationalizing" the project for their cloud. It might be cool and interesting if they let us see how they do this but it is not like that work directly translates back to the open source project. Anyone that has worked with Google open-source stuff has run into the same issues where there is some behind the scenes magic that Google has internally that the projects can leverage to make them scale better etc. It is Elastic's right to change the license if they so choose. If they own trademarks that they believe are violated it is up to them to take those challenges to a court and seek damages. Elastic is trying to have it all ways though. They want you to believe the new license is open source .. sort of true but not really. They want you to believe AWS has done something wrong. This I do not buy at all. What is special about Elasticsearch? The entire Internet and the Cloud is running on all kinds of open source software up and down the stack. It is in the interests of the behemoths that run these stacks to upstream fixes and improvements and generally they do. That does not mean they have to contribute the proprietary wrappers they have put in place around them as part of building their business model. AWS needs to be focused on its customers, not companies like Elastic and Mongo. If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve.
- sciurus 6y ago
  > If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve. How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?
  - acatton 6y ago
    Some ideas: * Since their license is Apache (most likely because they have an Open Core business model) instead of AGPL, they could offer extra services on Elastic's managed service. Amazon wouldn't able to offer since these parts are proprietary. * They could partner up with other Cloud Providers (Microsoft, Google, ...) to offer a managed Elastic on these clouds, before these cloud providers do it themselves. * They could offer other proprietary products that run on top of elastic (managed by them), that would force customers to use their managed service.
virgilp 6y ago
> "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free" Except that's not how it works with Elastic. I know at least one company (Acme Inc) that doesn't offer anything like Amazon, but does have clients who can access their "own" (client-specific) data hosted in Acme Inc's Elasticsearch cluster; it's a somewhat marginal (but still important) feature in the product, yet still, due to it, Elastic maintains that Acme Inc resells Elasticsearch and thus needs the "Enterprise" license to be in compliance. So, Elastic are not only going for AWS and people who cannot host their own Elasticsearch, they are going a bit wider than you imply here.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, and Eric S. Raymond, the people who invented Free Software and Open Source, all specifically said, at the very creation of the god damn licenses, that this would happen, and was perfectly fine. They specifically wrote their licenses to allow this. It's not an accident or exploitation, it's a fundamental part of what they exist to serve, which is the user's rights. The Open Source Initiative, Debian, and Fedora, have all banned licenses like SSPI which exist solely to punish cloud service providers. If that's not the open source spirit telling you where you can stick it, I don't know what is. You are trying to twist things here. If the people who invented the thing said this is to be expected, then it's part of the spirit.
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
> exploit gaps in Open Source licensing Allowing others to fork for profit and give nothing back is entirely the point of permissive licenses. "Permissive" means exactly that developers are permitted to give nothing back. Licenses without this permission are generally copyleft. > The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" Not at all. That's the spirit of copyleft. The spirit of permissive licenses is that "I don't want developers to have to give anything back." Usually this is done to deliberately allow private companies to profit off of the work without having to disclose their proprietary improvements. That is, presumably, why MIT and Berkeley licenses are permissive: they moved IP out of the university system into silicon valley as a type of indirect economic stimulus.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
runamok 6y ago
I dont't agree with "If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported." Unlike Google, Amazon is fantastic about supporting older AWS products. I can't think of any off hand that are completely gone. There are some that might be deprecated that you can no longer create new ones of though. An ancient database service comes to mind but I can't recall it's name.
titway 6y ago
After all that twisting you're doing, not clear if you understand what the ALv2 is about. It is what it says, not whatever subjective "spirit"s you're trying to twist into it.
d1zzy 6y ago
If taking an open source product that is released under a license that allows you to use in some ways and then using it that way and making money off it somehow is considered to be "exploiting open source" then yes, Amazon is guilty of that. I for one wouldn't use that word in this use case. They are just one of the many companies that legally use the product to make money with it. EDIT: While on this subject, does that mean Amazon is "exploiting open source" by building and selling products using their own Android fork off the open source code and not paying Google for it? :)
0800LUCAS 6y ago
> 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. I don't get how you came to this conclusion. If Elastic goes bust, why would Amazon suddenly drop support for product? They have customers paying millions for the service, why the heck would they drop it? If anything I would expect Amazon to keep the service and work harder to ensure good service, so they can absorb that portion of the market not being served.

by kodah 6y ago

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!)

cwyers 6y ago
> they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. So... you admit that the people who created the GPL decided their license wasn't sufficient to cover a certain usecase and revised it to cover it. But you think it's unfair to call this a "gap" that ES is now trying to close? EDIT: I do think it's fair to point out ways in which the new license for ES is worse than the AGPL, but I do think it's important to point out that it's possible to believe in open source licenses and to think that the way AWS uses software violates the spirit of open source. The people who work on GNU seem to think that!
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I see it as “there are a variety of licenses from which to choose, depending on your goals”. BSD, Apache, and MIT all represent different points in space, as do GPL and AGPL. When I choose Apache or MIT, I do so for a reason and if you or Amazon use code in compliance with that license, I’m happy and you’re not “exploiting a gap” but rather “complying with the terms I offered”.
  - klintcho 6y ago

IgorPartola 6y ago

So Amazon forking ES is then ensuring that if Elastic dies, ElasticSearch doesn’t go away, right? Part of the problem here really is that if I am using AWS for the rest of my stack, why would I run my search elsewhere, introducing latency, etc? Elastic’s opportunity was to approach AWS and try to get bought. But their business model really isn’t as good as it seems.

MoOmer 6y ago
Elastic's Cloud offering runs in the major cloud providers [0]. https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Is it better than AWS’s implementation?
  - patmorgan23 6y ago
    And/or cost competitive.
    - theamk 6y ago
      Looking at a single machine (i3.large, 15GB ram, 470GB SD): Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)
      - IgorPartola 6y ago
        So if we assume the level of service is not much better, AWS is the more prudent choice, no? So trademark issues aside, AWS does ES better than Elastic?
        budlightvirus 6y ago

dialamac 6y ago

> I don't really get how people get this twisted. Quite condescending this attitude. I don’t agree with you at all, and find your argument completely stupid. I don’t think there is anything twisted about it. The software was released under license terms and as long as Amazon is complying with them there isn’t a problem, it’s really is that simple. And really this is much ado about nothing. These fork fights are sometimes interesting with bit players, but the FAANGs of the world they could just build a tool like this from the ground up if necessary.

throwaway17_17 6y ago
I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software licenses and, it seems to be implied, that it should be seen to supersede the bare terms of a license. This reasoning is then used as the basis of ethical usage of open source software. So, when Amazon takes a piece of software and uses it not in the ‘spirit’ of open source, their compliance with licensing is irrelevant. I don’t particularly agree with this point of view, but I get the impression many people do.
- azernik 6y ago
  When it comes to the "spirit", the people criticizing it seem to be talking about the "spirit" of Stallman and Free Software; the term Open Source and the OSI as an institution were explicitly built on friendliness to running side by side with proprietary software and to third-party commercial use.
  - owenmarshall 6y ago
    Stallman has no problems dual licensing software and selling proprietary licenses to companies. His goal is freedom zero, the freedom of a user to use the software as they want.

mixedCase 6y ago

What makes you think this is a "gap in Open Source licensing"? Is it not more easily explained as Elastic's business plan having a gaping hole instead? Don't put the cart before the horse. They built on top of a license that gave the user a set of freedoms they don't want the user to have. End of story. Now they've patched this hole, but they want to keep the goodwill that comes from Open Source licensing instead of owning up to their decision and decide to blame AWS as a scapegoat, all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition where you cannot set restrictions on specific fields of endeavor (in this case, the same field the product belongs to). Now that's not okay.

dathinab 6y ago
> Plan having a gaping hole instead? A hole which didn't exist in this way 10 years ago. But well you could have seen it coming tbh. > all the while acting as if their license does not violate one of the core values on Open Source Definition So you are saying if you do open source you must be fine with being exploited? If so then why do GPL and similar exist, which are normally considered as Open Source? It's just that the landscape changed and with this the problems around it changed. While in the past bundling it into non free programs (+some committed aspects) was seen as a problem and as such GPL was created today the problem are similar but instead of distributing that bundles they are provided as managed services. In this context the Server Side Public License is as much in line with the core values of Open Source as GPL is. It's just that Amazon cares to some degree more about free software being free as in not costing them then they care about it being freely inspectable and modifiable. But cost free-ness was never a core value of Open Source, just a side effect.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  The hole did exist ten years ago, though. The AGPL was released in 2007, three years before Elasticsearch was created, to fix this exact problem. …except Elastic doesn't want to use the AGPL because anyone using Elasticsearch would have to open-source their whole codebase — a non-starter for most companies. Elastic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the wide adoption of open source software, while also preventing people from competing with them. That's not how open source works.

reissbaker 6y ago

I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back. The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service. So Elastic switched the license to the non-open-source SSPL, which makes offering a hosting service essentially impossible (to satisfy the terms, Amazon would need to open-source effectively all of AWS). This license switch is more antithetical to the spirit of open source — that is, user freedom — than what AWS was doing, which was offering a hosted version of open-source software that competed with Elastic's hosting business. Ultimately I think selling hosting of a single piece of open-source software as a funding model for developing a single piece of open-source software (e.g. Mongo, Elastic) has proven to not be a very sustainable funding model; at least, not if you're hoping for VC-backed company sized returns. And... I can see why that doesn't feel great. At one point, hosting was believed to be the silver bullet model as compared to consulting. But ultimately I think it's just not worked out: hosting as a model makes sense for proprietary software, but for OSS, either: * You pay developers to build the software and also pay more developers to build the hosting stack — but then your competition only pays for the latter and can beat you on price, or * You only pay to build the hosting stack, but then — what's the point? You haven't solved funding the software development.

freeqaz 6y ago
Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?
- fastball 6y ago
  I think this is the key. My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is: 1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES 2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES 3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software project will die. But like... isn't that the point of OSS? If a software project lives and dies with a single company, what exactly is the point of it being OSS?

tybit 6y ago

If you believe that just because you can exploit a license doesn’t mean you should, do you believe Elastic have wronged ElasticSearch and Lucene’s contributors by not compensating them(other than those that are employees)? I don’t understand the argument that a company should get to “own” all the profits for a particular FOSS project.

elango 6y ago
very good point on lucene contributors making money
tebruno99 6y ago
Its not exploited. There are several other license options Elastic could have used other than the one that says "Do whatever you want". The license communicates to others how you approve the usage of your copyright work. If you aren't communicating "do whatever you want" don't pick a license that literally says "do whatever you want".

lmm 6y ago

> 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. Or Amazon (or a third party) may take over maintenance of ES if it's worth it to them. That's the whole point of open source. > 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. There's no exploitation here. ES are grownups and responsible for their own business decisions. Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients. > 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. The whole point of "open source" as distinct from "free software" was to get away from all the ideological baggage and focus on pragmatic licensing that would appeal to businesses. Guess what: it worked.

skywhopper 6y ago
To be clear, Amazon is taking over maintenance of ES and Kibana. That’s explicitly what’s happening.
skolsuper 6y ago
> Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients. I wouldn't necessarily say AWS' ability to use ES as a loss-leader for their Data Transfer charges is better for AWS's clients in the long-run. I can certainly see the argument for calling it exploitation.
- fastball 6y ago
  For me, exploitation has always required the exploited party not having a choice. Customers of AWS ES vs. Elastic ES definitely have a choice in this matter and have done so deliberately.

marcosdumay 6y ago

> This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. The open core model never got much sympathy from the community or customers. The only reason there are people siding with ELK here is because the other side is the eminently unlikable Amazon. It also never worked very well. Yes, you can sustain a company with it, and even make it large. But it's limited in size and any idea that you can get VC money on a large evaluation and things will go smooth is ridiculous. The model also has a limited lifetime, after what you'll see your business slow down or you'll have to fight against your customers. It certainly can last enough to make people rich, but it's not sustainable, unless you diversify your software. None of that is caused by cloud providers.

cortesoft 6y ago

Yeah, Elastic is a 'smaller' company than Amazon, but they still are a $15 billion company. They aren't exactly a mom and pop shop.

bawolff 6y ago

From where i am sitting, it looks like a bait and switch: use the permissive open source license to get popular, once you are popular, switch to closed source license. Which is not to say what they are doing is wrong, they are just as much within their rights as amazon is. > The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" I think that's BS if you are talking about bsd-style licenses. Maybe i could see an argument about spirit violations if it was a GPL-family license, but the entire point of bsd style licenses is so that businesses can take the code and adapt it to their business needs.

sfifs 6y ago

> 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. I don't actually agree AWS violates the spirit of the license. The spirit of the Apache license is explicitly - "I don't care if you succeed with my code wildly beyond what i achieve, more power to you, just credit me in the byline". I license my own code in Apache usually because that's precisely my position. There are other licenses implying a different spirit if you want to take a different position - but complaining about AWS because they chose Apache is not a great look. They're certain to lose community developers.

eins1234 6y ago

I don't really want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective. But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term: I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good thing for society. For the longest time I dreamed of creating my own open source tools and products and simultaneously monetizing it to create a comfortable life for myself and maybe even eventually turning it into something bigger, and leave my mark on the world. However, as the years past and events like ElasticSearch v Amazon unfolded, I became more and more disillusioned on the realistic prospects of such an outcome. Today, I'm in the process of building something that would probably see more success in terms of adoption and do more good in the world if it's released as open source software, but at this point I've basically made up my mind to release it as proprietary software to have a realistic shot of monetizing it to achieve financial independence and eventually build a company around it. Basically I've weighed the tradeoffs and chose to put my own ability to capture the value of what I created over trying to maximize the value my software could create if open sourced. This was not a easy decision for me to make, but I suspect I'm not alone in having thought about these tradeoffs and reaching these same conclusions. And as more and more people witness the struggles of companies trying to build viable businesses on top of open source software, more and more people could make the same decision, and thus society would be robbed of all the value that having these pieces of software as open source could have created. I think the chilling effect these kinds of case studies have on the proliferation of new open source software, and the loss incurred by society as a whole as a result, is at the core of what we should be trying to figure out a solution for, not some philosophical discussion around who's in the right or wrong. (reposting from a comment in a previous submission that got buried)

theamk 6y ago
Have you considered BSL [0]? The fresh versions are source-available, but older versions convert to open source (GPL, Apache or something) after a few years. You can still build a business on your software -- as long as you keep developing, no competitor will be able to use up to date version. And people who want to rely on open source can do so, knowing that the software will get open-sourced eventually, no matter what the company decides. [0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/

moocowtruck 6y ago

>This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. FY20 Revenue of $427.6 million,Up 57% year-over-year (60% in constant currency) ?! they can't sustain developers on this?

LordHumungous 6y ago

And all of their servers run Linux kernel.

random5634 6y ago

Disappointing to see Kodah discounting all the open source contributors to ES. Please read this before you support folks like Kodah and Elastic hijacking ES. In short - this feeling that Elastic owns Elasticsearch (other than maybe trademark) is totally false. Many people contributed and adopted BASED on a real open source license. https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-belong-to-Elastic.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...

kodah 6y ago
Interesting take, and I can see why Drew feels it's valid. He's ascribing to the maximalist interpretation of open source licensing. Licensing which never had any idea that Open Source would one day take over the world, licensing which never could've imagined that cloud providers would begin to undermine and influence projects to their own ends. The problem that Drew is willfully ignoring here is that corporations see an opportunity in open source licensing to hijack projects, which I would remind you is exactly what is happening with Kibana. The control shifts away from the thousands of contributors and gets a board of engineers employed by corporations. Once these projects land in corporate control there's no denying that their culture and terms change. The CLA's he wrote about will surely be enforced, and if everyone ascribes to his belief system then the project will delve into chaos. Corporations like ElasticSearch were setup to sustain the project that is ElasticSearch. If you destroy them, then you will get Amazon's vision of ElasticSearch, not what the contributors chose, certainly not what the creators chose. When forks happen, they happen. There is a big difference between some random or influential person forking Elastic Search and a conglomerate, who is really only forking it because they intend to undermine the business that was setup to sustain the project in the first place. Want to see a fork I was completely fine with? Look at Gogs versus Gitea. The fact that they cleared a billion dollars is so arbitrary. At what threshold should anyone with principals and a backbone stop caring? At what point should someone like me not care if a conglomerate comes along to replicate and wipe out SourceHut? This has nothing to do with ElasticSearch and has everything to do with corporations flexing power, power which has repeatedly been used to influence and undermine projects in the open landscape that doesn't make it quite so open anymore.
- 6y ago

Aperocky 6y ago

> matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported. Amazon is not Google, they virtually NEVER drop a service.

nkellenicki 6y ago

> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. Therein lies the flaw in the argument. If a company decides to develop something and open source it, it's not a product. If the company chooses to assign their time and resources to help develop it, great, but the moment it no longer becomes beneficial for them to keep supporting it, they'll drop it and leave it to the community. Many companies invest time and resources into furthering open source projects without being the owner/creator of it. This is no different, whether they created it in the first place or not - they chose to open source it. Building your business around something that you give away for free will always be a terrible business model.

signal11 6y ago
> Building your business around something that you give away for free Although it’s great for new entrants to the market who’re looking to build mindshare and marketshare. Because it’s hard for incumbents to compete with Free. “Open Source bait and switch” has been a thing for a while now. Elastic is just the most recent/high profile example.

pjmlp 6y ago

Spirit is for those aiming for rainbows and music, this is a business.

cactus2093 6y ago

This comment kind of highlights how pointless this debate is. If you go off of what the law says, how this open source license works, and the understanding that all businesses are competing to make money, what AWS did here seems pretty reasonable and perfectly legal. If you come at it from the perspective that AWS is always evil and the little guy is always good, you’ll view this as a terrible injustice. There’s not much substance to the justifications here, seems like you had your mind made up and then half heartedly tried to backfill some sort of reasoning. Just assert that everyone else has it twisted, of course AWS always exploits, try to evoke the spirit of open source as if that’s a single, easily defined quality.

antonvs 6y ago

> a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source If your multi-billion dollar company depends on the spirit of your competitors, you're going to have a bad time.

HorkHunter 6y ago

And that's exactly what the GPL advocates have been saying for ages.

meowface 6y ago

If every legal agreement were interpreted by internet commenters' impression of its "spirit", what's the point of all that fancy language anyway? There is no universal definition of "open source/FOSS" or what its spirit might be, which is why everyone uses concrete licenses. It's Elastic's fault. I support their new license and wish they had picked it from the start; but they didn't. If you explicitly grant someone permission to use your hard work in a certain clearly defined way, you can't be surprised when someone uses it in that way.

arkh 6y ago

> The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" No. Opensource was started to avoid vendor lock-ins. Maybe it's time to launch a free (as in freedom) infrastructure movement.

markvdb 6y ago

Staunch free software proponent here. Clearly, as you say, there's nothing wrong here legally. By choosing this license, Elastic explicitly allowed anyone in the world to do what Amazon is doing now. Ethically, I can't find anything wrong about this either. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a "spirit of open source". Open source is a way of doing business. Elastic made a business decision. The company has to live with the consequences. One could certainly argue far too much power is getting concentrated with Amazon and other web giants, but that's an entirely different subject...

Closi 6y ago
I think it does say something about the future of the open source model though. Namely, that if you have a company that offers something like a database as a service, search as a service or some other API, and plan to support it's development by offering your own managed service - DO NOT OPEN SOURCE IT WITH PERMISSIVE LICENCES, AMAZON WILL UNDERCUT YOU. AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT. Take an example what Amazon did with Mongo - First they launch a closed-source competitor (totally fine) but then they also take Mongo's source and rebadge it as their own fully-managed DocumentDB (Mongo 1.6 but with closed source additions). It's having your cake and eating it too. There's nothing legally wrong with this, but I do think this is market abuse (because they can only do this because of AWS market penetration) just to make the worlds richest man richer.
- signal11 6y ago
  Even if MongoDB was closed-source, it would not stop anyone from creating a product that was compatible with the MongoDB API. Put another way, your API cannot be your USP. Lots of companies offer S3-compatible APIs, for instance. They compete not on the API, but around reliability, price, features. Of course, we have Oracle v Google coming up in the US Supreme Court, so things could change, but this is the way things are now.
- mvanbaak 6y ago
  'AND THEY WILL ALWAYS DO IT CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO FUND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.' Well, they DID actually contribute patches as the whole ES project was 'upstream-first', this is mentioned in the post with proofs. From what I can find online, it looks like DocumentDB is actually a layer on top of the AWS Aurora PostgreSQL offering. This means they created a MongoDB compatible API, but are not offering a hosted mongodb cluster. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397)

xorcist 6y ago

> This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. That's not really accurate, is it? Few if any open source companies has survived on a monopoly on hosting the product. MySQL doesn't do it at all, netiher does Red Hat, and many others. Those who do bundle it with support services for added value. They have to compete in the open market after all. They don't claim to have a monopoly. Wordpress makes most of their money from hosting, but they don't go after AWS or any of the thousands of smaller companies all over the world that host it. Their exploding market share has been more than enough to sustain their own hosting business. And it does seem like Elastic is in a similar situation, with their hosting business still rapidly expanding. Forget Amazon for a second. I know many people in the web hosting business and pretty much everything they host is open source software. If this is a precedent, if the opinion that hosting is morally wrong gets widespread, then that would affect a whole industry.

LockAndLol 6y ago

To add a voice in support of your comment, I agree with you. Amazon and others is why we can't have nice things. I'll quote Bill Burr here: > Just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's right. And just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because of this shitty behavior, we will need to write new licenses to restrict who can do what with our software. Society moves at the pace of its slowest members. I guess for opensource, that's "at the pace of our most exploitive and cut throat business".

IAmNotAFix 6y ago

> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they can take the market like that they'll do it, that's what companies do. The limits of taking the market has never been ethics, but sales.

markphip 6y ago

I have been involved with open source since 2000. I have been a member of the ASF for many of those years and worked with Apache licensed projects throughout. I have been in the position Elastic is in where I managed the employer-sponsored team working on an employer-sponsored Apache licensed project, though thankfully not against a behemoth like AWS. I have some sympathy for Elastic, but I just do not agree that AWS is doing anything wrong or against the spirit of open source. When they run into things that need to be fixed or improved in the projects they upstream them. The majority of work AWS does is in "operationalizing" the project for their cloud. It might be cool and interesting if they let us see how they do this but it is not like that work directly translates back to the open source project. Anyone that has worked with Google open-source stuff has run into the same issues where there is some behind the scenes magic that Google has internally that the projects can leverage to make them scale better etc. It is Elastic's right to change the license if they so choose. If they own trademarks that they believe are violated it is up to them to take those challenges to a court and seek damages. Elastic is trying to have it all ways though. They want you to believe the new license is open source .. sort of true but not really. They want you to believe AWS has done something wrong. This I do not buy at all. What is special about Elasticsearch? The entire Internet and the Cloud is running on all kinds of open source software up and down the stack. It is in the interests of the behemoths that run these stacks to upstream fixes and improvements and generally they do. That does not mean they have to contribute the proprietary wrappers they have put in place around them as part of building their business model. AWS needs to be focused on its customers, not companies like Elastic and Mongo. If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve.

sciurus 6y ago
> If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve. How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?
- acatton 6y ago
  Some ideas: * Since their license is Apache (most likely because they have an Open Core business model) instead of AGPL, they could offer extra services on Elastic's managed service. Amazon wouldn't able to offer since these parts are proprietary. * They could partner up with other Cloud Providers (Microsoft, Google, ...) to offer a managed Elastic on these clouds, before these cloud providers do it themselves. * They could offer other proprietary products that run on top of elastic (managed by them), that would force customers to use their managed service.

virgilp 6y ago

> "If you can run our product on your own, you get it for free" Except that's not how it works with Elastic. I know at least one company (Acme Inc) that doesn't offer anything like Amazon, but does have clients who can access their "own" (client-specific) data hosted in Acme Inc's Elasticsearch cluster; it's a somewhat marginal (but still important) feature in the product, yet still, due to it, Elastic maintains that Acme Inc resells Elasticsearch and thus needs the "Enterprise" license to be in compliance. So, Elastic are not only going for AWS and people who cannot host their own Elasticsearch, they are going a bit wider than you imply here.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, and Eric S. Raymond, the people who invented Free Software and Open Source, all specifically said, at the very creation of the god damn licenses, that this would happen, and was perfectly fine. They specifically wrote their licenses to allow this. It's not an accident or exploitation, it's a fundamental part of what they exist to serve, which is the user's rights. The Open Source Initiative, Debian, and Fedora, have all banned licenses like SSPI which exist solely to punish cloud service providers. If that's not the open source spirit telling you where you can stick it, I don't know what is. You are trying to twist things here. If the people who invented the thing said this is to be expected, then it's part of the spirit.

SquishyPanda23 6y ago

> exploit gaps in Open Source licensing Allowing others to fork for profit and give nothing back is entirely the point of permissive licenses. "Permissive" means exactly that developers are permitted to give nothing back. Licenses without this permission are generally copyleft. > The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" Not at all. That's the spirit of copyleft. The spirit of permissive licenses is that "I don't want developers to have to give anything back." Usually this is done to deliberately allow private companies to profit off of the work without having to disclose their proprietary improvements. That is, presumably, why MIT and Berkeley licenses are permissive: they moved IP out of the university system into silicon valley as a type of indirect economic stimulus.

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runamok 6y ago

I dont't agree with "If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported." Unlike Google, Amazon is fantastic about supporting older AWS products. I can't think of any off hand that are completely gone. There are some that might be deprecated that you can no longer create new ones of though. An ancient database service comes to mind but I can't recall it's name.

titway 6y ago

After all that twisting you're doing, not clear if you understand what the ALv2 is about. It is what it says, not whatever subjective "spirit"s you're trying to twist into it.

d1zzy 6y ago

If taking an open source product that is released under a license that allows you to use in some ways and then using it that way and making money off it somehow is considered to be "exploiting open source" then yes, Amazon is guilty of that. I for one wouldn't use that word in this use case. They are just one of the many companies that legally use the product to make money with it. EDIT: While on this subject, does that mean Amazon is "exploiting open source" by building and selling products using their own Android fork off the open source code and not paying Google for it? :)

0800LUCAS 6y ago

> 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. I don't get how you came to this conclusion. If Elastic goes bust, why would Amazon suddenly drop support for product? They have customers paying millions for the service, why the heck would they drop it? If anything I would expect Amazon to keep the service and work harder to ensure good service, so they can absorb that portion of the market not being served.