12 ms·

It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different na

by foxyv 2y ago

It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story. I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.

Raed667 2y ago
what is preventing AWS from dropping OpenSearch and going back to just selling Elastic ?
- antimemetics 2y ago
  sunk cost. at least that’s what elastic seems to be betting on.
- mr90210 2y ago
  Perhaps the fact that AWS has got years of time investment already made into OpenSearch and staying with their own version allows them to reduce risks should Elastic attempt to change ElasticSearch’s license again.
- foxyv 2y ago
  To be honest, the OpenSearch brand has more value now than Elastic.
  - jdboyd 2y ago
    Please explain. This isn't obvious to me.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead. What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?
    - jdc0589 2y ago
      thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have. I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        > it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find. Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.
        grogenaut 2y ago
        AWS revenue. Internal AWS stats. Open search client pulls (not sure if the client is different now). Opensearch is mainly going to be used on AWS so that won't show up as much in GitHub stars.
        lolinder 2y ago
        None of those metrics measure the value of the brand, so none of those metrics are useful for the question that this thread is about: figuring out if AWS benefits from sticking with the OpenSearch brand. If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.
    - PeterCorless 2y ago
      As a related proxy for market awareness, DB-Engines.com's ranking is a composite index of a number of factors: • Google search volume and quantity of search result pages (blogs, recipes, etc.) • Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill • Number of job post listings as a requisite skill • Social media mentions It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under management, etc.). With that said, in the August 2024 listing: • Elasticsearch is ranked #8 (of 423 systems tracked), with an index score of 129.83 • OpenSearch is ranked #35, with an index score of 16.47 This would make OpenSearch about an eighth as prevalent.
  - gip 2y ago
    I think it's nuanced. I'm currently managing an engineering team on an interim basis. During standup I noticed that most engineers were talking about 'elastic' or 'elasticsearch' but one was talking about opensearch. I asked them to clarify that for me and they told me that they transitioned to AWS opensearch but still use the old name for the product often - that might point to the strength of the Elastic brand.
    - dblock 2y ago
      "Elasticsearch" seems to be often referred to as a technology, as in ELK stack, rather than as in "Elastic" the company.
- beachy 2y ago
  Large tech companies care about their reputation. If they dropped their own fork and went back and started again from Elastic that would be admitting their own incompetence. So not happening.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    I think the bigger risk to Amazon: what if Elastic wants to pull the rug out from under them once again? Why take that risk when Amazon is already stable? Given the duration since the fork, I suspect there are more than a couple of features differences between the products that would have to be smoothed over.
- LamaOfRuin 2y ago
  It's a very different open source license than their previous one. AGPL vs Apache 2.0
- wmf 2y ago
  If you try to sell AGPL software the owner will probably shake you down.
  - davidgerard 2y ago
    Examples?
    - paulmd 2y ago
      lowagie/itextpdf being an obvious/prominent one. it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.
      - davidgerard 2y ago
        "shakedown" is a rather stronger claim than "adopted a licence".
        paulmd 2y ago
        I fairly well knew that your question wasn't good-faith, that's why I hesitated to respond rather than just flagging it.
        davidgerard 2y ago
        what element was "bad faith", that the query was nonsense? Point me at anything that would legally or even ethically constitute a "shakedown" as alleged by OP, who it appears in the subthread to have misread the license? like, answer the question instead of evading, surely it cannot be that hard.
    - wmf 2y ago
      Grafana https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relicensing/ https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic... RethinkDB http://web.archive.org/web/20161003231505/https://rethinkdb.com/faq/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161003231505/https://rethinkdb.... BerkeleyDB http://web.archive.org/web/20170211004058/http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611450/open-source-software/oracle-switches-berkeley-db-license.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170211004058/http://www.infowor... MongoDB tried the shakedown but I guess it didn't work http://web.archive.org/web/20240202161503/https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq http://web.archive.org/web/20240202161503/https://www.mongod...
- godber 2y ago
  OpenSearch really appears to have a significant amount of development momentum. It is functionally equivalent with Elasticsearch. There would be no incentive for AWS to do this. After ES broke their compatibility with OpenSearch they also broke compatibility with their own older versions. This forced users to choose in order to move forward with anything. I don’t know how it worked out for others but I’ve converted hundreds of ES clusters to OS and switched all development to OpenSearch because they started gaining momentum and didn’t make decisions that were actively hostile to their users. Edit: As long as OpenSearch doesn’t start breaking the self hosted use case, I don’t see any reason to consider Elasticsearch again. In fact, ES would have to offer up a significant advantage to overcome the bother.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  well importantly, Elastic was originally Apache-2.0. Then Amazon started using their stuff and they relicensed to their not-really-FOSS-license. Then Amazon forked their stuff, a bunch of legal conflicts happened. Now they are friends again. And now they relicensed to AGPL (which is FOSS). So they were originally Apache-2.0 which was permissive versus now they are AGPL which is copyleft. The important distinction here is that if Amazon was to use Elastic directly, they'd have to make their contributions available to users and those users could then upstream those contributions back to Elastic. In the old situation with Apache-2.0, Amazon could take contributions from Elastic but then they kept them themself for the most part without up-streaming. This forces a give-and-take relationship vs a one-way relationship. Also importantly now that Elastic is AGPL they can integrate anything they want from OpenSearch's Apache-2.0 licensed projects but unless OpenSearch becomes AGPL as well, they can't pull any contributions from Elastic.
  - wokwokwok 2y ago
    Realllllly? I sure hope not. There going to be some hard irony here, of making such a fuss about it before, when it was someone else doing it, and then doing it themselves. We’ll see. Maybe they’re principled enough not to rip off the open search contributions. If not, you’ve really got to believe there’s no sincerity left at elastic. I guess time will tell; I’d like to believe they’re better than that.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      There's a difference though. Prior to the relicensing, Amazon had a private fork they were running and weren't contributing upstream. Only after the relicense did they open source their fork. Now you have two open source projects and one has a copyleft license and the other has a permissive license. Taking contributions from the permissive to the copyleft project isn't ripping off contributions. It's using open source software and collaborating in the FOSS ecosystem. And Amazon would be free to pull contributions back the other way just as well as long as they agree to the mutual terms of the AGPL (which is by all means a FOSS license).
- luceneuser 2y ago
  It will not happen. OpenSearch grows fast in the last four years. There is no incentive to go back to ES.
- h1fra 2y ago
  Recently tried OpenSearch, it has good momentum but tbf the tooling / documentation and support are not that great. Contrary to what other people are saying in this thread, I would not say it has better branding than ElasticSearch and that ES has lost its battle. Outside AWS OpenSearch is still not a big contender
  - dblock 2y ago
    You're right about documentation and tooling. There's some good momentum in the OpenSearch community around it though, and I am really excited by things like https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/issues/7700 https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/....
anticorporate 2y ago
What could be learned from this example that might enable companies in the future to leverage trademark instead of a license change to accomplish the same thing? So much damage could have been avoided if this had been resolved differently to begin with.
- foxyv 2y ago
  Change your name, not your license.
  - flockonus 2y ago
    I think they are saying: trademark your product name (open source in this case), make sure it's used only as approved. Altho i believe it does go back to the license attached to the product.
    - ignaloidas 2y ago
      Source code license doesn't matter, Mozilla did this with Debian, that's why Iceweasel was a thing.
orra 2y ago
I don't understand why they didn't treat Amazon's previous offering as a trademark infringement.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?
  - orra 2y ago
    The service is more than the code base: it's who is offering it, who supports it. Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like the car. But wholesale is a completely different situation.
    - dboreham 2y ago
      It depends on the legal jurisdiction but in the US you're allowed to use a competitor's brand name/trademark specifically to inform your customers. E.g. "acetaminophen, the stuff that's in Tylenol". You can also use the competitor's brand colors.
      - exe34 2y ago
        so if I create a website called other-Facebook.com that looks exactly like Facebook, I can even tell people I'm going to steal their time and information just like the real Facebook, and that's allowed?
        rescbr 2y ago
        I think “foobar.com, a Facebook with blackjack and hookers” would be OK, while “other-facebook.com” wouldn’t. I’d say one is marketing, the other is misrepresentation.
ezekg 2y ago
Am I the only one not buying this reasoning? Seems like there's more than is being said, otherwise they would have said this by now. I'd reckon that ELv2 had friction that couldn't be easily overcome without OSS or at the very least DOSP [0]. I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so makes me curious. [0]: https://opensource.org/dosp https://opensource.org/dosp
- exe34 2y ago
  we sunk our own boat, it forced them to get on rafts and leave, and now we're declaring our own boat sea-worthy again.
  - ezekg 2y ago
    So, yes, the ELv2 did introduce significant friction?
    - outop 2y ago
      Yes, except that since Amazon have infinite resources, the friction didn't stop them doing anything, and the fork was always going to be perfectly viable.
      - coredog64 2y ago
        It’s very clear in the post ZIRP era that none of the hyperscalers have infinite resources. AWS just discontinued, er, de-emphasized Cloud9 and CodeCommit. Neither of these were free, and both were substitutes for paid products that AWS customers can get elsewhere.
- jrochkind1 2y ago
  You are not the only one, that's a ridiculous story.
- Salgat 2y ago
  Sounds to me like they're trying to cover up a bad case of regret. At our company we've fully shifted to OpenSearch, so there's no going back to ElasticSearch even if we wanted (not that we would want to). Also there is a lot of engineering contribution from Amazon that's seemingly gone now from Elasticsearch, right?

by foxyv 2y ago

Raed667 2y ago

what is preventing AWS from dropping OpenSearch and going back to just selling Elastic ?

antimemetics 2y ago
sunk cost. at least that’s what elastic seems to be betting on.
mr90210 2y ago
Perhaps the fact that AWS has got years of time investment already made into OpenSearch and staying with their own version allows them to reduce risks should Elastic attempt to change ElasticSearch’s license again.
foxyv 2y ago
To be honest, the OpenSearch brand has more value now than Elastic.
- jdboyd 2y ago
  Please explain. This isn't obvious to me.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead. What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?
  - jdc0589 2y ago
    thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have. I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find. Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.
      - grogenaut 2y ago
        AWS revenue. Internal AWS stats. Open search client pulls (not sure if the client is different now). Opensearch is mainly going to be used on AWS so that won't show up as much in GitHub stars.
        lolinder 2y ago
        None of those metrics measure the value of the brand, so none of those metrics are useful for the question that this thread is about: figuring out if AWS benefits from sticking with the OpenSearch brand. If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.
  - PeterCorless 2y ago
    As a related proxy for market awareness, DB-Engines.com's ranking is a composite index of a number of factors: • Google search volume and quantity of search result pages (blogs, recipes, etc.) • Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill • Number of job post listings as a requisite skill • Social media mentions It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under management, etc.). With that said, in the August 2024 listing: • Elasticsearch is ranked #8 (of 423 systems tracked), with an index score of 129.83 • OpenSearch is ranked #35, with an index score of 16.47 This would make OpenSearch about an eighth as prevalent.
- gip 2y ago
  I think it's nuanced. I'm currently managing an engineering team on an interim basis. During standup I noticed that most engineers were talking about 'elastic' or 'elasticsearch' but one was talking about opensearch. I asked them to clarify that for me and they told me that they transitioned to AWS opensearch but still use the old name for the product often - that might point to the strength of the Elastic brand.
  - dblock 2y ago
    "Elasticsearch" seems to be often referred to as a technology, as in ELK stack, rather than as in "Elastic" the company.
beachy 2y ago
Large tech companies care about their reputation. If they dropped their own fork and went back and started again from Elastic that would be admitting their own incompetence. So not happening.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  I think the bigger risk to Amazon: what if Elastic wants to pull the rug out from under them once again? Why take that risk when Amazon is already stable? Given the duration since the fork, I suspect there are more than a couple of features differences between the products that would have to be smoothed over.
LamaOfRuin 2y ago
It's a very different open source license than their previous one. AGPL vs Apache 2.0
wmf 2y ago
If you try to sell AGPL software the owner will probably shake you down.
- davidgerard 2y ago
  Examples?
  - paulmd 2y ago
    lowagie/itextpdf being an obvious/prominent one. it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.
    - davidgerard 2y ago
      "shakedown" is a rather stronger claim than "adopted a licence".
      - paulmd 2y ago
        I fairly well knew that your question wasn't good-faith, that's why I hesitated to respond rather than just flagging it.
        davidgerard 2y ago
        what element was "bad faith", that the query was nonsense? Point me at anything that would legally or even ethically constitute a "shakedown" as alleged by OP, who it appears in the subthread to have misread the license? like, answer the question instead of evading, surely it cannot be that hard.
  - wmf 2y ago
    Grafana https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relicensing/ https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic... RethinkDB http://web.archive.org/web/20161003231505/https://rethinkdb.com/faq/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161003231505/https://rethinkdb.... BerkeleyDB http://web.archive.org/web/20170211004058/http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611450/open-source-software/oracle-switches-berkeley-db-license.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170211004058/http://www.infowor... MongoDB tried the shakedown but I guess it didn't work http://web.archive.org/web/20240202161503/https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq http://web.archive.org/web/20240202161503/https://www.mongod...
godber 2y ago
OpenSearch really appears to have a significant amount of development momentum. It is functionally equivalent with Elasticsearch. There would be no incentive for AWS to do this. After ES broke their compatibility with OpenSearch they also broke compatibility with their own older versions. This forced users to choose in order to move forward with anything. I don’t know how it worked out for others but I’ve converted hundreds of ES clusters to OS and switched all development to OpenSearch because they started gaining momentum and didn’t make decisions that were actively hostile to their users. Edit: As long as OpenSearch doesn’t start breaking the self hosted use case, I don’t see any reason to consider Elasticsearch again. In fact, ES would have to offer up a significant advantage to overcome the bother.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
well importantly, Elastic was originally Apache-2.0. Then Amazon started using their stuff and they relicensed to their not-really-FOSS-license. Then Amazon forked their stuff, a bunch of legal conflicts happened. Now they are friends again. And now they relicensed to AGPL (which is FOSS). So they were originally Apache-2.0 which was permissive versus now they are AGPL which is copyleft. The important distinction here is that if Amazon was to use Elastic directly, they'd have to make their contributions available to users and those users could then upstream those contributions back to Elastic. In the old situation with Apache-2.0, Amazon could take contributions from Elastic but then they kept them themself for the most part without up-streaming. This forces a give-and-take relationship vs a one-way relationship. Also importantly now that Elastic is AGPL they can integrate anything they want from OpenSearch's Apache-2.0 licensed projects but unless OpenSearch becomes AGPL as well, they can't pull any contributions from Elastic.
- wokwokwok 2y ago
  Realllllly? I sure hope not. There going to be some hard irony here, of making such a fuss about it before, when it was someone else doing it, and then doing it themselves. We’ll see. Maybe they’re principled enough not to rip off the open search contributions. If not, you’ve really got to believe there’s no sincerity left at elastic. I guess time will tell; I’d like to believe they’re better than that.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    There's a difference though. Prior to the relicensing, Amazon had a private fork they were running and weren't contributing upstream. Only after the relicense did they open source their fork. Now you have two open source projects and one has a copyleft license and the other has a permissive license. Taking contributions from the permissive to the copyleft project isn't ripping off contributions. It's using open source software and collaborating in the FOSS ecosystem. And Amazon would be free to pull contributions back the other way just as well as long as they agree to the mutual terms of the AGPL (which is by all means a FOSS license).
luceneuser 2y ago
It will not happen. OpenSearch grows fast in the last four years. There is no incentive to go back to ES.
h1fra 2y ago
Recently tried OpenSearch, it has good momentum but tbf the tooling / documentation and support are not that great. Contrary to what other people are saying in this thread, I would not say it has better branding than ElasticSearch and that ES has lost its battle. Outside AWS OpenSearch is still not a big contender
- dblock 2y ago
  You're right about documentation and tooling. There's some good momentum in the OpenSearch community around it though, and I am really excited by things like https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/issues/7700 https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/....

anticorporate 2y ago

What could be learned from this example that might enable companies in the future to leverage trademark instead of a license change to accomplish the same thing? So much damage could have been avoided if this had been resolved differently to begin with.

foxyv 2y ago
Change your name, not your license.
- flockonus 2y ago
  I think they are saying: trademark your product name (open source in this case), make sure it's used only as approved. Altho i believe it does go back to the license attached to the product.
  - ignaloidas 2y ago
    Source code license doesn't matter, Mozilla did this with Debian, that's why Iceweasel was a thing.

orra 2y ago

I don't understand why they didn't treat Amazon's previous offering as a trademark infringement.

vineyardmike 2y ago
If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?
- orra 2y ago
  The service is more than the code base: it's who is offering it, who supports it. Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like the car. But wholesale is a completely different situation.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    It depends on the legal jurisdiction but in the US you're allowed to use a competitor's brand name/trademark specifically to inform your customers. E.g. "acetaminophen, the stuff that's in Tylenol". You can also use the competitor's brand colors.
    - exe34 2y ago
      so if I create a website called other-Facebook.com that looks exactly like Facebook, I can even tell people I'm going to steal their time and information just like the real Facebook, and that's allowed?
      - rescbr 2y ago
        I think “foobar.com, a Facebook with blackjack and hookers” would be OK, while “other-facebook.com” wouldn’t. I’d say one is marketing, the other is misrepresentation.

ezekg 2y ago

Am I the only one not buying this reasoning? Seems like there's more than is being said, otherwise they would have said this by now. I'd reckon that ELv2 had friction that couldn't be easily overcome without OSS or at the very least DOSP [0]. I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so makes me curious. [0]: https://opensource.org/dosp https://opensource.org/dosp

exe34 2y ago
we sunk our own boat, it forced them to get on rafts and leave, and now we're declaring our own boat sea-worthy again.
- ezekg 2y ago
  So, yes, the ELv2 did introduce significant friction?
  - outop 2y ago
    Yes, except that since Amazon have infinite resources, the friction didn't stop them doing anything, and the fork was always going to be perfectly viable.
    - coredog64 2y ago
      It’s very clear in the post ZIRP era that none of the hyperscalers have infinite resources. AWS just discontinued, er, de-emphasized Cloud9 and CodeCommit. Neither of these were free, and both were substitutes for paid products that AWS customers can get elsewhere.
jrochkind1 2y ago
You are not the only one, that's a ridiculous story.
Salgat 2y ago
Sounds to me like they're trying to cover up a bad case of regret. At our company we've fully shifted to OpenSearch, so there's no going back to ElasticSearch even if we wanted (not that we would want to). Also there is a lot of engineering contribution from Amazon that's seemingly gone now from Elasticsearch, right?