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I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events: - ElasticSearch was open-source

I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events: - ElasticSearch was open-source - Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service - ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license - Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch - (Few years pass) - Amazon and ElasticSearch are now buddies I think GP is talking about the events that transpired a while back before Amazon and ElasticSearch made up.

ok_dad 2y ago
What, when Amazon forked an open source project, as was allowed by the license, and continued to support that open source license even when the original company abandoned theirs? I’m not an Amazon fan, but they did the same thing (forking) that many others do, and they did it perfectly legally according to the license.
- mx_03 2y ago
  Yes, doesnt Elasticsearch do the same thing with Lucene? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-difference-between-lucene-and-elasticsearch https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-dif... AWS just offered a convenience layer over ElasticSearch
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than that because Elastic during all of this had some of the plugins in Amazon's OpenDistro (now OpenSearch) project recycling proprietary code from Elastic's commercial, source available codebase under OpenDistro's permissive Apache-2.0 license. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-including-amazon-elasticsearch-service-open-distro-and-others https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
  - ok_dad 2y ago
    Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did. I get it, Amazon is bad, I agree they are too, but not because they’re malicious, Amazon is bad because they’re too large to compete on level ground with anyone other than Google or Microsoft in the cloud. My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps. At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They don’t even go around acting all superior like those “open source” corps do about it.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      > Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did. Yeah it's not that Amazon stole the code, it's that they were distributing stolen code. It's not as bad but it's still problematic unless Amazon immediately pulled said code when they were notified. > My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. I think this was less about preventing open source from being used and more about picking the wrong license for their project. The way I see it they took the long way around because they were afraid of the AGPL. They dual licensed under the SSPL (which is the AGPL with one change that makes it problematic) and the Elastic License (which they originally also provided code under a previous version of). Then they are now finally getting around to moving from the SSPL to the AGPL (while technically still offering the SSPL). Had they gone straight to the AGPL none of this would have been even worth discussing but a lot of people are afraid of that license in the same way people used to be scared of the GPL. > If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps. Sure however if you chose an open source license, you probably don't want companies selling access to your software with a few extra closed source bits bolted on without contributing anything back. It's not legally wrong but it's a dick move and against the spirit of FOSS. So even then Amazon hadn't broke any laws but it'd make sense for a FOSS oriented company to pivot to a license they think would force upstream contribution. Elastic just fucked up and chose a bad license (SSPL) because they feared the AGPL. This is just them getting over that fear and picking the license they should have picked from day 1. > At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They do now. When Elastic was Apache licensed they did not. That was the problem. It was only when they re-licensed Elastic that Amazon open sourced their fork. Had they not, OpenSearch would still be the closed source AWS ElasticSearch.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  No one ever accused Amazon of breaking the law. The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that. Now, there can be a lot of opinions on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the open source community, but it should be pretty obvious why elastic didn’t like it. They were a company who had a product they were selling, and then the biggest competitor in the world starts selling THE EXACT same thing with the EXACT same name. They needed to do something to compete. So they did, and forced Amazon to change the name of their offering to opensearch instead of Elasticsearch. Once they achieved that, they reverted the change.
  - sickmate 2y ago
    >The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing Amazon first offered Elasticsearch as a managed service in 2015. Elastic began offering managed services in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Managed_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Managed_services
    - nemo44x 2y ago
      That’s not true. Elastic acquired Found in 2015 and immediately offered their managed Elasticsearch service. It was publicly announced at their user conference early that year.
  - glenngillen 2y ago
    > since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that. That's one interpretation. I've another, which I've seen play out multiple times now across multiple OSS projects: company invents a thing, thinks that because they're the inventor of said thing they'll be able to sell a managed version of it, belatedly realise that inventing a piece of software doesn't magically make you the best in the world at running it at scale. What Elastic, and most like them, can't compete with is the ability to run highly available/reliable software at the scale of Amazon.
Salgat 2y ago
The true irony being that elasticsearch would be no where near what it is now if it wasn't opensource and receiving contributions in the first place. AWS had employees dedicated to contributing to Elasticsearch (same as Redis).

ok_dad 2y ago

What, when Amazon forked an open source project, as was allowed by the license, and continued to support that open source license even when the original company abandoned theirs? I’m not an Amazon fan, but they did the same thing (forking) that many others do, and they did it perfectly legally according to the license.

mx_03 2y ago
Yes, doesnt Elasticsearch do the same thing with Lucene? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-difference-between-lucene-and-elasticsearch https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-dif... AWS just offered a convenience layer over ElasticSearch
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
It's a bit more complicated than that because Elastic during all of this had some of the plugins in Amazon's OpenDistro (now OpenSearch) project recycling proprietary code from Elastic's commercial, source available codebase under OpenDistro's permissive Apache-2.0 license. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-including-amazon-elasticsearch-service-open-distro-and-others https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
- ok_dad 2y ago
  Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did. I get it, Amazon is bad, I agree they are too, but not because they’re malicious, Amazon is bad because they’re too large to compete on level ground with anyone other than Google or Microsoft in the cloud. My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps. At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They don’t even go around acting all superior like those “open source” corps do about it.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    > Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did. Yeah it's not that Amazon stole the code, it's that they were distributing stolen code. It's not as bad but it's still problematic unless Amazon immediately pulled said code when they were notified. > My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. I think this was less about preventing open source from being used and more about picking the wrong license for their project. The way I see it they took the long way around because they were afraid of the AGPL. They dual licensed under the SSPL (which is the AGPL with one change that makes it problematic) and the Elastic License (which they originally also provided code under a previous version of). Then they are now finally getting around to moving from the SSPL to the AGPL (while technically still offering the SSPL). Had they gone straight to the AGPL none of this would have been even worth discussing but a lot of people are afraid of that license in the same way people used to be scared of the GPL. > If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps. Sure however if you chose an open source license, you probably don't want companies selling access to your software with a few extra closed source bits bolted on without contributing anything back. It's not legally wrong but it's a dick move and against the spirit of FOSS. So even then Amazon hadn't broke any laws but it'd make sense for a FOSS oriented company to pivot to a license they think would force upstream contribution. Elastic just fucked up and chose a bad license (SSPL) because they feared the AGPL. This is just them getting over that fear and picking the license they should have picked from day 1. > At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They do now. When Elastic was Apache licensed they did not. That was the problem. It was only when they re-licensed Elastic that Amazon open sourced their fork. Had they not, OpenSearch would still be the closed source AWS ElasticSearch.
cortesoft 2y ago
No one ever accused Amazon of breaking the law. The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that. Now, there can be a lot of opinions on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the open source community, but it should be pretty obvious why elastic didn’t like it. They were a company who had a product they were selling, and then the biggest competitor in the world starts selling THE EXACT same thing with the EXACT same name. They needed to do something to compete. So they did, and forced Amazon to change the name of their offering to opensearch instead of Elasticsearch. Once they achieved that, they reverted the change.
- sickmate 2y ago
  >The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing Amazon first offered Elasticsearch as a managed service in 2015. Elastic began offering managed services in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Managed_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Managed_services
  - nemo44x 2y ago
    That’s not true. Elastic acquired Found in 2015 and immediately offered their managed Elasticsearch service. It was publicly announced at their user conference early that year.
- glenngillen 2y ago
  > since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that. That's one interpretation. I've another, which I've seen play out multiple times now across multiple OSS projects: company invents a thing, thinks that because they're the inventor of said thing they'll be able to sell a managed version of it, belatedly realise that inventing a piece of software doesn't magically make you the best in the world at running it at scale. What Elastic, and most like them, can't compete with is the ability to run highly available/reliable software at the scale of Amazon.

Salgat 2y ago

The true irony being that elasticsearch would be no where near what it is now if it wasn't opensource and receiving contributions in the first place. AWS had employees dedicated to contributing to Elasticsearch (same as Redis).