I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that.<p>AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been widely used and successful. It is up to Elastic to come up with a business model that works, not blame others if it is not.
AWS are the good guys here. Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space. It's how open source works. The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward <i>except</i> that their efforts would remain open source.<p>Elasticsearch got popular, and now Elastic wants to reap all the rewards and make money off the product. They're free to do that, and create restricted-license or closed-source versions for future enhancements. But the community doesn't have to buy into that and continue to contribute to what is no longer truly an open source product. AWS is forking it and continuing with the original, truly open source license.<p>This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product.<p>AWS does plenty of things worth criticizing, and one can even criticize them in this particular instance for not working with Elastic to provide more support to whatever it was they were asking for. And Elastic may very well have a legitimate gripe about trademarks. But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.<p>You can't create an open source project, wait for it to gain market dominance, decide to be less open source, and expect the community to continue contributing.<p>Elastic shot themselves in the foot and now they can either revert their decision or get left behind as the community moves on to what will ultimately end up being the better product.
While it's great that AWS has indeed contributed fixes to upstream Elasticsearch, they link to 9 PRs that are generally on the trivial end of the scale. (Though I don't doubt the PR that adds a missing synchronized keyword might have been gnarly and time consuming to debug, and that diff size does not necessarily correlate to importance)<p>For a project AWS was making hundreds of millions in revenue on four years ago (as per an ex AWS employee), patting your own shoulder for such a trivial amount of contributions is a bit disingenuous. They might have contributed more, but if there was something significant, they probably would have mentioned.<p>Notable new features like "ultrawarm" they did not attempt to contribute upstream, nor open source at all: <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/aws-announces-amazon-elasticsearch-service-ultrawarm-general-availability/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/aws-annou...</a>
They want to fork because $$, fine. But they could at least stop pretending to be saint of OSS. They're bragging of raising 9 PRs of total 41000 in elastic repo.<p>They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.
Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed single deployment scripts), the value of having someone navigate the artificial complexity for you vanishes, and thus the value to the customer.<p>You have to question what value Elastic is offering its customers on top of the opensource project. Why is it that people complain about AWS devaluing the commercial services of Elastic but none of you complain about opensource devaluing the development of code in general. I can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code. I think the proliferation of opensource is probably worse than some of you imagine. I'm not writing any opensource that isn't sponsored because I refuse to spend my time devaluing software development. The vast majority of the profits from opensource all end up in the hands of massive tech companies anyway. If we could skew the commercial advantages to the developer our industry would be a lot more pleasant.
I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch v(FORKED_VERSION). Their continued trying to associate it to ES is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well.<p>I am actually quite surprised they haven't just hired a small team of core devs for it and try and out compete Elastic. The groundwork is laid, I could easily see AWS being able to maintain a "Fast Follower" + AWS Optimisation approach and be able to offer a substantial portion of the value for a fraction of the costs. Try and pick up the open source community now while there is concerns around the license.<p>Additionally at this point the AWS core platform is different enough then GCP / Azure / other clouds. I imagine they could build optimisations for AWS in and be able to save costs on providing the service. (i.e. it might be worth doing some work in FPGAs / ASICs, giving faster performance while only being economical when your the scale of AWS). I kind of am surprised AWS hasn't grown to attempt to have a guiding hand over many of the open source projects that are effectively their vendors. Many projects have a handful of core contributors and a hiring a key person will ensure your able to influence development in a way that assists you (assuming it is neutral to beneficial to the project).<p>Edit: I should probably say I don't love the idea (morality) of the "Fast Follower" capturing the value of an innovative project and screwing the people involved in making the project successful. However it is how competition works and how many other businesses operate in other industries. Since elastic and AWS can't seem to come to a mutually beneficial agreement, then I would prefer them to sort it out in competition.
I have no affection for Elastic Co, but why should they sit there and let Amazon eat their lunch?<p>Maybe I’m forgetting something but I can’t think of a single significant open source project created by Amazon. As far as I can tell they prefer to keep their differentiating services proprietary to their platform. That’s about as far from open source as you can get.<p>There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I do think it’s pretty rich that they’re going to try to claim the high road in a dispute with a company that actually has created something as useful as Elasticsearch and released it as open source (with caveats, yes). It’s pretty easy to be high and mighty about open source when you’re on the taking side.<p>It seems to me that if companies like Elastic can’t defend their ability to make a profit from companies like Amazon there’s a good chance we’re all going to miss out. I think it’s pretty obvious that Amazon’s not going to create the next Elasticsearch and release it as open source.
I had meetings lately with AWS regarding the license and was told about the fork. They mentioned something to the effect that Elastic was being greedy with open-source software.<p>I am an early contributor to Elasticsearch. I probably have more commits to the core product than most employees. It is now incredibly difficult for a non-employee to have any PR looked at unless it is a bug. I stopped contributing after their last "we are open" debacle but did have one outstanding feature PR open. Over two years later, still not merged. You will have others commenting that they would like the feature, but Elastic sits on it. Not blaming them, but at this point, it really is being driven by them. I give up trying to contribute.
Steve Jobs said something like Dropbox was a feature, not a product. I think Bezos feels the same about <i>literally everything.</i> AFAIK Azure/Google have actual partnerships with the Elastic stack, partnerships that assumedly benefit both sides and have staying power.<p>Part of me wonders if AWS always had planned to do this, and they were just waiting until it made business sense to fork (ie they had features and a new direction in mind but neglected to implement them because Elasticsearch was good enough as is). The alternative part is just 2 big corporations not finding a way to get along. Which means without clear direction and careful stewardship I'd expect the forks to just be cleanroom reimplementations or something like that.
To Elastic: if you're a $15B [0] company you don't get to be a victim by appealing to your customer base to whine about how your competitor is profiting "unjustly" from a decision <i>you</i> made that led to your growth in the first place. Choosing Apache2 license ensures your OSS gets traction, but then you'll have to live with its consequences when Amazon comes knocking on the door.<p>[0] <a href="https://google.com/search?q=estc" rel="nofollow">https://google.com/search?q=estc</a>
I am so delighted to hear this. Open source wins again. Open source is the right for you to do whatever you want with the software, AND YES, that includes monetize it. I've been sitting on the sidelines reading the different perspectives, but I just cannot see how you can be on the side of Elasticsearch. How can they take all the work from the OSS community and add a clause that THEY only can monetize it? I will tell you right now, I have NO desire to ever contribute to the closed version of Elasticsearch and I will gladly jump on board and contribute to the AWS version. We are watching in real time the OSS community being degraded by these ridiculous licenses.<p>The greed here is on Elasticsearch and not on AWS. If you wanted to have a closed source piece of software that you have the only rights to monetize, then you should have closed it off from the beginning instead of taking all the work from the OSS community and giving the rights for ONLY you to monetize it.
Amazon are the masters of theivery. The hypocrisy is not going unnoticed. Amazon contributed nothing of value to open source, then they basically stole the hard work of others and again contributed nothing back and now they're going so far as to preach about open source. Please. The sad part is, users won't care and customers won't care because at the end of the day ease of use wins. Elastic are taking drastic measures which will in the short term impact then but hopefully in the long term everyone will give more thought to what licenses they choose. Open source is no longer just about the freedom of choice but now a marketing and commercial strategy for big tech. Just keep that in mind if you ever want to build something of value in the open.
The fact that AWS doesn't link to the Elastic License is hilarious to me. The plain reading of the license is "APLv2 but AWS Can't Sell a Hosted Version" so of course AWS forks the last APL version and plows ahead.<p>Note, I'm not trying to side with either AWS or Elastic here and I fully recognize that both Elastic re-licensing and AWS forking are within each org's rights. I really just think it is funny how beside the point AWS's press release is here.<p>EDIT: an apostrophe
> This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software.<p>This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be. It’s not free for AWS going forward, however. Why is it that Amazon has such a hard time paying for stuff they use and commercialize? There’s no issues here with other providers (GCP, Azure, etc.), so clearly the problem lies with them. While they’re at it, they should also get off this “open and free” high horse they seem to be on. A few patches here and there don’t qualify as big time contributor status. If they want to show that they’re committed, how about the release their infrastructure code that runs all their services? That’d definitely go a lot further than “big bad Elastic changed their license and we’re defending users.” Get outta here with that nonsense, history shows otherwise with all the other tech that’s been ripped off.<p>I also don’t get all the criticism for Elastic doing this. They own the software, and they can do whatever they want. Should they have done this license from the start? Maybe, but it’s not exactly easy getting a project off the ground without some way to gain attention. If you’ve got no users, you’ve got to show at least what your code is doing, and picking software licenses is not exactly a straightforward task. They changed their license to fight back, and it’s entirely within their right to do so.<p>Hate to feel like I’m venting, but AWS is being the bully here and feigning that they’re pro-user, which is frustrating to witness.
The issue here is that it's quite impossible to compete with AWS if it offers even an inferior version of a service.<p>Because of network egress pricing.<p>You are most likely on AWS already. And even if elastic offers a 2x better product at 1/2 the price, your cost of traffic for an external service will easily 4x versus using AWS services. And that's really the frustration for these service providers.<p>You can NEVER compete. Ever. Against an equivalent service offered by AWS because the egress pricing acts as a pricing barrier.
There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally.<p>A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to the project.
And I, for sure, will never use them.<p>The AWS version of ES has been abysmal- it’s only saving grace is that it’s “in the ecosystem”- I was convinced by an AWS zealot on my team. Never again.
So... if Amazon's fork is still Apache 2.0 license, which is a permissive license... Elasticsearch is welcome to take any code they want from it and port it into their copy, no? Correct me if I'm wrong.<p>Yes, we all know this is a lot of work, and will be a manual process if it wasn't coordinated, increasingly manual as the codebases diverge. But, anything especially valuable Amazon does, ElasticSearch can copy if they want. The same is not true in the opposite direction of course.
Elastic is a for profit business.<p>Steven Schuuman [1] was CEO before Shay Bannon. Schuuman (who made 450MM from selling SpringSource to VMWare) is a billionaire. Stop pretending this is about "OSS" and not 'hey, that's my mad money Jeff!'.<p>If Elastic was a company that was fully owned only by "OSS Developers", then fine, this would be an opportunity to support that sort of enlightended for profit corporation and fellow developers.<p>But the stakeholders here are Billionaires and millionaires. No doubt Elastic took very good care of software developers (lots of perks) but since this is about money (lest we forget) it would be interested to see a breakdown of just who made what from this "OSS" "project".<p>(And yes, not even a fan of Amazon.)<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/steven-schuurman/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/profile/steven-schuurman/</a>
The time-tested model for a situation like this that benefits everyone is big company offering X as a service hires/funds N developers in proportion to the popularity of that service on their platform. That helps ensure the project is sustainable, gives back to the community the big service obviously benefits from, and is certainly a form of "good karma".<p>I think a lot of people are upset due to the perceived violation of that social contract, though it obviously isn't a legal issue and may not even be a moral one depending on where you draw the line. AWS has the appearance of benefitting enormously from many OSS projects but rarely funds contributions - funding that would be a rounding error to the AWS budget.<p>The ball is entirely in Amazon's court. They've earned this reputation (fair or not). They can make the problem go away at any time if they want to spend a little money.
The audacity of these AWS folks patronizing elastic about open source despite AWS making millions of dollars off of their open source project just reeks of entitlement. Glad I am never going to use AWS.
AWS has known all along what they are doing with this OSS strategy. They are the only provider that doesn't lose by having heavily commoditized, open source backend software - they can support profitable operations at a much lower cost point than these mid-sized companies like Elastic/Mongo<p>Elastic, and the "open source business model" companies certainly should have seen this coming. But the attitude in the early 2010s was 'lol open source fun, figure out business model later' and somehow VCs bit and a company like Elastic could take off. They shouldn't have been surprised.<p>I would rather live in a world where a mid-sized company like Elastic could thrive than an AWS monoculture. Most things Amazon make me feel icky... but I also feel like this is the reality of open source... its not really open source if it's entirely associated with one company..
There is an important thing that gets ignored a lot in these conversations where an organization that stewards an open-source project close-sources it.<p>That software grew largely because it was open-source, and it really makes a difference. It's not only those who contributed to the software and made PRs (which is sometimes a surprisingly small number of devs), but the software often only exists because it was taken up by a large number of projects that then created an ecosystem and a userbase around it.<p>Importantly, software is never "finished", so when the single large company behind a popular open-source project close-sources it, it often means the end of that project as an open-source alternative. It's frustrating if for example the existence of that killer open-source project in the past stopped other projects from blossoming.<p>The close-sourcing of several projects has made me cautious nowadays about using software that is backed by a company that exists only around that product.
We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but par for the course for Bezos's company.
This is really clearly a case of Elastic wanting to have its cake and eat it too but also of the existential challenge that faces the open source community -- how do developers of open source software pay to keep the lights on?<p>There's a bit of a myth that OSS is lots and lots of volunteers spending their free-time to contribute bits of code here and there. But the reality is that most of the current major open source projects are all basically corporately sponsored. It's not the Cathedral and the Bazaar, it's the Cathedral and the anchor tenants at the local mall. And they're all contributing funds to build the Christmas display and Take-pictures-with-Santa spot near the fountains. It's open to the public, but the moment somebody starts busing in hundres of tourists they get upset.
I don't trust aws will do a good job with the fork. Can anyone tell me a FOSS project led by amazon that's not for accessing their services (boto)?<p>Now that elastic.co is going sideways, sphinxsearch (best search server experience I've had) non-foss since circa 2017, what are the good search server options for a small shop dealing wth geo search?<p>Edit/disclaimer: former aws employee
I believe no party is in the wrong here.<p>Elastic has the right to take the code private. Basically they are making a fork.<p>AWS also has the right to create their fork and contribute to it.<p>If we're playing the game of "who's the bigger dickhead" I would say it's Elastic. Before these 2 forks, many companies benefitted from hosting Elasticsearch for their customers. From their reasoning, it seems that only they should benefit from the code. Which is not Elastic's by the way. It belongs to the world.
This may sound heretical but the idea of open sourcing commercial offerings always seemed like bad business to me. We are seeing it come to roost now with cloud providers selling a more desirable version of an open source platform that the makers of the platform.<p>If you strip everything down to first principles, you get paid because you have a valuable asset. That asset may be your skill, your time, a piece of land, a patent, etc. With open source, you give away your key asset and then you have nothing except the wish and hope that nobody takes it and eats your lunch with your own fork. Which is clearly what is happening in this case.<p>I am all for things being done as open source because you believe in the freedom of it, or it's fun for you, but it seems like a really bad way of getting programmers and businesses paid, if you're into that sort of thing.
This is an embarrassing anecdote, but I thought I'd share. I started using Elasticsearch because it showed up in the AWS console along with all the other "Elastic" things ("Elastic Compute Cloud") and I figured it was a thing they made themselves. Only later on in the process did I realize that there was a company called Elastic that named it.<p>Very unfortunate. Probably a lesson about naming your company after a common English word.
This feels like a spin? Isn't AWS biting hand that feeds them? They need a win-win strategy for open source devs. It's hard enough to compete with their version of your service (spark, kafka) without them forking your project. what's next, are they going to fork spark and kafka?
Ominous. AWS is going to pay premium to acquire services of those core Elasticsearch developers, aren't they?<p>The blog post also signals an intention to make sure there's parity in terms of API surface with mainline Elasticsearch.<p>Also, AWS' decision to create a committee is something Elastic.co could have done... Alas, this is where we are. Would be interesting to see which of these forks take off. The developer community is likely to rally behind F/OSS. I can also see a lot of IaaS/PaaS upstarts like RailwayApp [0] prefer OpenDistro.<p>I'm half-expecting AWS to announce a managed Solr service and prompt an exodus to it with lower pricing and free data migration.<p>[0] <a href="https://railway.app/changelog/2021-01-15" rel="nofollow">https://railway.app/changelog/2021-01-15</a>
>Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch<p>Seems like a rather disingenuous way of announcing it given the reason for the license change is (allegedly) a direct response to Amazon.<p>Not that I'm a fan of Elastic's stance either...
At the end of the day, all this really demonstrates is that the business model of producing open source software for free and charging for support or hosted solutions either does not work or does not scale. Part of the point of open source software is that anyone who uses it can inspect the source and make changes. If your business model depends on users not providing their own services for the software you have developed, that is on you.<p>This is also why, if you have a customer or competitor who makes changes to the software and does not release those changes if they convey the software to others, you are not protected by using a permissive open source license. If AWS was allegedly not committing back to Elasticsearch/Kibana, they are within their rights to do so, whether Elastic like it or not. Elastic should not have used a permissive open source license like APL. The only thing that protects users here is strong copyleft, in this case a license like AGPL.<p>At the end of the day, these licenses protect users. Maybe something else is needed to protect the interests of businesses which also respecting users - whatever that is, it is not necessarily one of the stated goals of free or open source software, so assigning an open source license and expecting support to cover the costs is not going to end well for you if you get big enough to matter.
I'm extremely skeptical of AWS's ability to deliver a compelling, featured ES fork up against Elastic. Unless they actively hire contributors, they're going to get lapped functionality-wise.
>Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community).<p>I'm a bit out of the loop here, can someone please tell me why Elastic decided to enact this seemingly Anti-OSS license?
There behavior with Elasticsearh [0] seems similar to what they did to sellers with Amazon Choice and their other knockoffs [1].<p>> When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion.<p>> Recently, we found more examples of what we consider to be ethically challenged behavior. We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon, telling us their behavior continues and is more brazen. NOT OK.<p>0: <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS" rel="nofollow">https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS</a><p>1: <a href="https://archive.is/9TIu6" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/9TIu6</a>
The major threads on this so far:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25794987" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25794987</a>
I would bet on AWS in this case as they will also likely have the support of anyone who wants to make a hosted service of those products. It will be interesting to see if eventually AWS starts making new APIs that diverge from the Elastic or if they chose to keep the product maintenance mode.
I'm not sure I understand Amazon's game theory on this one. Anything they contribute to their Apache License branch can be used by Elastic, but not vice versa.<p>This means Elastic can continue to differentiate from Amazon without worry. Amazon however can keep the code they've not contributed back internally, but they could always do that.<p>Perhaps this is simply an image move they don't plan to actually enhance or maintain the fork?<p>Also Elastic moving from Apache to (essentially) GPL is not making it closed source. Just as Amazon was within their rights to maintain an internal fork, so is Elastic to move to a GPL model. Demonizing either over business decisions is dumb.
Elastic really shot themselves in the foot here.<p>AWS is calling them out as they deserve too and now AWS is going to run with a true open source codebase moving forward. Ironic considering the, generally baseless, accusations that AWS just takes open source stuff but doesn’t contribute back to the community.<p>This all just comes across as Elastic having sour grapes for being out competed on managed service offerings and trying to save that with shady license moves. With a separate fork, now they’re going to have to compete on the codebase too as, ironically, the proprietary model against the open source community the claim is being hurt here.
perfect response, this is exactly, by design, what open source is about.<p>now this is just the beginning; for they will need to throw money at their fork to make sure it's successful. And isn't that ultimately what this was about, money? Now Amazon has the opportunity to hire the core engineers to contribute to the TRUE open source project.<p>Everything by design as intended. Go Amazon.<p>Don't start an open source projects if that's not what you want to be. Or did you forget what made you successful to begin with?
The problem is much more fundamental. Free Software is about users having the right to understand and modify the software that they use. This is my understanding of 'the printer story': <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...</a>. With hosted solutions the software runs on the supplier servers - so if the user wants to modify it he has to resign from the hosted solution (or maybe negotiate a special case - this does not seem very realistic). This is a fundamental limitation. If the software is Open Source the user still can copy it, modify and run it on their own servers (or on some other cloud supplier who would agree to the change) - but it is a lot of hassle (and hassle is important - after all with enough work you can always decompile a binary so it is only the hassle that differentiates source code from binary). Maybe if there was enough competition between cloud providers - then this could work - but I think the economy is against it.
This is Node.js and IO.js. vi and vim. vim and neovim. In other words, it’s just another perfectly fine software fork. If Elastic can’t sustain a valuable product they created, someone else will. If it it’s not valuable enough to invest in, something better will replace it. I don’t see why quarreling over software licensing is a valuable use of their time, especially when the foundation of their software is more open source software.
You can’t have a business only based on open source software. As a company you need to provide bit more than what is there in open source world. Just technical support won’t cut it. What elastic provides can be very well mimicked by other players if they want to and have money for it. I believe Elastic
Realized their business model is not working and so they changed their license. But AWS has money and man power to fork it.
It is like Chess<p>ElasticSearch move was very easy to conter-attack.<p>Amazon does not lack smart guy to its side.
Anyway the way cloud providers are using open source project can become a issue and "drain" day by day the open source community, especially smart startup creating a value in the day by day.<p>I think there is some space for new ideas and new startup to find out a way to balance these forces and find out a deal in a win-win scenario....what do you think?
This seemed inevitable, as Amazon has done this several times now when asked to pay to support the organizations behind large enterprise OSS offerings.
Elasticsearch is now being released under a proprietary license. The last FOSS version got forked by Amazon. This is a good thing if you care about software freedom. Sure, under Amazon it may be a "throw over the wall" model but at least there are open opportunities for the source code to be forked again, and in the meantime at least it's being maintained under an FOSS license.
First, the dispute between AWS and Elasic is a trademark dispute. Second, ES had always been incomplete in it's open source form. No auth or access control (this feature requires an x-pack subscription) is included. It's also important to point out that ES relies on other open source software (Lucene) for its core functionality. Its hard to feel bad for either party here.
The amount the dialogue has been moved to open source and "who's in the right" is a bit scary. These are billion dollar companies making decisions and writing Mean Girls-type blog posts about each other in the hope of chasing profits, but their use of the term "open source" repeatedly makes the community act like this is what matters to either of them?
Going to start the first actual tech discussion here – the codebases can be naturally expected to diverge, but will AWS keep the APIs the same? I can't imagine the fork will be successful without leveraging the massive Elasticsearch ecosystem. And what bearing does <i>Oracle v Google</i> have if they do "steal" APIs from future SSPL-licensed code?
I'm not sure how the "AWS is stealing Elasti Cos product" holds up. AWS is willing to dedicate the time and infra to maintaining a copy of the last "freely" available version.<p>It is surely a significant investment on AWS part and they're even maintaining the Av2 license.<p>At the end of the day, we have a huge, highly profitable company backing and a better license
There has to be a way for an OSS project / companies to offer licences to managed service providers in a way that gets them supported financially. That would be a massive win for everyone<p>Something like: okay yes, this is OSS, except if you want to offer it as a managed service, in which case you need to purchase a licence.
Hopefully they change the names. Even if keeping the old names isn't legally trademark infringement (IANAL, so I don't know), using those names without Elastic's consent is a low blow.<p>That said, being able to make a fork if you disagree with the direction of an open source project is one of the great things about open source. AWS clearly has the resources, and the motivation to maintain a fork of Elasticsearch, at least they are making their fork open source instead of keeping it proprietary. It probably would have been a better situation if AWS had created some kind of reciprocal partnership with Elastic and Elastic hadn't felt the need to change the license, but it is likely too late for that now.
Haha bravo Amazon, you couldn't have scripted a more perfect response. Well done. Game on etc.<p>Elastic is a 15 billion dollar MONSTER of a publicly traded company doing hundred+ million revenue per quarter. By market cap they'd be a ~top-20 biggest company overall and contender if not title-holder for the biggest tech company in the UK, Australia, and most other non-US countries. They are not some plucky feel-good startup fighting the good fight against nasty/unfair big-corps that are drinking their milkshake.<p>That multi-billion dollar corporation does not own ElasticSearch 7.10 any more than Amazon does. Elastic have taken 7.10 and released it under a new license that prevents others from doing stuff with it. That's allowed. You could do that too. It's allowed. And some plucky startup in a garage (or say, Google, or MS, or Amazon) could decide they'll make changes to 7.10 and release it open source. All fine. All allowed.<p>If your argument is that AWS is a form of mono/duo/oligo-poly and there are antitrust matters at play due to distorted market power being used illegally to crush a competitor... great make that argument.<p>Most of the other arguments boil down to variations on an anti-capitalist theme.
What a joke. Unfortunately capitalist firms privatizing tech, exploiting working class labor, and locking up/monopolizing humanity's shared inheritance, is nothing new. The original developers will shortly be completely replaced by Amazon developers, and Amazon's Elasticsearch fork will be repurposed for Amazon-specific use cases only. Goodbye any use cases beyond what Amazon approves.<p>Amazon say: "Thanks original developers, farewell! We will take over from here."<p>I think this can act as an important reminder to license your (group) project as GPLv3 or AGLPv3, it's a trojan horse and helps the open source/free software revolution.
Can you have a license that cuts AWS, Amazon and all of their subsidiaries from doing this?<p>It feels predatory and although Elastic is a huge company by the numbers that keep getting touted here, they're a rounding error on Amazons scale.<p>Amazons practice in sections of their online market place has been clone / re-brand what's selling well in the market, slap an amazon basics logo on it. Then harass, ban or in the best case put the margins so low (or in the negative until the competition bleeds out) that the original seller can no longer compete. To me, this feels like the OSS equivalent.<p>I'm anti-Amazon though and not sure if I'm just jaded at this point.
The sad part is that while I really want to support Elasic here we are likely going to have to move to Amazon's Apache-licensed fork for our internal use because SSPL is incompatible with our company's open source policy.
Hint for ElasticSearch: The AWS fork is hosted on github <a href="https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch</a><p>If I were working at ElasticSearch/Kibana, I would be filling a DMCA takedown on GitHub against all the offending repos.<p>This is how to defend your copyright and trademark.<p>And yes, it's getting into aggressive territory and not everybody might agree with that strategy, but that's how the game is played. It's a full on conflict and the result might very well kill elastic in the long term if no action is taken now.
It seems like a lot of companies want to open source their software which would otherwise be a key secret sauce in order to get popularity, recognition, and traction. Once they're well known, in this case, Elastic; they are complaining about how others are taking advantage of their position. It's shooting themselves in the foot.<p>It's kind of like an Uber model - offer taxi services while bleeding cash to wipe out the entire Taxi industry (Short term success) to get fame and popularity, get AOUs and ARPUs going; and then have a difficult time monetizing their mistakes.
As individuals, we (mostly) want companies building open source to thrive, particularly if they aren't behemoths of the industry. Ultimately though, efficiency matters more than sentiment. Companies rightly prefer a "good enough" product from a single source; even just avoiding a second enterprise agreement negotiation would make the AWS version worthwhile. Throwing unusual licenses into the mix, I guess new custom for Elastic Co is mostly going to be passed along by the other cloud providers feeding the anti-AWS prejudice within some customers.
What I understand is that Elastic is upset AWS used the name for it's service promotion, stole propertiary code and alleged business partnership with Elastic.<p>So Elastic felt loosing due to AWS using is assets, so changed the licence to compensate.<p>Now AWS announces it cuts ties with Elastic by forking Elastic. So what AWS seems to announce is that it will continue to earn from Elastic , still will be using the name and further more it will openly compete with Elastic?<p>It is an extremely aggressive move, take all and destroy, or am I missing on something?
First we had GPL, then some people noticed the “over a network” loophole being exploited, so AGPL was born. Has the time come for FAGPL (F*** Amazon General Public License)?
It seems a bit unfaithful, not mentioning that the behavior of AWS played a key part in the decision of elastic[1]. They didn't even link to the announcement. Instead they act as if they are the saviors, upholding the open source status of elaticsearch and kibana: NOT OK<p>[1] <a href="https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/why-license-change-AWS" rel="nofollow">https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/why-license-change-AWS</a>
I'm very curious how trademark stuff with work with this and if the whole "<something> for <existing trademark name>" naming scheme will continue to hold. E.g. Windows Subsystem for Linux.<p>What if someone searches for Elasticsearch and finds Elastic's docs and there's confusion as to why something is different from AWS's Opendistro for Elasticsearch? How would that relate to trademark dilution?
aws steamrolling at its best. big tech at its worst. Even worse is the PR stunt "for the community".<p>Lies lies and lies. Wake up. They could have done things by the book by collaborating with the ES team. They didn't. Don't ever let them feed on lack of true knowledge. Build infrastructures that can be deployed anywhere. Support the OSS products you buy if you can. Reevaluate.
there are 2 distinct issues here<p>(1) Ethical and (2) Tort.<p>Ethical is the question of good corporate practice to do what's right to your partner. As a key executive of a company, I am expected to call any CEO and say - you know what CEO Joe, that contract we signed 2 weeks ago, we goofed. Can we please re-cut ? And because Joe is interested in a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts a long time, that's what usually happens.<p>Enter the FAANGS.<p>Clearly, it was Elastic's mistake to operate on a open license that lends to FAANGS literally imploding Elastic market share. Elastic mistake, OK . However, it is not ethical for a FAANG to profit off errors, just as it is not ethical for a Bank to charge overdraft fees over overdraft fees from a grandma. They can, but they really shouldn't. What is legal is not ethical.<p>In the middle east it is legal to stone a female adulterer to death. That's not OK.<p>2) Tort. It will be argued in court that AWS misappropriated the Elastic TM. That's where AWS is going to pay. AWS clearly stepped over the line.<p>It is just a question of how costly that mistake was.
I'm afraid there may be less open source projects in the future as if you become successful by being community driven open source, you get run over by AWS once you get big enough and the project will end up being more closed to only offer highly priced corporate targeted SaaS to survive and one might just start off as closed to begin with.
I'm a bit disappointed by all the good guy/bad guy judgement going on here on HN, when both players are working with the market forces to get the best result.<p>From AWS' perspective, taking an OSS Project and offering it as a hosted solution is legally fine.<p>Elastic isn't happy about the fact that AWS make more profit from their OSS product than themselves, so they recognize that OSS isn't their best approach anymore, and do it differently.<p>AWS decides that forking and maintaining the their own OSS version is more profitable in the long run than paying license fees.<p>What changed since Elastic's original license choice? Hosting an SaaS version was possible back then, but it didn't happen at the scale that it is, so it was more of a theoretical problem. Now it's a very practical problem.<p>This is a bit of a simplistic take, and there seem to be a lot of side shows (like trademarks), so more details lurk in the shadows.<p>If I were to try to make a value judgement, my premise would be the flourishing OSS is a good thing. AWS's actions have have driven Elastic to make their product no longer OSS, which is not good. OTOH they maintain an OSS fork, which is good.<p>But the interesting broader question is: would it have been beneficial for OSS if Amazon were paying some license fees to Elastic, for an OSS product? I think we need to find some model whereby OSS shops are not forced to rely on the whim of a giant to make their money. Whether this can be done sustainably without restricting usage rights remains to be seen, IMHO.
AWS slagging off Elastic in this post really isn't a good look. I expect more of them. There's one thing putting spin on their decision (which only non technical managers will be fooled by) but whinging about Elastic writing a 'blustery blog post' and doing something 'fishy' etc is pathetic.
This thread has some interesting links..
<a href="https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/t/recent-elastic-co-licensing-change-announcment/4583/40" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/t/recent-elastic-co-...</a>
Fuck Amazon is all I have to say. This just adds yet another reason why I would never use AWS. People that defend Amazon are the ones ensuring no other companies will release their software as open source since you'll get exploited by shitty companies like Amazon.
How "good" they are, you can gauge that by the fact that they are actively removing all discuss comments in linked blog post that points out to their hypocricy.<p>Don't believe me, just go ahead say something negative and see it get removed within 30 minutes.
So is there a standard license people can use to prevent this? Something like "Apache 2.0 but the only thing you can't do is resell this service as a managed cloud product"?<p>I think that would be valuable and the right choice for many projects.
For context, I recommend reading that part too if you haven't: <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS" rel="nofollow">https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS</a>
How much is the Elastic Search business worth to AWS?<p>I'd image now AWS will have to put significant resources to maintaining their fork and keeping it current. Couldn't that money have been applied to a licensing deal with Elastic instead?
I don’t like how opinionated these articles are, both the announcement from Elasticsearch and AWS. I’d prefer a simple summary of changes and reasons for these changes, with as much objectivity (and as little blaming) as possible.
The biggest flaw in the piece is "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software."<p>The SSPL is an open source license. It's just not the license that can help Amazon make money.
This reminds of now node was forked into iojs. Somehow they found middleground and joined back.<p>Elastic seems to have shaken the AWS beast and they forked (which is legal).<p>I wonder what will eventually win with the community.
> They believe that restricting their license will lock others out of offering managed Elasticsearch services, which will let Elastic build a bigger business.<p>meanwhile AWS is fighting for what?
Elastic reaped a lot of benefits from open-source software. It's unfortunate that this is happening, but their decision was self-serving for much of the company's life.
Ah, this will be yet another case-study in patent and license law.<p>Reminds me of the cisco router firmware fiasco.<p>Looks like a few elastic lawyers are about to get sacked.
I think this is a negative sum outcome. The key metric is customer value and the Apache License had previously struck a balance between commercialization and customer lock-in. The Cloud gorillas (AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba) have disrupted this balance but they too are delivering customer value.<p>I'm not sure if OSS vendors like Elastic need to modify their business models, Apache needs to address the suboptimal situation, or if the Cloud gorillas need to change their business tactics but something has to give.
AWS has a point there (although I personally don't like their wording, open source is only a side effect here, it's more about how Amazon can charge for it also in future).<p>It only makes me sad that AWS makes a lot of $$$ with their elastic SaaS because of their size and for that reason can monetize it better than the original authors. Feels very Amazon like for me.<p>At end I have the feeling it could be all avoided if Amazon paid a little bit royalty to Elastic and both sides would have talked more and better together.
what if more developers start thinking like elastic , big tech will benefit from their code but not leave any business for them to survive on.<p>AWS would be a multi-trillion company by then, will buy these companies and make that code proprietary. they have no incentive to let their competitors win.
Wow. Amazon is blatantly misleading people here. They know the SSPL was created specifically because MongoDB had the same issues with Amazon’s service. I worked for MongoDB. Nobody wanted the SSPL, but Amazon was relentless.<p>MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing <i>nothing</i> to the project. They even linked entirely to MongoDB’s comprehensive documentation. “Anticompetitive” is the kindest description I can offer of Amazon’s behavior.<p>Just remember —- the SSPL and similar licenses are still completely open source. Amazon knows they’re forcing companies to change licenses, but shaming them as being “unacceptable to many in the open source community”.<p>This is political rhetoric, and I’m shocked anybody outside of Amazon would support this. The people who started these projects and surrounding businesses are generally <i>very</i> good people — I’ve been disabled with a neurological condition for 6 years now, but live can afford to live relatively comfortably thanks to the people at MongoDB. And I contributed code to the project before I started working for them (10gen at the time). So I’m admittedly biased, but it really seems like Amazon has become the Trump of Silicon Valley. I’m done with political rhetoric like this.<p><i>All opinions are my own.</i>
How can people honestly think that big innovations will come out of the Amazon’s Elastic fork?
There is not fundamental technical reasons for that fork.
Call me hippie, but a project is all about love and dedication. And I hardly think Amazon is that much in love with the Elastic codebase and roadmap.
Time will tell...
Excellent reflection business changes in opensource here:<p>Death of an Open Source Business Model [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b" rel="nofollow">https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-busin...</a>
>>> "This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software."<p>So any license which AWS cannot make good use of is not a valid OSS license? What a pirate logic here.<p>EDIT: I think I made a mistake here. SSPL is really a weird license here, not really friendly.
for Elastic to be truly open source, we will need adoption and push by major players and the key difference is Google cloud and Azure not looking at Elastic opportunity
Well, I think people have various opinions on this one, but if you restrict supposedly free software with the trademark, fork happens to get rid of trademark. This isn't the first time and certainly not the last.
The irony here is that AWS offers licenses for some products but nothing for Elasticsearch.<p>However how AWS is doing this is ugly and my hope is it will make people stop using AWS managed services.
"This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software"<p>Elasticsearch is open source. the SSPL is open source. It just can't help Amazon make money.
I'm as capitalist as anyone, but you do have to wonder how much money is enough. AWS/Amazon has plenty of money to do the right thing and pay ElasticSearch fairly but they'd rather rip off their work to keep Bezos in his billions.
I understand the question mark about what it is that Amazon did wrong here, and for the most part I agree that they've done nothing wrong.<p>But I am not Amazon's side here. This is my very subjective take on the matter and by no means am I claiming to be correct.<p>Amazon represents and existential threat to the open source business model. To those who say otherwise: How do you compete with a company with the incredible amount of resources available to Amazon? They could outprice you (running at a loss) and use that as leverage to bring your customers into their ecosystem.<p>I'm not saying Amazon is actively hostile towards opensource. I recognise that they even submit contributions to the stacks they use (at least the ones I've seen). But there's no argument that I could host a better instance than Amazon. That would be one hell of a grandiose delusion.<p>I don't know what the answer is here for open source. Maybe a license that allows free use, but prohibits you directly competing (offering a paid solution for support of the product) without a license.<p>I don't think that's unfair stance to take, it doesn't punish Amazon for being such an incredibly successful and powerful hosting provider (I like AWS, I really hope I'm not sounding hostile towards them) but it creates a symbiotic relationship instead of a directly competitive one.<p>Maybe I'm being naive and overlooking something, but I don't see what choices Elastic had here.<p>I don't agree with the arguments that Elastic made a killing last year and therefore they should shut up and be grateful. Be grateful for what, exactly? That a behemoth of a platform is taking business share from them? You can't expect them to be OK with that, surely. I don't agree with their response either, but I think it's time the open source community acknowledges that we're in a different era now and we need a license to reflect that.<p>1. Don't punish Amazon, they haven't done anything wrong (and you can very easily nuke small businesses that offered support too, nobody is whining about them). Open source should belong to all of us. Making money off of that should really belong the original authors. I don't think that's a wildly ridiculous opinion.<p>2. Protect your business model, or maybe even come up with a new one that works hand-in-hand with a hosting provider like Amazon, rather than waiting for them to drain your market (which is not their intention but you can't ignore that it's happening).<p>An example I can think of for 2) is building a version of the product that's more suitable for Amazon, which might help relieve overhead for them setting that product up. Then charge them for supporting that codebase. I'm imagining a twist of the "enterprise-grade" tier with extra features for enterprise-grade users. Have a "cloud-provider" tier on top of that (that supports replication, multi-instance, easy-up-down state or whatever you can think of).<p>Again: I'm just a dude who thinks there's a growing elephant in the room that can be addressed in a manner that's beneficial to all parties. I don't mean to attack Amazon or Elastic, but I think this incident is a harbinger for what's to come<p>-----<p>EDIT: Maybe the right move is to approach the cloud providers as an OSS provider and ask them to work with you on your business model. Don't wait for Amazon to build your product into an offering, <i>build it with them</i>. Take a cut of the revenue. Maybe?
What will happen next? AWS will poach elastic developers. AWS will need to show the open source community what happens when someone revolts. They now need to destroy elastic at any cost. I hope elastic has some large releases coming up, or some tricks up their sleeves