It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully?<p>From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / console templates. Indeed, most of this is templated -- AFAIU, for example, each AWS service autogenerates its Boto bindings and parts of its console frontend via code generators. Amazon has really mastered the factory process of churning out new services, and when they find a popular one, they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.<p>And therein lies the rub. If Amazon is improving the software in a way that the original team couldn't, it's hard to say that the community isn't benefiting. I think what strikes me the wrong way is that Amazon is not doing it for any altruistic reason. In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it. Compare them to Facebook (React, etc) or Google (tons of dev tools) or Microsoft (VSC, TypeScript). What does Amazon have? Firecracker, kind of? And now a fork of ES because that's the only way they could continue making money off it without violating the license a small startup put in place to stop them?<p>Well, good for Amazon, I suppose, but I find myself instinctively disliking them for this. I'm not sure what the solution is. Hopefully technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform will encourage big customers to become at least cloud-agnostic, if not cloud-independent. At the very least it would be great if Amazon / Google / Microsoft stopped gouging bandwidth at such absurd margins. Or not. Maybe it will be their downfall as startups differentiate along those lines. That would be ironic, coming from the originators of "your margin is my opportunity."<p>Personally I'm doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in. It's great to be able to deploy to any cloud, if you value either robustness or flexibility.
Is there any good that done by Amazon to support OSS? Like ever. They started with cloning MongoDB and now Elastic with actually zero contribution to the community regardless of their insane profits. This is a clear single. Amazon can always clone and redistribute any open source software then lock it in for AWS. If we've started to witness declining in OSS, well at least we know now who started the wave.
I have mixed feelings about this server side license stuff that mongo db started. Imagine where the internet would be today if the creators of apache and mysql had tried to prevent shared hosting providers in the early days of the web from using their software
I feel Amazon took the feedback from the DocumentDB/MongoDB fiasco to heart and made positive change in their approach.<p>DocumentDB is a closed source proprietary database created by Amazon to emulate the MongoDB API. Think Google's Dalvik runtime vs Sun/Oracle's JVM.<p>This time around we have an open source fork of ES with big backers all contributing and very permissive licensing.<p>In both cases, Amazon gets to implement AWS-specific upgrades to management to depend heavily on EBS replication rather than application-layer replication. Would it be nice to have that secret sauce that makes Aurora/DocumentDB so nice to use compared to self-hosting or RDS? Of course. Do we have to have it to consider using or contributing to the open source software? No.
The new name clashes with the Open Search Foundation.<p><a href="https://opensearchfoundation.org/" rel="nofollow">https://opensearchfoundation.org/</a>
It's been said that the best way to fortify your business is to use your clout to make the world inhospitable for adjacent businesses.<p>As someone who is not currently in the cloud, that idea strikes me as being very pertinent to what's happening here. Increasingly many technologies are becoming cloud-only, or have non-cloud offerings that are decidedly second-class. Elastic offers on-prem support. I doubt Amazon will be doing the same with OpenSearch.<p>It may be a subtle effect, but it's pushing the world in a direction that makes me uncomfortable. If it's harder for non-cloud-based companies to maintain non-cloud-based offerings, then that will push the industry even more toward being dominated by SaaS products. And these products often leave clients and users locked in, with limited control over their own data, and, by extension, reduced ability to control their own fates. What I worry about is that we may be witnessing a return of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, only in a new form that's even more dangerous because it's harder to see.<p>I appreciate the discomfort people have about the SSPL. It is a departure from the original ideas behind FOSS. But, at least as I see it, those open source principles were never an end in and of themselves. They're a means to a greater end: digital autonomy. To the extent that very large companies seem to be learning how to co-opt FOSS in order to re-assert control, FOSS's ability, in its current incarnation, to serve that end may be waning.
From the announcement: "You should consider the initial code to be at an alpha stage — it is not complete, not thoroughly tested, and not suitable for production use. We are planning to release a beta in the next few weeks, and expect it to stabilize and be ready for production by early summer (mid-2021)."<p>Given that Amazon announced the fork in January and they don't expect it to be production-ready until summer, I'm guessing they've underestimated the amount of work required to package and distribute a product as complex as Elasticsearch. Given that, I doubt they will be well-equipped to keep pace with new feature development.
I have been perfectly happy with ES cloud services. Is this done by honest intentions from AWS or is it simply based on the fact that ES are making a lot of money of the cloud services?
Will be interesting to see the resources that AWS will throw at this. You can get a sense of the resource that elastic.co is throwing at elasticsearch at<p><a href="https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=github%3Aelastic%2Felasticsearch&v=repo" rel="nofollow">https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...</a><p>I'm currently indexing the fork, so in about an hour or two, I'll provide the insights for the fork as well.
I think even with their "permissive usage guidelines" of the OpenSearch trademark, their own way of how they've been doing Amazon ElasticSearch would not be allowed... For example, you can't do: `Microsoft OpenSearch`, you have to do "for OpenSearch" or "with OpenSearch compatibility".<p>From their "permissive" trademark policy [1]<p>> You may also use the “OpenSearch” word mark to make accurate statements about compatibility and interoperability using relational phrases such as “works with,” “runs on,” “compatible with,” and the like (e.g., “Foocorp Software powered by OpenSearch” or “Foocorp Software for OpenSearch” or “Foocorp Software with OpenSearch compatibility”).<p>1: <a href="https://opensearch.org/trademark-usage.html" rel="nofollow">https://opensearch.org/trademark-usage.html</a>
Hey All, if you're interested in getting a good understanding of this vs Elasticsearch, we invited the team to give a Haystack LIVE talk where they outlined the details and goals of the project: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_6U1luNScg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_6U1luNScg</a>
OpenSearch was once was an initiative founded at A9, Amazon subsidiary, to create a personalized, cross-service, search engine: <a href="https://archive.is/PCKWq" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/PCKWq</a><p>OpenSearch is from an era when Amazon and Google were covertly competitive. Google didn't get anywhere with Froogle and AppEngine; whilst Alexa and A9 didn't move any mountains.<p>Code: <a href="https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch</a>
I'm happy to see a couple of good choices made here:<p>- Sticking with Apache 2.0<p>- Asking for a Developer Certificate-of-Origin rather than a copyright assignment<p>This bodes well for the future of this fork. Amazon also has the resources necessary to keep up consistent and quality maintenance of a project on this scale.<p>Elastic would definitely like you to view AWS as the Big Bad here, but their response to the Elastic betrayal is very good, and I would like to see more like this in the future.
I think this thread is much about shared source licenses like SSPL vs. "orthodox" open source licenses like GPL.<p>Based on the link below it seems to me the difference is that SSPL etc. have a clause which prevents me from making money by selling the use of the licensed software over the network for instance.<p>GPL puts some rather strict rules on users of copyleft software, mainly that you MUST distribute your modifications with the same license.<p>What I don't quite get is why adding a rule that says "if you make this software usable over the network you must make it usable for free" would be considered categorically less ethical than GPL.<p>GPL says you must give out your modifications for free.
SSPL says you must also give out the rights to use that software for free as well.<p>Isn't SSPL more ethical in the sense that it requires you to give out more for free?<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-source-abuse/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-s...</a>
I feel this is a very scary trend starting. I have not come across a single founder in the last 5-6 years who does not start with AWS credits or is not craving for them.<p>AWS is a monopoly and they use their cash to buy early customers. Initially it was Amazon's money, but now AWS has enough cash of their own to push whatever they wish to. The same goes for Google and Microsoft<i>.<p>AWS directly building up the software side of what started out as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is only going to hurt software vendors. We can only expect new software players or ones with low capital to restrict their licenses even more.<p>Open source licenses are not only for ideological freedom, but very necessary for companies (end users) to integrate and modify products on their own. We will migrate more toward source-available licenses instead since big giants are going to corner the small companies.<p>(</i>) Edits
I want to love elasticsearch and they keep making it harder. On top of this open source backflip, their sales staff would put Oracle to shame. Pressure tactics, making clients pay 5 figures for few hours of ES consultant time, very expensive training/certification (and cert expires every 2 years) - among few of them.
AWS gave us consultant time for no charge, guess who we picked to run our ES load.
It's nice that they announce it and that there's some sort of future effort promised. From my perspective we might not upgrade the elastic-stack (with current Elastic projects) too far to not bacome accidentally incompatible in case we want to make a switch.
One of the more discouraging aspects of being an OSS developer is that successful companies that use your software never consider contributing to the OSS developers. I suppose that is the nature of business though. Take what you can get.
Will be interesting if other cloud providers (Google, Azure) offer this or you see other software companies offer support for it.<p>Will also be an interesting case study if the community shifts to this project and it dwarfs elastic for features.
Are people actually required to use ELK? What are your use cases?<p>The interface is completely cluttered and it takes loads of resource and it feels like it's waiting to be replaced with lighter and more focused products.<p>Graylog (though it uses Elasticsearch internally) does a decent job at log handling and creating all the visual items out of logs and Grafana/Loki can do quite good at it as well with a very small memory footprint.<p>Besides, most of the "business intelligences" aren't actionable but just some visual arts you wouldn't need but to stare at when you're bored.
I wonder if ES had originally been AGPL licensed would that have helped them? If Amazon adapts AGPL code to integrate it with their own infra=structure doesn't that in fact mean that all of Amazons' software-based infra-structure would become AGPL as well, and thus easily reproduced by Google Cloud, MS Cloud, Oracle Cloud etc.? Or even inhouse? In other words wouldn't it mean it would be easy to replicate the Amazon Cloud-business (on a smaller scale)?
Am I missing something here? Elastic says this is a free sw, which you can install and use, but if you want someone else to manage the hosting, we are practically the only option.<p>How did that became an 'ethical position' ? If I am OSS dev, why should I contribute to them vs OpenSearch?
> and we don’t ask for a contributor license agreement (CLA)<p>Makes me wonder what these are for (copyright transfer) and why they decided it’s not needed. It also makes me wonder if this sort of thing has ever been taken/tested in court or if it’s paranoid friction with little value add.
anyone know if OpenSearch still uses "/" as a special character? Largest pita when trying to use ES for logging web applications and quite frankly, made it near unusable.<p>If Amazon fixed that, I would be firmly on their side. Also, any improvement over Kibana would be welcome.
They took over FreeRTOS for good, CBMC for good, with Xen they were a bit unlucky, but it still has much better security than KVM, and now they take over ElasticSearch.<p>Good Open Source efforts, much better than until a few years ago.
Just want to mention that "OpenSearch" is/was also an AWS^H^H^HAmazon initiative for websites to expose a search URL to browsers in HTML metadata, similar to exposing an RSS feed URL. They may want to consider renaming it to avoid complete and utter confusion, like searching "OpenSearch" (no the other one) using "OpenSearch" (no the ES fork).
Imagine if they went after Mongo next?<p>Atlas is a virtual monopoly for Mongo solely due to SSPL, and it has created a ridiculously overpriced ecosystem for hosted and managed services, and tooling around it.<p>Parking the technical merits to one side, considering the sheer number of devs and early-stage products that are built on Mongo, I'd love for someone to go after them next.
Perfect case for a megacorp destroying open source plus business models. I start to hate amazon with a passion. Craziest thing is they are not paying taxes in Europe though they dominate the market.
Amazon needs be broken up. It's too big and too mighty.
What is the sell for ES over something like the fulltext search built into Postgres, considering that the cost of adding another dependency is not insignificant?
Irrespective of how big Elastic is, this is an escalation of Amazon's behaviour of suppressing the tough weeds of competition.<p>> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Maybe Amazon treating open source developers like it treats its blue collar workers will open people's eyes about working conditions in 21st century American capitalism.
They also could sponsor Elasticsearch alternatives in Rust - Sonic[1] and Toshi[2]. Even more, integration[3] with Vector.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/timberio/vector/issues/988" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/timberio/vector/issues/988</a>
So as someone who has heard about Elasticsearch for years and years, and seen all this, right this moment I've decided to see what it really is.<p>On their home page, "Why use Elastic search?", the reasons are basically:<p>* It's fast!<p>* It does a lot of stuff!<p>* It has some tools to visualize data!<p>* It's distributed!!<p>I have to say this is not very appealing to me since it sounds like something any database could do.