Sounds like you've fully shifted to exploiting (without contributing anything) to OpenSearch. I think Elastic will be just fine without your company or Amazon.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
Several years ago, I led a project at a startup to move from Postgres to Elasticsearch for geographic search. I chose Elasticsearch because it had the capability to do geohashing and so it provided a credible alternative to PostGIS for our particular use case. Geohashing-based search is particularly computationally intensive, which is somewhat different from traditional full-text search, which can be memory intensive.
I wanted to pay Elasticsearch to host our search cluster. And I did for a while. But it became clear we were paying for gobs of RAM that we weren't using and we didn't have enough CPU to really cover our search needs. I talked to the head of sales at the time and he said they were working on a plan that would allow us to choose machines that were more CPU heavy but that that was in the pipeline and there was no ETA.
So we switched to AWS and everything worked just fine.
All this is to say, Amazon was not offering the exact same service. They were offering a better service.
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.
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.
> 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.
I disagree with this. Most people use FOSS and do not give anything back, individuals included. The spirit of FOSS is creating things that others will use without compensation. If I release anything open source, it's because I'm donating it as a whole to humanity, including big corps and individuals. I understand that, because I've thought long and hard about what it means to release something with, say, an MIT license. It means you lose having full control of your creation. If I wanted to limit who can use my software, I'll sell it or license it accordingly. Complaining later that your FOSS software was "stolen" or "exploited" or whatever is just sour grapes.
If rando small business or rando dude is just using FOSS software without giving back, whatever people have priorities.
If megacorp is re-boxing it in a closed source manner and making mass profits off of it without dedicating at least some level of engineering hours or money to the project, that's a dick move.
Being unhappy with that situation is totally fine and it's understandable to change the licensing to a more copyleft license to reflect your intents.
That's what elastic did. They essentially went Apache-2.0 -> ... -> AGPLv3 but it took a while for them to figure it out.
And my complaint isn't that people make money off FOSS software or don't give back enough. It's that they make money off FOSS software and don't give back essentially at all while depriving their users of the same rights/licensing terms that the upstream gave them.
In any case, Amazon did give back to Elastic via code commits before the fork, so they didn't just steal the code, they also made it better. I can't believe I am defending Amazon, but this is a hill that I will die on: FOSS means free, as in beer.
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).
I think the word "using" here is doing a lot of work. When talking about an entire application, I think of "using" it as being, well, using the application. But what I think we're talking about here is "using" the application code by selling it as your own product.
I recognize that "open source" is ok with that second way of "using" the code, but I do think it's meaningfully different.
4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1
It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.
This is not the argument at all. Software (open source or otherwise) is not created for free; devs gotta eat, pay rent, etc. The business model of Elastic and similar is to offer a SaaS. They feel that Amazon offering a SaaS is directly competing with their business model, and because half the world runs on AWS it's not too different from Windows shipping IE back in the day killing Netscape. Elastic feels Amazon is eating their pie.
Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.
Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation.
It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that.
But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time.
If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. It’s quite simple.
But it’s ridiculous, I think, to claim Amazon is doing anything wrong by abiding by the license.
Elastic shouldn’t feel that Amazon is eating their pie because they chose to put their pie out with a “free pie for everyone” under ASL. If they feel bad, that may be so, but their feelings aren’t as important as what their intellect should set up.
I'm not really interested in discussing the merits of the argument (or lack thereof); I've done this a dozen times over the last few years and I have no interest in repeating it.
I am just saying your post hugely misrepresented the argument.
That you think the argument is a load of bollocks changes nothing about that.
It’s unfortunate you don’t want to discuss the merits of my argument.
Not to give out advice, but if your aim isn’t to learn and debate and change minds and be changed, what’s your point? Do you just want to make noise or something?
I would like to properly characterize the argument to understand all sides. Because I want more great software to exist in the world. My belief is that the way to do this is to have people create and share, of their own free will. And I want to learn if there’s a better way.
Funny, you're doing exactly what you accused others of: defend Amazon with argument 1. Ah, argument 1 completely misses the point? Well, just defend Amazon with argument 2. Say no word about how you missed the point originally, because the only important thing is to defend Amazon.
This is kinda funny, because I am arguing both sides a bit here in my reply to different comments, mostly because I am not actually sure what my final belief on this topic is.
But maybe we shouldn’t fund open source development via companies whose entire revenue is selling support for that product? I feel like my favorite OSS projects are ones that are created and maintained by developers working for companies whose business model is based on something entirely separate from the OSS project, but who need the OSS project to support that business. They, and many other companies who have the same need, pay developers to work on the project so they can get what they need from it, but they keep it open source because it isn’t core to their business and being OSS makes it easier and cheaper to maintain.
In this way, there is no conflict of interest between the open source needs and the companies business model.
According to a quick search, there are 33M "users" of Linux (I suspect that number is way too low). Only 15k have contributed to the kernel. That's an "exploitation" rate of well over 99.9%.
> According to a quick search, there are 33M "users" of Linux (I suspect that number is way too low). Only 15k have contributed to the kernel. That's an "exploitation" rate of well over 99.9%.
This is very misleading. There is a lot more code than just the kernel for the Linux operating system. If you ran the numbers for a default install of Ubuntu or RHEL that would be far more useful. The Linux kernel requires far deeper skills than a lot of user-and development so it is going to have fewer contributors per year on average.
You're right; that's just an example. Even if we included all components, and bumped that contributor number up to 1M, we're talking about 97% "exploitation". My point was that pretty much every open source project is almost entirely usage vs contribution and that claims of exploiting open source are a non sequitur.
Then why is Elastic opening sourcing their code again? No need to change any part of their business model if things are going perfectly well? Altruism?
