Ten years ago I would be very hesitant adopting ElasticSearch if I knew that they were the only ones allowed to maintain a cloud solution of it. The fact that is was liberally licensed made me less afraid of vendor lock-in.

In my opinion it seems like Elastic wants ElasticSearch to still be perceived as the fully open source project (with all of its good connotations) it once was.

> AWS is the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how blaming Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is anything other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is OSS at all, and we should want an environment where companies that produce OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for wanting to get paid for the work that they release freely into the world.

It's okay to release things as non-OSS. It's also okay to release something as OSS first, and then regret later. But it's super weird that they're painting this picture of AWS being a big evil company when they're just doing exactly what is expected. Can't they just say "we're not able to build a company around the liberal license" instead of this "we're such an open company and we love open source and AWS is ruining everything" talk?

To me, that's exactly what you're saying you expected from liberal licenses, but it's delivered by a restrictive license, using the restrictions popularized by GPL licenses. This makes ElasticSearch more open source, rather than less, because now anyone who uses it has to "open" their source code. That's the premise of GPLv3 in a nutshell, and I'm hard-pressed to understand how it's a drawback here.

Have I misunderstood and their new license somehow reduces the openness of their source code to the world?

(And if we're following the "definitions" then ElasticSearch is no longer "open source" since that has a strict definition, but it's probably not so relevant in this discussion.)

I also don't really object to their license choice at all; what I object to is how they're framing the discussion. This license change is all about business: They want to be able to sell their cloud service without competition. That's perfectly okay, but there's no need to hide this. And certainly no need to "shame" Amazon for building a business on top of something Elastic open sourced.

> Have I misunderstood and their new license somehow reduces the openness of their source code to the world?

I think their new license just shows that it's all about business. If they really wanted an open source license which stimulates anyone to share improvements to ElasticSearch they could have picked GPL. As of now, any big company (Facebook, Google, etc) can create an improved internal fork of ElasticSearch which none of the community will ever be able to take advantage of. And why are they fine with Facebook/Google doing this? Because it won't jeopardize Elastic's cloud offering.

In addition, their new license also makes it harder for other people to build businesses on top of ElasticSearch. Imagine that I invest a ton of time and effort into creating a new management layer which is capable of scaling ElasticSearch drastically better. Something completely novel which looks at current trends of traffic and automatically moves shards around. Non-trivial stuff. Well, sorry, there's no way of building a business on top of this idea.

GPL does not require releasing source code or patches except to those whom you give the binaries. If Facebook creates an improved internal fork of GPL code and runs it inside of Facebook, they can keep their sources/patches private and be in compliance with GPL.

There is a practical advantage to upstreaming your patches: because it makes maintenance easier if those patches are accepted and merged upstream, but there's no legal/license requirement to release them for code that you keep internal to your company.

If ES was under AGPL3, AWS' ES server would absolutely fall in scope.

The Facebook example, however, is tricky. You are technically right: the FSF calls this the Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) problem[1]. But Facebook can run an AGPL3 project and, as long as they are careful, will not need to expose any changes they make to it.

In practice, Facebook and other big corporations are extremely unlikely to do this. If they get it wrong, they've inadvertently accepted a license they didn't mean to, which could open them up to liability or worse – relicensing things. To prevent this you get a set of approved permissive licenses that are always kosher. If you want to stray off the path there is a set of massive flaming hoops you have to jump through (VP approval? legal review? just the beginning of your fun!) that are designed to convince you that you should chose a different path that involve more permissively licensed software.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

If this was AGPL, I'd agree with you. IANAL, but SSPL is so broad that it could be construed to cover the Linux kernel, which is a no-no. :(

SSPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service"

GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you release binaries

SSPL+GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service or if you release binaries

As long as the source is duly published under the merged SSPL+GPL conditions above, anyone trying to bring a GPL case against Elasticsearch-SSPL-on-Linux-GPL may discover that their judge refuses to enforce the GPL's hostility clause, because the SSPL strengthens the intent of the GPL without weakening it in any respect. We'll never know until someone gets to a judge, though, but my armchair speculation bet is that the "can't combine this license" clause won't hold up when the combination increases the total amount of Copyleft in play without decreasing it in any regard. I hope someone takes this to court and doesn't settle, or else we'll never find out :)

(I'm not your lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

AGPL is okay.

I'm not hiring a lawyer when I'm selecting a few tools to benchmark. I'm not using EC until I've had the license reviewed by a lawyer. Ergo, redis or similar.

By leaving it grey and a little open to intrepretation they know that AWS lawyers will have to advice AWS to avoid it because it might open them up to legal attack.

That’s my attitude towards most of these license changes or “open core” pivots. These companies want all the good will and community contributions of “open source” while still being able to wield intellectual property protection laws against other companies who dare compete against them on unrelated, commoditized services like hosting.

But surely it's only a conundrum if the primary goal of a software project is for a single company that has the same name as the software project to exclusively make money by selling hosting and/or support for that software while still using an open source license to attract a community of developers to work for you for free. I'd argue that this conundrum is easily resolvable: either have an open source software project for which anyone can sell support and hosting, or have a software company that develops proprietary software and sells it and related services.

Almost every user would have been free to use it exactly as they do today.

I would be much more hesitant choosing an storage solution if I knew the parent company has problems monetizing upon it.

You should be hesitant about choosing any mission critical product where you don't know how the vendor will make money. This is even the case with stable vendors. How many products has Google killed over the years because they could figure out how to make them profitable (enough)?

HN never ceases to amaze me. This is a post on pattern of exploitative and anti-competitive behavior of AWS. Somehow HN crowd found a way to whine about Google. Every single day multiple anti-Google posts on HN front page was not enough.

This. It is too bad they couldn't have satisfactory financial success building on open source and it is their right and perfectly fine to switch to a different model, but their justification as well as the SSPL dual licensing muddle the water unnecessarily.

At least the blogpost clearly states it is no longer open source, but then it goes "it's just definition, we're actually totally free and open, just, you know, not OSI free and open". SSPL software is not free software, it is not FOSS. Calling it "free and open software" is misleading at best.

The legal team for Fedora expressed this well, I think:

> It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users. Additionally, it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt towards commercial users of software under that license. To consider the SSPL to be "Free" or "Open Source" causes that shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem, even though none of them carry that risk.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]...

I think it is this discrimination that makes in not as free or as open as AGPL and GPL.

If SSPL discriminates against a "field of endeavor" that is making proprietary software, or against "persons or groups" that are proprietary software developers, all copyleft licenses do. That was the point. Here's Richard Stallman on the GPL:

> I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

The quote from Fedora perfectly encapsulates the difference between the OSI review process as people perceive it and the OSI review process as it really was. Are we judging license terms, or what we believe to have been in the secret heart of the company that wrote them? What happens when someone else uses the license, as when independent hackers choose GPL, or startups choose AGPL?

Commercial software makers have plenty to fear from GPL, AGPL, and other open source copyleft licenses, because so many of their business models entail slurping up other people's open code, but not sharing their own. Those licenses prohibit building proprietary software with open code, just not if you happen to "compose" a service with network API calls, rather than build a program by copying code snippets, using frameworks, and linking libraries.

Amazon benefits from extended tax holiday. Result: lower cost of doing business.

Amazon appropriates FOSS. Result: lower cost of development.

Amazon knocks off successful products, competing with their own partners in their own walled garden. Result: lower cost of product development.

Amazon allows counterfeit products, fake reviews, and other fraud. Result: lower cost of operations.

Amazon uses gig workers. Result: lower cost of labor.

I'm sensing a pattern...

Amazon's success, their prime (pun!) advantage, is built on aggressively avoiding costs normally incurred by other businesses. They perfected WalMart's strategy.

Sure, they've done some clever stuff. Throw enough spaghetti, some of it will stick. Free shipping with Prime membership is akin to Tencent's freemium (genius). And figuring out how to sell excess capacity was cool.

I'm sure a lot of other leaders would share Bezos' tolerance for risk, commitment to long term plans, if only they weren't micromanaged by Wall St.

I certainly didn't grok AWS for way too long.

And there was plenty of concern trolling about free shipping, eg "how long can they sustain this loss leader?!". Very long when you have free capital, certainly more than anyone else. It fortuitously parlayed into amazing customer retention and upselling. What Prof G (Scott Galloway) has coined the rundle (recurring revenue bundle). Proved so effective, in fact, that everyone's now doing subscriptions for everything.

We saw something similar in the 90s where health care prices plummeted as the now winners developed and convinced the public that their monopolies were good. Now they are able increase prices by 15-20%/yr into the foreseeable future.

This is not a prediction (per se), but a statement that we should realize that monopolistic might be good for the consumer in the short term but bad in the long term.

If you're referring to how Amazon Web Services was born out of the excess server capacity in their eCommerce service, this has been debunked as a myth [1]

Bezos knew what he was doing.

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

HNers praise how great Amazon is for Graviton.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for leaving Azure and GCP on the dust.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for FOSS project XYZ.

HNers bash Amazon because yet another project made the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses.

Yep, I am seeing a pattern definitely.

I do not criticize or defend Amazon's parasitic relationship with FOSS. Frankly, I don't yet see how it can be any other way. I just merely acknowledge the plain truth. And that Amazon is better at this than the other belligerents.

While I'm a very happy Amazon Prime customer, I'd never be an employee or otherwise do business with Amazon. I just feel like there's no way for me to benefit proportionally. Per the parable of the lion's share.

> ...the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses.

Go on.

I'm hoping someone, anyone will discuss Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ) advice.

I have three projects in my back pocket. Once seen, their secret sauce is trivially reproduced. I can think of no way to publish them as anything other than FOSS. Not even as a service. Nor can I figure out how to pay rent working on them.

Which is a pity. These three tools are pretty neat.

Actually outside of the webdev bubble most companies are willing to pay for software too. SolarWinds in the news for all the wrong reasons now but their bread-and-butter was selling things to big corporations that webdevs would demand for free.

Any time I've seen it, it's glaringly obvious that HN users come down on both sides of the issue.

Pattern-matching detractors of your position as dominant in a particular venue's discussion is a common partisan failure mode. Doesn't mean you have to succumb to it.

On top of that, lots of discussion has become simply low-quality. The comments on technical posts turn into complaining about something not related to the technical content rather about the product. The amount of complaining and whining is through the roof. Mods should look into "Whine Wednesday" type threads to keep the off-topic whinings and complaining invading every single thread.

We should realize that we all succumb to the same biases when communicating in an online forum and exhibit the same tropes - exasperation at the loss of our 'secret hangout', frustration that companies we like get bashed repeatedly, and over-analyzing and drawing broad conclusions from strangers on the internet.

Try to enjoy the good responses and don't get so bothered by the rest! Or maybe there's another community that is more enjoyable out there. Personally I can put up with some of the noise and repeated points like yours because there's still plenty of value for me in these posts. Best of luck.

The requirement to give something back and/or avoid taking profit from the work of others is something the OSS world has a complicated relationship to. GPL is quite clear that there's a requirement to pass on source changes, if not explicitly to give them back, and many people were outraged by even this limited requirement and instead chose licenses which imposed no requirements at all.

Similarly, people want their work to be used for free by everyone .. but haven't really considered that this results in them working for the Bezos fortune, for free. Or the US military, for free.

There aren't simple clear answers to these questions, only a slowly evolving discussion.

Certainly, and I think that if we want OSS to thrive we need to move towards a future where it's easy for companies to make a return on their investment by releasing OSS. I think Amazon and all the "I provide your software as a service" providers eat into that and hinder that future.

Yes, GPLv3 was meant to fight Tivoization, but it never anticipated providers providing services on an OSS product without contributing significantly, in combination with the companies that develop the OSS hoping to make money off the same hosted service that the former undercuts.

Basically, monetization strategies for OSS are few, and one that is beneficial for both the company and the consumer is providing hosted services. A third company that doesn't have to develop the software is usually a good enough competitor, but since the developer has the obvious support/knowledge advantage, they can still compete. This breaks down when Amazon comes in with its lock-in advantage and sucsk all the money away from the developer.

This is why we're seeing these new licenses, because there's no way currently to be "OSS except Amazon". I think we do need to figure out some way.

Well, the so-called "service provider loophole" was certainly well-known when GPLv3 was drafted. That's why AGPLv2 was created some years prior. IIRC early GPLv3 drafts contained AGPL-style language, but several of the companies involved in the GPLv3 drafting process (such as Google) objected, and those clauses were withdrawn from the final GPLv3.

It isn’t a limited requirements. There is a very real legal risk that using GPL software in an enterprise code base means you have to open source of your entire code base. That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used.

And this, right there, is how MySQL AB was purchased for a billion dollars in 2008: you dual-license your software. Release it under a copyleft license that bigco's don't want to touch (AGPL3 is tempting today!), and offer a commercial license that gives your customers the freedom to use it as they need.

GPL allows you to "use" but not "make derived works".

Plenty of companies use Linux... this seems like something people worried about in the 90's but have now generally accepted.

You're sadly right that many big enterprises purport to believe there's some special extra risk unique to the GPL, but you're wrong to say it's a "very real legal risk"; there's no reasonable basis for believing that at all.

Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic even existed. They couldn’t have released it as closed source because they weren’t there to release it at all.

It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene.

I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn’t like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work.

That "one guy" is the CEO and founder of the company. You are making it seem like some guy developed an open source database, and a company later came around and built a business out of it, when that wasn't the case.

Most open source to commercial success stories like Kafka, Mongodb, and Elastic do seem to follow similar path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#History

Any money made from here on out is not based on the work of creating the software, but on helping people use it. If Amazon does a better job of that than Elastic, than they should win the competition.

You're asserting a comparison where none was made.

If that isn't what you meant then perhaps we are in agreement. :-)

I wasn't trying to imply anything about where most of the functionality was coming from.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch

While I still think this phrasing is unfair, it certainly seems to be the consensus. At least when measured by Google search results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Elasticsearch%20is%20a%20...

Because no other companies build on a foundation of open-source software today? I think that describes every company. Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not just components of it, but does that really matter?

I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here.

I don't really know where I fall on this subject. Companies need a route to monetize when developing open source products. It feels like AWS has been closing many ways to do that. Short term it might feel good for us end users, but long term it's probably bad for the ecosystem.

I am happy to let them compete to see who can offer the best value.

If Linus all of a sudden woke up tomorrow and said "Hey, I just realized that I'm not being paid a cut by literally every single company in Silicon Valley, that is NOT OK, I am going to shift gears and remove non-contributor code and start releasing Linux as closed source from now on", I feel people would be less forgiving than they are to these much less impactful companies. But Linus would be as "right" as they are, arguably more so.

Many of these companies are simply learning that maybe all those "dinosaurs" of the 90s might have been onto something with commercial licensing, which ultimately seems to be what they actually want: to charge money for their software. Sure, it doesn't get you free contributions and ready-made communities, but it gets you money, which is what a company is supposed to do. And that's fine! It's just not Open Source.

> - You may not distibute[sic] this for a fee, not even "handling" costs.

Also I think the GPL was pretty important to the kernel, since many companies, especially in the 90s, probably would have kept contributions private and their code closed without that gentle push.

OTOH maybe eventually most people would have switched to FreeBSD (or whatever free *BSD would have been the "mainstream" choice), just like they switched to Linux in our universe, since they thought that whatever value add provided by some proprietary unix wasn't worth it anymore.

In a hypothetical copyleft-free universe, sure, there would be a lot more companies using OSS to create proprietary products without having to think about what is a derivative work, linking and distribution restrictions. OTOH all those proprietary companies playing the "commodify your complement" game against each other would ensure that the quantity and quantity of OSS would continually be increasing as well, forcing those companies to continually innovate lest they lose their market to the free OSS alternatives. To repeat, hypothetically speaking, as we don't have an alternate universe to run such experiments in.

And in what concerns x86, they would just support it as well, as Solaris did. HP-UX and Aix also have supported a couple of CPU architectures, as did some of the others.

Just Irix was kind of married with MIPS.

Or Windows would just have won the x86 server room instead.

In any case, there are a couple of major surviving GPL projects, all competition against Linux on the IoT space are BSD/MIT FOSS POSIX clones, ironically one of them being sponsored by Linux foundation (Zephyr), so those around in 20 years will get to appreciate how much of GPL will still be left around.

This should be "quantity and quality"

Perhaps you mean when comparing to the “all Silicon Valley companies” I mentioned, but that still leaves AWS, GCP, Azure, Heroku, and every serverless provider out there as direct comparisons to this situation.

A relevant question is "would they have been that successful if Elastic were 'just another closed source enterprise product'."

Elastic was successful because a lot of companies tried it out for free and then purchased licenses, or because hobbiysts used it on their personal project and then pushed for it at work.

> Elastic was successful because a lot of companies tried it out for free and then purchased licenses, or because hobbiysts used it on their personal project and then pushed for it at work.

That model is not actually incompatible with closed source. You can always distribute binaries with a liberal usage license. And if your model is selling support, that might actually be helpful, since it's even less practical for a 2nd or 3rd party to support software when they don't have access to the source code, so you'd sell more support contracts

I think Amazon's behavior may end up just harming open source, by punishing the idealism that leads companies to try to make commercialized open source business models work.

I'm aware of that, and have even worked with such companies. However, IMHO it's way harder (and less effective) than supporting an open source product. For instance, it's way harder for a 2nd or 3rd party to diagnose and patch a bug if they don't have the source.

You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking.

You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers working to keep those services up and make them talk to other AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to react to any failures.

I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge value in what Amazon offers.

As someone building distributed systems, I'd think you'd appreciate that merely "installing" Elasticsearch wouldn't simply cut it for the scale AWS operates at.

I wish Elastic would have focused on their differentiated offerings instead and had let go of their iron grip on Elasticsearch itself (perhaps by creating a Foundation around it).

Why should we be mad at Amazon for adhering to the terms of the license that the ES developers chose?

Software isn't born under the terms of Apache 2/MIT/BSD/a similarly permissive license. The people who developed it chose that license.

Reducing it to an issue of following license terms is short sighted, it's having negative repercussions on the software ecosystem and it's a dimension that has to be considered beyond merely a discussion on copyleft and the extent of it.

It's really not: the license terms are the root of the problem you are pointing out. We can either voice our (righteous, but ultimately pointless) anger or we can try to analyze what's happening and how to fix it. So let's do the latter.

Amazon offers a fully managed ElasticSearch service running on the core ES code because ElasticSearch was, up to this point, released under the Apache 2.0 license which fully supports Amazon's right to do this.

Amazon offers a fully managed MongoDB compatible database called DocumentDB. It is not based on MongoDB – Amazon reimplemented the core functionality but maintained the MongoDB API layer.

MongoDB Inc. makes the forceful point that it is not a drop in replacement[1] but a rather crippled product that lags behind what MongoDB can do and continues to diverge. This is likely very good marketing for MongoDB and probably helps their company succeed :)

Why did Amazon do this? Why would Amazon use the core ES code but go through a more difficult reimplementation for Mongo?

Because MongoDB's core was licensed under the terms of the AGPL3, but all the drivers that implemented the API functionality were implemented under terms of the Apache 2.0 license.

Beginning to see the solution?

[1]: https://www.mongodb.com/atlas-vs-amazon-documentdb

When you choose an OSS license, you're giving permission to any company or person to exploit your product in any way they want, this is how OSS works.

Amazon is not the only one that can do this and I would be surprised if other cloud vendors didn't also offer ES and other popular OSS software to their customers.

Do you expect that just because you created some OSS you deserve some kind of exclusivity on profits made from it?? If you do, you need to understand you need to use a non-OSS license. This seems to be what Elastic has finally realised, but a bit late.

I know that prominent figures in FOSS have expressed the sentiment that you have to suck it up, but you know, the people actually living through this have a say.

Thus, licensing changes and a conversation on their moral standing.

That seems to be the fundamental problem with this whole tempest in a teapot: people have decided on an idea of what "free software" means in their hearts, and many people think it's about "fairness" and "protecting the little guy". That is noble and good, but isn't extensible to an existing large body of software with licenses that clearly spell out how free they are or are not.

But what is great is that if you don't like the state of affairs you don't have to suck it up: you just have to pick a license that is better suited to your goals.

I have a handful of open source projects on my public Github. They fall into two categories for me:

* Software that is trivial, uninteresting, or easy to replicate: these I've released under the terms of the ISC license (2-clause BSD). I have no expectation it will ever come to much, so I'm happy to free it – if it ever turns up in the license file of the iPhone or a Tesla or something I'll say "cool!" (but it won't because it's not that good ;)) Hopefully someone uses it and it makes their life easier.

* Software that is non-trivial, interesting, or difficult to replicate: I've freed it all under the terms of the AGPLv3 and placed a "business use? contact me about the license" note at the top. If I ever decided to work towards building a product around the software (but I won't because it's not that good ;)) I'd look at a dual-licensing strategy, but in the meantime it's out there for anyone to extend and carry forward and build things on. But I know that the AGPLv3 essentially means FAANG will never touch it because the risk is disproportionate for the reward of using it.

This feels right to me. Your calculus may be different so you can license as you'd wish.

We shouldn't. But you can't have your cake and eat it too, and say "well these are the terms you chose so why be mad at someone following them" and then ALSO say "hey, you can't change your terms!".

They're their terms, they can change them if they want to.

I haven't said that. And as far as I know, Amazon hasn't either. Have I missed something from them?

You seem to be the only person passing value judgements:

> Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I think Amazon is.

This is incorrect: Amazon used Elastic per terms of the license. Elastic didn't care for an infringement on their business, so they've relicensed. No one is in the wrong here.

I'm talking about the general sentiment here. Either Amazon have been playing by the rules and Elastic is within their rights to change those rules, so no problem anywhere, or Amazon has been harming a part of the OSS ecosystem and forced Elastic to make an unpopular change.

> Amazon used Elastic per terms of the license

Maybe I shouldn't have used "in the wrong" and said "is the problem" instead. I don't so much care about whether the rules are being followed as I care that more companies are encouraged to release their software as OSS because they can make money for it. That's a win-win situation to me.

But they can't! Tell me how many companies make profit off purely OSS... RedHat maybe? What else?

And even if they can, they shouldn't be surprised when competitors use their OSS for their own benefit because OSS explicitly allows for that. Making money off OSS is a red herring, just because it works in a couple isolated cases, doesn't mean it's a viable business strategy.

Why the scare quotes? Well, I don't mean all profit according to definition, but specifically the "returns for investors" type. Company profits. Technically you can run a sole proprietorship, and make (say) $100k in profit.. or you could structure as a corporation, pay yourself a $100k salary, and make no profit. It's all the same money, but it's two ways of looking at the portion that I would like to describe as fair compensation to a human for the work they do. When I say "at cost", I don't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to make a living working on OSS; I mean it's fundamentally impossible to get filthy rich with it.

And in my opinion that's a good thing. In my experience, "getting filthy rich" / providing outsized returns to investors almost always comes at someone else's expense. Usually the little guy. It happens when the poor sod paying you can't afford to switch to a competitor, so you're able to wring them dry. The counter-argument goes that we need the "filthy rich" incentive to motivate people to make these things. I think it likely increases the rate of innovation, but I think the amount of cool and useful OSS written by people in their spare time is evidence enough that profit is not a requirement in that area, only financial security.

There is a problem, though, where it's currently very difficult to even make a living wage working on OSS (again, or public goods in general). I think can be solved, and I am working on a project trying to solve this (as a volunteer; we could use help). I'll cut it here (I spent far too much time writing this comment already...), but you can read more at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop

Why is it a win for you?

And then doing stuff like this:

> 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.

That makes it all the more dodgy. The fact that AWS is also the only cloud provider they complain about, and explicitly name others where they don't have these issues with, paints a pretty clear picture imho...

I slice it this way: as a company that is highly invested in AWS it is easier for us to deploy AWS ElasticSearch service than to use Elastic's cloud offering or set it up ourselves. But that doesn't mean I like it. Or are you talking about a different end user?

They are moving onto the "Extend and Extinguish" phase with elastic.

This is, perhaps, exploitation but it seems unlikely they'll kill Elastic ever.

Not sure how good they are with eg MySQL and PostgreSQL, anyone know?

I don't think that's clear. I (and the team I work with) use AWS, like so many of us do. (And the ones who don't very likely use Azure or GCP.)

Why do we give money to AWS (and their kin) every month? I'd submit it's because we're getting value from it. If AWS was actually bad for end users then we, as end users, would walk away.

If you were right, and AWS was bad and Elastic is good, this would be an easy problem. But actually, they're both good. The issue is people who paid AWS to host ES instead of Elastic, and you know who those people are? Us. And with reason!

There are two main differences here.

1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement.

2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you think there is so little differentiation between the product you built and the product you built off of, that you are better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made any meaningful differences.

3rd BONUS difference: It is my understanding that a large part of the core Lucene team works at (or at one point worked at) Elastic[0].

[0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene

2. Amazon adds value here by providing hosting solutions for companies using the elastic search software. So it makes sense to call it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" since that's what it is. I think interpreting this as Amazon built a new competing product but calling it the same name is not the right interpertation. If that's confusing then maybe modifying it to "amazon elasticsearch hosting service" would be the OK thing to do. Not sure if that would make Elastic happy.

3. That's nice of them (really!). Sounds like win-win. But again, it doesn't make anything they do more justifiable.

No one is asking Amazon to share profits with Elastic. Many people do expect Amazon to honor trademarks of other companies. Many people expect Amazon not to package proprietary features as if they were free and open source.

Lucene is a library that makes it easier to provide indexing and searching of "stuff". It's not a commercial product with a sales and consulting team. I can't think of a more apples and oranges comparison.

Elasticsearch is a name of an open source project. Why is calling something "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" a trademark issue? It's not Amazon's fault they called their company after the name of an open source software (the OSS came first btw). Also, IMHO calling it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" is fair since it represents exactly what it is. Would it better if they instead took the code, made some closed modifications and then released a service around it with a new name? My thought is no.

This isn't unusual, many other open source projects trademarked the name of their project. Google has some guidance on why a project might want to do this.

https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#unmanaged-...

Here is a list of open source projects whose name is trademarked by Canonical.

https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks

But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term:

I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good thing for society.

For the longest time I dreamed of creating my own open source tools and products and simultaneously monetizing it to create a comfortable life for myself and maybe even eventually turning it into something bigger, and leave my mark on the world.

However, as the years past and events like ElasticSearch v Amazon unfolded, I became more and more disillusioned on the realistic prospects of such an outcome.

Today, I'm in the process of building something that would probably see more success in terms of adoption and do more good in the world if it's released as open source software, but at this point I've basically made up my mind to release it as proprietary software to have a realistic shot of monetizing it to achieve financial independence and eventually build a company around it.

Basically I've weighed the tradeoffs and chose to put my own ability to capture the value of what I created over trying to maximize the value my software could create if open sourced.

This was not a easy decision for me to make, but I suspect I'm not alone in having thought about these tradeoffs and reaching these same conclusions. And as more and more people witness the struggles of companies trying to build viable businesses on top of open source software, more and more people could make the same decision, and thus society would be robbed of all the value that having these pieces of software as open source could have created.

I think the chilling effect these kinds of case studies have on the proliferation of new open source software, and the loss incurred by society as a whole as a result, is at the core of what we should be trying to figure out a solution for, not some philosophical discussion around who's in the right or wrong.

On the other hand if you open source something with a license that permits selling the software, well... what do you expect? You gotta hand it to Amazon. They’ve really hustled the industry by hosting open source code. The code is free, literally anybody else could have done this, but Amazon did it especially well.

That includes nice people like you and me

It includes reprobates like Amazon

The horrid games they were playing with trade marks is part of why Amazon is a reprobate.

Shay keeps claiming "our users" aren't affected, but who's he fooling? They say, AWS cornered them to adopting dual-license SSPL, what's to say they woudln't do an Oracle in the future (like Sun did with Java and continue to do with their DB offerings?). Slippery slope, sure, but it is indeed slippery for a company struggling to compete with competition and seeking predatory avenues as last ditch attempt to stay alive.

I believe, in all my naivety, that Elastic could have created an Elastic Foundation (like Joyent did with NodeJS, who btw didn't throw a hissy-fit at AWS for Lambda) and invited developers from all walks to shoulder the burden of the core software (which they themselves commoditized by F/OSSing it) so that they could focus on SaaS (like AWS).

I'd like to think, Elastic's real problem is they have hard time competing with AWS in terms of pricing for SaaS (of course, AWS owns infrastructure and so it is a tough battle-front), but if they were paying any attention, AWS Elasticsearch Service was very poor in 2015 and continued to remain so for a long time (it sucks less now), but Elastic's own service wasn't up to the mark, either. I think they misplaced their priorities (see GCP's flawless execution with k8s, managed-k8s, and Anthos) and were caught asleep at the wheel when they could have captured SaaS market away from AWS in those interim years (2015-19) by focusing solely on differentiated features and not on the core Elasticsearch software (which was libre and hence undifferentiated).

Of course, Shay and Elastic know better than I do and I am indeed a grumpy developer who's upset, but I want Elastic to give up their misleading messaging viz. 'doesn't affect / nothing changes for our users'. They're being hypocritical and not doing anyone any favours.

> And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. And no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises.

No, Shay. It does affect the community, who are also the users of the software.

> We created Elasticsearch; we care about it more than anyone else. It is our life’s work. We will wake up every day and do more to move the technology forward and innovate on your behalf.

I see a lot of "We"s and "Our"s. And that's the problem with CLAs and stealing someone else's work. Companies can't tell anymore who's stealing from whom.

Amazon is giving a lot back to the community, though. They are providing a really valuable service when they provide open source software as a service. They aren't giving back to Elastic the company, but it's important to note the difference, because Amazon isn't being a bad actor here. I think it's reasonable for both Amazon and Elastic to act the way they do, and I think the competition between their respective business models will end up in a better set of products available to developers.

In my opinion this is a short-sighted way for Amazon to do business. If Elastic makes every new feature unusable by Amazon, do to licensing restrictions, Amazon's product will fall behind.

No, many SaaS providers have discovered that it’s the back door in the GPL, Google were the leaders in this field. AWS is egregious but they didn’t invent doing this.

They released ES open source so that they could leverage the community + an open source tool (lucene) to build their tool and later on their company.

If not for the open source they would be just a random actor in search and SOLR would likely be a better tool than it is now.

Also by your logic elastic did to lucene what aws did to elastic...

This is a question, and not a informed opinion/suggestion.

I'm really not interested to know who's in the "right" or in the "wrong". I want to know, what's the motivation for opensource if not "reuse my code please"

Then, you can ask "if they get annoyed at Amazon, why open source?" and the answer is "indeed, and now that they realized their mistake they're changing it".

Notably, they're changing it after building a business off the back of many contributors, many of whom expected to be contributing to OSS. Sure, there's a CLA so there's no legal issue, but I'm not sure it's any more morally virtuous than what Amazon's doing. Both are versions of "trying to make billions of dollars off the backs of other people's work".

There's having cake, and then there's eating it. Either you want to retain control over something so you can monetize it to the max, or you want to particpate (and benefit from) the OSS community and build something that benefits everyone.

Amazon took no money from them; they competed on potential revenues.

I think people are upset, not because they don't clearly understand Elastic's motivations, but because Elastic is trying to paint Amazon as the bad guy for using the license Elastic offered. Amazon benefited from Elastic's open license, but so did Elastic. Being open source has greatly benefited Elastic's own business and growth.

That isn't to say that Amazon's size and practices around open source aren't cause for concern, just that Elastic come across as very disingenuous when they try to lay all the blame on Amazon while proclaiming how dedicated they are to "openness".

https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/