And my bet is it's the one most are going to be using from now on. I used to think this was a fairly black and white issue, but now two things have coloured it for me.

Firstly, dick moves like this: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-py/pull/1623

Secondly, I don't buy the argument from Elastic any more. Yes, the ethical thing to do when you're making money from someone's work is at least contribute back. At the same time though, they're making money from packaging it up and selling it _as a service_. That "as a service" part is where they're making the bucks.

A bonus thirdly; OpenSearch really is Open Source, and ElasticSearch no longer is.

FD: I have a friend who works at Elastic, though he doesn't really colour my opinions of things.

> Firstly, dick moves like this: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-py/pull/1623

I understand that this is unpopular, but you can make a very strong argument that it's to prevent weird errors in the future. I'm also guilty of littering my code with Asserts to ensure the universe is working fine.

The alternative is to allow it to work and then you end up with weird issues like when you connect mysql client to mariadb server (and vice-versa): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50169576/mysql-8-0-11-er...

> Secondly, I don't buy the argument from Elastic any more. Yes, the ethical thing to do when you're making money from someone's work is at least contribute back. At the same time though, they're making money from packaging it up and selling it _as a service_. That "as a service" part is where they're making the bucks.

That's just an opinion, yes they have a service, and yes it competes with Amazon. Is it cool for Amazon to take a body of work and sell it without supporting it? Are amazon actually supporting it? Is it the same as Elastic using Lucene? (not really because Elastic submits a the majority of fixes to Lucene, but, you get it).

it's kinda gray, I'm sure Amazon thinks they're the good guy, but it's hard for me to look at Elastic as the bad guy in all this.

Amazon did contribute patches back to elasticsearch. Just not as much as Elastic wanted I guess? On the other hand I do think Amazon was probably in the wrong to call their hosted service Elasticsearch.

It seems especially egregious that AWS claimed their hosted offering was a partnership with Elastic when they launched it: https://twitter.com/kimchy/status/1351534454154543106

Breaking backwards compatability for clients would normally be a massive risk, but Elastic took the risk. It severs the link to OpenSearch, totally. We have 2 ecosystems, now.

We switched to OpenSearch from Elastic, as we have an open source platform. It's actually better than open source elastic - with the security plugin and k-nn plugin (an embedding store):

https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/open-distro-for-elasticsearch-...

We’re looking to migrate from Elastic to OpenSearch for these reasons. We’re a really huge elastic user.

Also the EOL support on elastic versions are pretty aggressive now. It’s been a challenge for us to keep up with it.

Totally agree, and that PR seems pointless as AWS OpenSearch has an advanced configuration option that makes OS pretend to be ES for backward compatibility so not really sure what they're achieving with it.

Maybe don't use an overly generous license if you want to open source, but not really...

I doubt it. Their forum seems pretty dead, Elasticsearch has the known name, etc etc. Seems a bit like MariaDb/Mysql where Mysql are still the default choice for most companies (over MariaDb).

I know some people on hackernews etc are upset with the decisions of Elastic. Suspect most people couldn't care less, even if they are even aware.

> Seems a bit like MariaDb/Mysql where Mysql are still the default choice for most companies (over MariaDb).

[citation needed]. Some Linux distros (notably Debian, Fedora, Arch) only have MariaDB in their repos and will push you towards it, even if you try to ask for MySQL.

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/distributions-which-include-mariad... and look for “replaces” or “defaulted to”.

CentOS even just installs MariaDB when you `yum install MySQL`

I wonder how much money AWS is making off Elasticsearch? The efforts they’re going through seem to be substantial, which makes me wonder just how much it must be.

Alternatively, it must be a strategic play of some kind with the technology behind it, but that seems very unlikely to me.

I'd doubt there's huge money being made by Amazon, but if they give a profit cut to one or two companies that make products AWS offer as a hosted service, then a bunch more will probably also start changing their licensing to match. Putting resources into building an alternative that discourages this is probably not as much as it might appear (there are already plenty of developers at Amazon, and it's unlikely they're all working on other things that need to take priority), so it may be a good investment.

My company uses it and the bill isn't small. I can imagine that other thousands of customers provide substantial money as well.

Amazon's thing is the network effect, not margins on a particular feature.

and tbh it's enough for most of the people. and opensearch supports also OpenID/Oauth.

> OpenSearch is a registered trademark of Amazon Web Services.

Hidden away at the bottom of the page. It's too bad there isn't an Open Source License that protects smaller business from the tech Goliaths.

Elastic-the-company have over 200 million USD in revenue per quarter and its growing. It's not a small company that needs protection.

well, relative to aws they are a small company ;-)