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Comment by fiberoptick | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where this leaves the AWS-sponsored Open Distro for Elasticsearch? (https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/)

Seems to me that they have no choice but to hard fork off of the last Apache-licensed release of Elasticsearch et al

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They'd have to re-license Open Distro to SSPL instead of Apache 2.0 to remain complaint, but I don't know if Amazon would be willing to do that. Considering they have to solve the hosted Elasticsearch problem anyways, I think either a fork or a one-off deal with Elastic is on the horizon.

Presumably this change will impact Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch service, but why would it impact Open Distro?

Although, I guess there will not be much of an incentive for Amazon to continue development of Open Distro after this change.

It means that any “derivative work” will need to also open the management layer under SSPL. The management layer is AWS, so this puts OpenDistro in a tight spot. I’m not sure forking would work - as Elasticsearch evolves Amazon would not be able to copy features anymore. In the search space, this would be a very hard pill to swallow.

they’d still be able to innovate their own fork, but they will no longer be able to pull future upstream elastic code into it. so it becomes more of a hard fork. if elastic continues to innovate it will be difficult for open distro to remain competitive with it.

AWS ES has major problems, have been a pain us for years. Pretty sure they cannot be competitive with a hard fork

My guess, from AWS experience, is that you're right. What specific pain points did you experience?

Other services are great. Aws es is just put together. It goes down, blue green updates take forever, arbitrary disk limits etc.

Yeah at my last gig we used AWS’ offering. Blue green deployments would hit a race condition and the new cluster would never come up, requiring a ticket to be filed. Important APIs and settings were disallowed.

Horrible service. That’s why it’s ironic that Elastic just shot themselves in the foot with this licensing change. So foolish.

I don't think AWS really cares. They "bought" (the devs of), and killed, blazegraph to make Neptune. And since, Neptune doesn't really evolve much either so both projects are stagnating. Enough to say they can do "graphs" but not enough to really do anything useful...

The source code for the various components that make up Open Distro is already freely available under an Apache 2.0 license. This change will have zero direct impact on Open Distro. The SSPL restrictions apply when the licensed software is used to provide a service.

It is the AWS Elasticsearch Service that will be directly impacted. It will be limited to Elasticsearch 7.10.x as a foundation. Unless of course AWS makes available the code that they use to orchestrate and manage that service. Assuming that that code is sufficiently uncoupled from other systems, they could perhaps do exactly that. It would certainly be an entertaining counter-move from AWS.

It looks like the way the license is written, they would have to release the source of the entire AWS console, and possibly everything that is AWS.

IMO, the SSPL's cloud provision is a "Japanese No", it is so wide in possible interpretation, that only the Eclipse foundation could actually provide such a service.

> The SSPL restrictions apply when the licensed software is used to provide a service.

Wrong. It only affects code going forward. Elastic can't change the license of existing code.

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