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It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight. They are both multi-billion dollar corporations looking out for their shareholders' interests. "Open source" is being thrown around by both sides as a marketing/goodwill tool, nothing more.

It really is. “Open source” good, “closed source” bad. This is embarrassing.

this is the correct take. AWS and Elastic are both acting out of self interest with varying levels of gains for the customer in each.

I'm about to make a really petty and possibly off topic comment, so sorry for this --

"this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."

I think it comes from a desperation for clarity in a messy conversation.

This is the correct take.

I guess "I believe this is correct." would be more polite. But on a social media site where everything is about prompting the next comment, and no one can unilaterally end any conversation, it's obviously toothless. In that context, the "polite" alternative could come off as tentative.

I hadn't heard "twitterism" before. Is there a list of these? I unplugged from Twitter more than a year ago, and have benefited immensely. But I'm sure I'm missing references because of it.

I think if you read the two parent comments to "this is the correct take", they also take an authoritative mood.

Rather qualifying a statement with "I think", or "I believe", they basically assume some reality to be true and then describe it. And that's ok, as readers we assume that the author is giving their opinion.

So "this is the correct take" should be read as "in the reality that I believe is true, this is the correct take".

Except [I believe] it should be called out to help the author become aware of the rigidity in thought of they are unaware of it. Perhaps they truly believe something is the only truth., and then they can defend their authoritative statement if they wish.

It becomes tiresome to always phrase things with "I believe" or "my opinion".

I agree but I am a firm believer that all things between people are highly situational, including when to inform, when to explain, when to suggest, when to ask, and when to listen. Correcting people can be considered impolite. In discussions marked by conflict, it's often more useful to get the other person to arrive at your conclusion themselves, by simply presenting the information and your evaluation of its meaning. It depends a lot upon the audience, the prior conversation, the circumstances etc. People are marked by a great deal of hysteresis (not to be confused with hysteria lol).

Completely agree. It's a boring reddit/twitter soundbite which contributes nothing

haha —- maybe i’ll add imo next time? good feedback though. i hadn’t considered the phrase to be taken that way

“Acting out of self interest” doesn’t make you the bad guy. In fact, it makes you the good guy because you chose to align your own interests with something that is good. This is why Apple is the “good guy” when it comes to privacy and Google is the “bad guy” (relative to each other at least). Sure, Apple is acting in their own interest when they advertise how privacy focused they are. But they chose to make that a selling point for themselves, while Google did not.

And not for lack of trying, but rather because iAds failed

I personally feel AWS should have collaborated with Elastic long before this. AWS is likely making a ton on the elasticsearch offering.

What’s interesting is a few people working at AWS has decided to be a bully and then now trying to kill a company. There is zero goodwill to the community here. Both parties working off their egos.

I hope they can keep it up and make their solution a MariaDB and not a subpar version of ES.

> It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight

Without Amazon for this would have end up like Qt software .In this case Amazon clearly are the good guys. Although they do it in their self interest, i am glad it happened.

MariaDB came out with the BSL license for projects like maxcale to help protect against AWS nonsense (and the like). The mysql -> mariadb response is completely different, but no less terrible.

This is history repeating itself as Amazon, once again, attempt to gut open source efforts.

For a short while Amazon did contribute to some MariaDB projects.

MongoDB now have similar license and AWS offers compatible API's.

Yet, MongoDB seems to maintain a healthy, symbiotic relationship with AWS [1][2][3].

[1]: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/lp/try2 [2]: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/aws-mongodb [3]: https://www.mongodb.com/mongodb-on-aws

it does feel like the whole issue blew up so much because AWS & Elastic.co are unable to work together. We many never know the details, so can't say who's in the wrong here.

> help protect against AWS nonsense

Not gaslighting, legit questions follow:

It's not clear to me how taking open source software and providing commercial managed services is "nonsense"? Or is it specifically when AWS does it that it's not okay?

Either way, is there something specific at play that makes it fundamentally different from say WPEngine running hosted Wordpress? Is it purely a function of scale?

If a startup decides that Kubernetes is worth providing a managed service for at what point does providing that managed service become "AWS nonsense"? Is there a revenue watermark beyond which what they're doing becomes unfair? Or is k8s ok because it's backed by a mega-corp already?

AWS repeatedly said they were "together with elastic" in service offerings. They apparently were not, so they were just running on elastics coat tails, offering nothing to elastic, and saying they were totally together.

It's hilarious that you picked K8. K8 destroyed dockers ability to make money. They were planning on rolling out their own system, but didn't get it out fast enough and got eaten.

Was k8 nonsense? no, they made a product from the ground up.

Contributor efforts are remaining open source. The change in license goes into effect in the 7.11 release. Code contributed under Apache stays that way.

Typically open source projects have only a handful of core developers - with a large majority being pass-by contributors interested in fixing their problems/use case. Characterizing it to sound like all these developers are being slighted is strange.

Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic.

> Not being able to reap what you sow is a problem with open source. I don’t doubt we are seeing less great software being shared in the open because of it. If we want more useful software shared as open source we should fix this. The Amazon problem doesn’t help. I’m with Elastic.

Simply put, this is a naive and entitled attitude. And here's my proof of that: Elastic is a success story. They gave away software for free and turned it into a $15B business. And yet there's still people like you being apologists for their outright lies and intentionally misleading statements. I find it so incredibly absurd.

Elastic is tricking you into thinking that they are not an absurdly successful business. That's not true.

Oh, and one last time: This license change doesn't even protect their business, so it's totally pointless. It's just a business blunder. The SSPL will not make a difference to Amazon because they're not going to use the SSPL version of the code. It's so simple.

On the contrary, this is win-win for everyone: Amazon now has to make their fork competitive with Elastic's, so they'll have to invest more resources in open source development. Elastic is also still free to grab their Apache-licensed improvements.

Meanwhile, if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

> if Elastic's future improvements are better than AWS', it'll drive use of their services over Amazon's.

Except Amazon has a moat: no egress fees and network effects. AWS is starting the race way ahead.

Elastic doesn't need to make more money than Amazon. They just need to be able to make enough to have a healthy business, and so far they've achieved that. $500MM yearly revenue with 40+% growth is nothing to scoff at.

It really seems like Elastic's motivation here is jealousy more than anything else. Which I understand from an emotional perspective, but from a logical perspective it's a big business blunder they've made IMO.

I totally agree, I think this is great for the community because the writing was on the wall ever since the initial X-pack source-available drama as well as the original OpenDistro drama.

I think this will be better for all involved.

How exactly is what Elastic is doing helping the problem?

> Code contributed under Apache stays that way.

IANAL but I think code doesn’t really belong to contributors if they agreed to sign their rights over with a CLA, no? Which is why I always feel iffy about CLA’s. I get why they’re needed but I don’t like what they enable.

But the code licensed as Apache 2.0 stays that way. The open code doesn't magically become closed source.

So AFAIK it’s not exactly so. One can actually change project license granted they have agreement of every single contributor to do so. Which they do since they had the CLA system from the start.

So theoretically they can even unpublish all the code if they want. It’s just probably not worth the reputation as damage.

IANAL though so I’d be very interested to hear a patent lawyer take on this.

IANAL either but I believe that if you release code under license A you can relicense it to license B, but anyone that obtained the code under license A will be able to keep on using it under that license.

A license is like a contract, and you can’t change a contract out of the blue without the permission of both sides. Otherwise licenses would be useless, as at any point someone could go “aha, I changed my license to the give-me-all-your-money license and you’re using my code, so pay up!”.

Since the license A in this case is an open source license, anyone that has a copy of the software with license A (such as amazon) will be able to share it again under license A. So effectively the old code base will always remain under license A, and only new changes will be fully protected by license B.

IANAL, but AFAIK while Amazon could ‘unpublish’ the code by removing it from their Github or something like that, there is no way to ‘unlicense’ it.

On a project without a CLA, you’ll have to ask permission to every contributor for a use that goes beyond the initially agreed to license. On a project with a CLA, the organisation to which the code has been licensed no longer needs to do that. The situation becomes similar to a project that only has one author and no outside contributors. So they can release a commercial version in parallel, or they can decide to change the license for new versions. But none of this magically changes the licence for old code: code once released stays under the license it was released under. Otherwise the whole system of Free and Open Source licences would be extremely brittle, if authors could just revoke their licences as they saw fit.

If one wants to contribute to something under an Apache license but exclude certain part, one is expected to explicitly point the exclusion out as in “this part is not delivered under Apache 2 license”.

You might want to read the Apache2 license text. It's not that complicated, at least not the in your case relevant section(s)

Classic "externalize costs" (have community build and evangelize for you) then "privatize gains" (now that we're here, we're changing the deal).

Pretty sure that >95% of Elastic's code is created by the company and not external contributors.

Yes, but open-source software adoption and growth is about more than just those who build it, it's about those who use it. Elastic wouldn't exist without the users either.

And Amazon wouldn't have ElasticSearch without Elastic.

Both wouldn't exist without countless hours of paid/unpaid FOSS contributors (Lucene, Netty, Docker, Linux, OpenJdk).

> This is pretty much exactly what happened to MySQL, and now we have MariaDB, which is a better and truly open source product.

This is controversial example, in my understanding MySql creator requested to agree with his terms for all OSS commits, which gave him copyright rights on codebase, then sold his rights to Sun, and only then created MariaDb - OSS fork.

Where is the controversy there? Did he sign a non-compete?

NextCloud and OwnCloud

Jenkins and Hudson

More software is good.

I'd say the MariaDB-is-better conclusion is controversial since the improves to Oracle's MySQL are substantial. At least around Innodb, and disregarding their embarrassingly bad bugs.

> Where is the controversy there? Did he sign a non-compete?

Controversy is that he accepted patches from OSS contributors, but assumed his own copyright on them, then sold his rights to big corp (Sun), which (Oracle) closed some sources, it is probably not very clean behavior.

> Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space.

That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll. You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic at the time of their contributions.

> The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source

Again, did you do a survey of any of these people? Seeing they are Elastic employees I guess they asked for more than just OSS glory... Probably lunch and and a pay check.

> But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.

What would you suggest, at this point in time, that Elastic did instead? They released the projects as OSS 10 years ago - there's no changing that. Now they need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company. I'm honestly interested to hear your suggestion.

Personally I'd theoretically be ok with having contributed long ago, and the company now going SSPL. Not that easy to have known, that far back, how things would turn out.

> need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company

They make lots of money, but also have high salary costs, right. I wonder if you looked at the numbers and growth / profitablity, and concluded that they're at risk, or if you're assuming

Just as Elastic chose their license, and then Amazon took advantage of that, so did contributors decide to contribute under that license. So those contributors do not deserve any more sympathy than Elastic. Both got stuff yanked out from under them. Those contributors shot themselves in the foot.

FROM ORIGINAL POST: >When AWS decides to offer a service based on an open source project, we ensure that we are equipped and prepared to maintain it ourselves if necessary.

You might disagree but to me this sounds like hyperbole; a veiled threat should any other OSS dev decide to change their licensing just to disadvantage AWS.

I think it's juvenile to think that even AWS has the resources necessary to for every OSS product they offer. Think Linux (the kernel) etc. drivers, frameworks, as well as every dependency these projects contain.

That’s not what they’re saying, they offer virtualization services, not Linux as a service.

It's a good point. Imagine if one of those open source projects that Elastic uses licensed there own little bit of code under the SSL. Elastic would flip out.

A question worth asking, has AWS paid retribution to the elastic oss ecosystem with new oss? If so, Elastic are the bad guys.