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Elastic are a $13 billion company. They get little sympathy from me.

They built that value off the back of many other open source products, and with help from the community - all under licenses like Apache 2.0 and MIT.

And now, after building all that value by selling Enterprise and SaaS versions of the software, they decided to specifically target their competitor who was doing the exact same thing.

Without Lucene, there would have been no ElasticSearch. Why does ElasticSearch get to take all the hard work done by Lucene contributors and sell it as part of their own product? This does not sound fair... in the terms you put it.

If this hurts Elastic, they did it to themselves. They don't deserve your support.

Just remember that their valuation does not represent their free cash flow, whether they are profitable at all, etc. It could be that open sourcing something kills your profitability in the back, while boosting revenue.

Elastic is a public company, the financial information is readily available, so no need to speculate.

FY2020 revenue was 430 million, and they spent 220 million on sales and marketing and 165 million on R&D, the total being net loss of 167 million.

In this case, it's understandable that they need to improve their profitability, and laudable that they are not doing so by closed sourcing the product.

It is not an open source product anymore. Source is available, but this is not the same thing.

This is what OSI had to say about it: https://opensource.org/node/1099

"The Elastic projects were offered under the Apache license. Outside contributors donated time and energy with the understanding that their work was going towards the greater good, the public software commons. Now, instead, their contributions are embedded in a proprietary product. If they want to enjoy the fruits of their own and their co-contributors’ labor, they have to agree to a proprietary license or fork."

"Elastic’s current business model is inconsistent with what open source licenses are designed to do. Its current business desires are what proprietary licenses (which includes source available) are designed for."

Because they significantly innovated beyond the core lucene library to solve a major pain of their customers around scaling, analytics, etc., providing customers with extra value.

Amazon appear to be only making minor tweaks to the software and commoditising its running, capitalising on their entrenched audience. It's easy to see why Elastic are annoyed.

> Because they significantly innovated beyond the core lucene library to solve a major pain of their customers around scaling, analytics, etc., providing customers with extra value.

And they've decided that this extra value could be given away for $0, or they wouldn't have released this under an open source license.

> Amazon appear to be only making minor tweaks to the software and commoditising its running

They may be "minor tweaks" but apparently they have a lot of value for some people. I don't particularly care for them and run my own ES cluster. Just as enabling TLS and basic auth are "minor tweaks", but this is what Elastic charges for.

But if there are a non-negligible number of companies using the managed ES service, it means that it has at least some value and that it's good enough compared to the Elastic Cloud offering (I personally don't know how they compare, just that I find both expensive).

This value has been offered by AWS before Elastic's offering. Only now that "not enough people" want to buy the managed Elastic Cloud is it an issue.

To me, these are separate products. Sure, there would be no managed AWS ES without Elastic's product. But Elastic's cloud offering is something that came afterwards, and to me only this particular offering (the managed ES) competes with AWS's offering.

Now, it looks like Elastic will get the worst of both worlds. I only use ES for the logs and needed the authentication. I couldn't really justify the platinum tier just to get SSO, so we made do with basic LDAP. But now that Open Search has those features for free? I don't really have a good reason anymore to stick with Elastic's onerous plan. And no, I've never once called them for the "support" part of the offering, so I'm not really losing anything there.

Yeah AWS ES totally has value. I'm aware ES decided to go with an open licence but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that they did that to try to gain traction and cross-sell other services, such as managed hosting.

If you have a friend round to stay for the weekend and say "stay as long as you want", wouldn't you be annoyed if they were still there 10 years later? There is such a thing as the spirit vs the letter of the law.

> it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that they did that to try to gain traction and cross-sell other services, such as managed hosting.

I sympathize with that, and would say that they took this chance and lost.

But again, what rubs me the wrong way is that AWS is not just selling a "packaged" version of ES for more money, the same exact thing that Elastic sells. They're selling the service around it. Which they built themselves. My client runs an ES cluster on a bunch of fairly fat EC2 instances, which would cost an arm and a leg if they went through Elastic Cloud. Are we the friend who's still there ten years later?

I probably still wouldn't agree with it, but I guess I would have less of an issue with this line of argument if it weren't just about ES but about every [Thing]Service that AWS sells, in particular RDS.

Hell, why is there no outcry about them selling EC2 instances with Ubuntu? Or even "worse", their "custom" distribution (Amazon Linux). Are they sending a check regularly to Linus and / or to the Linux Foundation (or whoever is in charge of Linux as a "product")?

This, to me, looks a lot like a sore loser situation. ES tried to take on AWS selling a service around a product and lost. I understand it stings even worse that said product is their product. But maybe they should've stuck to building an awesome service around Lucene that they could sell for profit. Wait... this sounds familiar, doesn't it?

I'm not saying this is a great situation for Elastic to be in. But I don't like the way they're trying to dance around it and not assume their errors. They wanted to build a second product (Elastic Cloud) around their first (Elasticsearch) and it failed to attract the expected success. Instead of asking themselves why that is, they decided to change the rules of the game. Now, they're of course allowed to do this, Elasticsearch being their product and all. But they can't expect for everybody to be on board with it. Maybe their product sucked compared to AWS' or simply wasn't good enough to warrant the hassle of going through a second supplier or whatever.

I think you nailed it in the last sentence. AWS will one day be able to extract near monopoly profits due to costs of migration.

I expect the ES didn't realise how popular it'd end up being so went open source, and later realised they'd shot themselves in the foot but knew they'd rub people up the wrong way if they went closed source so they kicked the can down the road... And here we are

Solr also addressed a lot of the same problems as Elastic, maybe not all of them. It was harder to configure but the documentation eventually got to be decent. That was some years ago. I don't know the state of things now.

My two cents.... trying to profit via the business of artificial scarcity on an open source project that's going to end up a commoditization anyway, is kinda crappy. If they offered support or implementations or a specific customization for profit, I get it. That way the people doing work get rewarded and people don't end up paying for access to a feature because it's a carrot being used to get money.

> They built that value off the back of many other open source products

Would you opinion change if everything in Elasticsearch was in-house?

I think there is a broader question about spirit of open source licensing here. If I'm building a new DB from scratch, should I choose a true open source license and risk giving up competitive advantage in my ability to monetize it, over Amazon-like companies who have the benefit of brand and scale? Or is it okay to just make the code source-available, which is still better than closed-source?

I like the balanced approach some companies are adopting: make the code source-available initially and automatically transition to a open source license after N years.

Elastic Cloud was always behind what AWS already offerred. Not sure how it is like today, but it was one of blockers for us.

And what AWS offers today is not a huge bar, mainly too many reliability problems, at the 1.5x of bare EC2 cost, a stupid load balancer in front of cluster that abstracts the nodes so you cannot connect to the healthy one yourself and probably load balancer is too late to mark it unhealthy, many hours of blue-green deployment that increases latency considerably, overly complex Cognito for auth.. list continues. Still after all these years, like most half-managed offerings in AWS, ES offering sucks IMO.

Elastic happily used the free software Lucene, community contribution when it was convenient for more than 8 years, but when they surely lagged behind what AWS offers, they switched to this licence. ES cloud was not reasonable price either.

Why it's not fair? The license explicitly allows that. From another point of view, years of contribution is now behind another non-free license and outside contributors would not want to contribute to it.

Hating on AWS sounds cool in HN, but there are many projects starting AGPL now, however Amazon ES has been launched in 2015, there was plenty of time to make the license switch but they did not. They tried licensing parts of it, which made sense (I guess after the IPO, not sure.) but when AWS just implemented those on their own they went this license route and alienated everyone.

Finally, there is not just AWS ES, there were always another ones to offer managed ELK, i.o Logz.io and others who are also supportive of this fork now. Why there were so many providers? Because ES did not provide, and when they acquired another company to provide it, it was not on-par with others, so the situation today.

I must not have been the only one confused how exactly it counts as an Amazon rip-off rather than a community maintained version of the open source part of Elasticsearch. And frankly I'd still be interested if anyone could clarify how exactly this code can be considered Amazon's.

I did however notice that Amazon claims copyright on the github repo, which is interesting I suppose.

> Yet, I am not sure if in that particular case this follows the spirit of the free software.

Eh, the spirit of free software is that the user has several important freedoms. This is true with OpenSearch, but no longer true with ElasticSearch.

The fact that a large percentage of the code was original developed by Elasticsearch B.V is entirely irrelevant to the “spirit of free software”.

Isn't all OpenSource code a "ripoff"? Elasticsearch is based on Lucene, IIRC.

I don't fully agree with your take.

There are two non-free parts to ES:

1. The "support pack", né x-pack, that adds features and support, is billed per node and for a minimum of 5 nodes, adding such "optional" features as centralized authentication, and, until recently, TLS (!) and basic auth (which have been integrated in the basic product a while ago).

2. The hosting part, where Elastic-the-company hosts the service for you. This does not include the "support pack" from 1.

Source: https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/cloud

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Now, as I understand it, Elastic's issue with AWS is the hosting part. I've never used the managed AWS ES, but if I understand it correctly, if you wanted to use any of the "support" features, you would have had to purchase the pack from Elastic.

> Elasticsearch company produced pretty great product, they wanted to earn some bucks on additional features (I think alerts were only in paid version) and cloud hosting for rather reasonable price. And here came AWS, took their product to sell it as their own. This does not sound fair.

This doesn't sound right to me. AWS never sold "Elasticsearch, the product, as their own". They've sold a hosted version of it, the same way they sell a hosted version of Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, etc (RDS — Relational Database Service). The advanced features you talked about were separate.

In this, yes, they compete directly with one of Elastic's offerings, namely "hosted Elasticsearch".

I would understand the outcry against "AWS selling Elastic's product as their own" if there had been a similar outcry for PostgreSQL, Ubuntu, or any of the myriad other services they offer.

The thing is, Elastic put out a product, Elasticsearch, as open source. Now they've put out a second product, "Elastic Cloud", based on the first, and they don't like that other companies are able to use the first product in order to compete with them on the second.

It's like if Ford introduced a "managed car" service, with a driver, and suddenly started complaining that Uber drivers should pay extra for the same Ford car. This is also kind of like the whole "licensed repair shops" thing.

Yes, a Ford car costs money to buy, but it's the same price for everyone, be it a grandma looking to cart around her grandkids once in a while, or a professional driver offering to drive people around for money every day. The price has nothing to do with it, since AWS honored the Elasticsearch license.