Comment by bradknowles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradknowles | Hacker News Reader

They’re not going after the same customers. AWS is targeting people who are already using AWS and who want to use an ES type service, but without managing their own servers running the ES software. They want something they can plug into their CloudFormation templates and let AWS do all the low-level admin work.

ES the company is going after people who want all the latest bells and whistles and geegaws, and are willing to build and maintain their own ES clusters to make that happen.

Yes, there’s some overlap in the middle, but not much.

And no matter how bad the ES service is on AWS, it will always have a large customer base who will choose it, simply because it’s good enough, as well as easier and lower administrative overhead.

The OpenSearch thing is new. So far as I know, they didn’t create their own forks of MySQL or Postgres and then try to build communities around that. But that is what they’re doing with OpenSearch. IMO, that’s a mistake. They’re better off working with the ES community and contributing changes back to an existing community, as opposed to trying to build and maintain their own separate but equal community.

Sometimes forks are a good idea. Sometimes not. Sometimes those forks live on, and sometimes not. This is a case where I think the fork is a bad idea, I believe it is likely to not live on, and I think a lot of harm will be done on both sides of that war, above and beyond whatever else might have happened if they had just chosen to support the existing ES community.

But that’s just my personal opinion.

Amazom were contributing changes back to Elasticsearch before the license change - the license change basically explicitly says "you can't run this as a service and sell it to people".

With this in mind what could Amazon do? Their options were: A. Stop selling their Elasticsearch service, or B. Fork Elasticsearch.

This change from Elastic is really shitty though, and sort of proves that all their finger pointing at Amazon saying that they're acting against the spirit of open source was all bullshit.

Those aren't the only options. AWS could've paid to license the software.

> Amazom were contributing changes back to Elasticsearch before the license change

Not very many by my count; something like 2 patches/month on average. I mean, of course this is great, but there are several ES-based companies that contributed more, and about >95% of ES was written by Elastic.

> about >95% of ES was written by Elastic

Nope.

I'm not sure what the numbers are, but Elasticsearch is based on Lucene, so a large chuck of what makes up Elasticsearch predates Elasticsearch.

It's based on looking at the ElasticSearch commit log; some details in [1].

Lucene is not included in this; as far as I can tell it's just imported as a dependency. I mean, obviously Lucene is an important part, but by this standard something like "Jane Doe wrote about half of Docker" would also be "wrong" because we'd have to count the people who worked on cgroups and all the other Linux stuff Docker uses, all the Go dependencies, etc. Realistically, almost everything we do is based on various things other people did. "To make an apple pie from scratch we must first invent the universe."

Maybe that would be fairer/better to also count Lucene, but that's a different discussion and wasn't really my point, which was that almost all code in the ElasticSearch GitHub repo comes from Elastic employees, that Amazon never contributed all that much code, and that based on this plus the severely reduced levels of activity of OpenSearch vs. Elastic don't really paint the most rosy long-term prospect for OpenSearch vs. ElasticSearch.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...

There is no more committing to the ES community for AWS. I agree a single project would have been great but lets just be clear the necessity for the fork was entirely on Elastic Co.

> The OpenSearch thing is new. So far as I know, they didn’t create their own forks of MySQL or Postgres and then try to build communities around that. But that is what they’re doing with OpenSearch. IMO, that’s a mistake. They’re better off working with the ES community and contributing changes back to an existing community, as opposed to trying to build and maintain their own separate but equal community.

MySQL and Postgres are still open source. ElasticSearch is not.

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