I don't entirely understand this bit.
> we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story.
I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.
What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?
I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find.
Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.
If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.
• Google search volume and quantity of search result pages (blogs, recipes, etc.)
• Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill
• Number of job post listings as a requisite skill
• Social media mentions
It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under management, etc.).
With that said, in the August 2024 listing:
• Elasticsearch is ranked #8 (of 423 systems tracked), with an index score of 129.83
• OpenSearch is ranked #35, with an index score of 16.47
This would make OpenSearch about an eighth as prevalent.
A big question is New + Churning installs. I'd expect a scary portion of the New, and inherently slower rate of Churn are heading to OS instead ES. The curves support that: note that ES isn't substantively growing on that chart. Anecdotally, we see most new installs as leaning to OS in the security industry, which is one of the top money makers for ES/OS.
Opensearch is definitely coming on strong.
That's not true—we're talking about brand value, not financial value of the product. If AWS switched over to offering ElasticSearch again (not that they will) and ditched OpenSearch, I have no reason to believe that their financial numbers would go down a bit.
Brand value is nearly impossible to measure, but to the extent that you can it'd be by measuring perception among those outside the company, not through an accounting of the company's actual revenue.
Think of it this way: the brand LENRUE [0] is worth approximately zero. The company that makes these products could rebrand tomorrow and their revenue stream wouldn't take a hit in the slightest. But the company presumably actually makes some amount of money.
For Elastic vs OpenSearch, the brand value of the two products should be loosely comparable by looking at some measures of public perceptions, and I can't find any measurement that would suggest OpenSearch is in the lead.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/stores/LENRUE/page/24E9713E-AC7E-4269...
Anecdata, but very real.
it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.
like, answer the question instead of evading, surely it cannot be that hard.
One of them is not the company talking about their license choice but a FUD article crying about AGPL which we've seen a million tired versions of.
The Rethink one says
> * Require users who choose to modify RethinkDB to fit their needs to release the patches to the software development community.
> * Require users who are unwilling to release the patches to the software development community to purchase a commercial license.
note:
> * who choose to modify RethinkDB
and
> * release the patches
none of these say anything about problems with putting control planes in front of it.
I have worked with cloud hosting a database where the only feature behind the enterprise license is a load balancer with some dead simple authz plugins.
You can write put any LB in front of it and host and sell it with the same capabilities without violating the OSS license. Adding a "control plane" that sits in front of the hosted database does not require you to publish any modifications unless you actually are running a modified version of the open source software. You would never have to publish your own LB.
Edit: As long as OpenSearch doesn’t start breaking the self hosted use case, I don’t see any reason to consider Elasticsearch again. In fact, ES would have to offer up a significant advantage to overcome the bother.
So they were originally Apache-2.0 which was permissive versus now they are AGPL which is copyleft.
The important distinction here is that if Amazon was to use Elastic directly, they'd have to make their contributions available to users and those users could then upstream those contributions back to Elastic. In the old situation with Apache-2.0, Amazon could take contributions from Elastic but then they kept them themself for the most part without up-streaming.
This forces a give-and-take relationship vs a one-way relationship.
Also importantly now that Elastic is AGPL they can integrate anything they want from OpenSearch's Apache-2.0 licensed projects but unless OpenSearch becomes AGPL as well, they can't pull any contributions from Elastic.
There going to be some hard irony here, of making such a fuss about it before, when it was someone else doing it, and then doing it themselves.
We’ll see. Maybe they’re principled enough not to rip off the open search contributions.
If not, you’ve really got to believe there’s no sincerity left at elastic.
I guess time will tell; I’d like to believe they’re better than that.
Now you have two open source projects and one has a copyleft license and the other has a permissive license.
Taking contributions from the permissive to the copyleft project isn't ripping off contributions. It's using open source software and collaborating in the FOSS ecosystem. And Amazon would be free to pull contributions back the other way just as well as long as they agree to the mutual terms of the AGPL (which is by all means a FOSS license).
Contrary to what other people are saying in this thread, I would not say it has better branding than ElasticSearch and that ES has lost its battle. Outside AWS OpenSearch is still not a big contender
Altho i believe it does go back to the license attached to the product.
Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like the car. But wholesale is a completely different situation.
I’d say one is marketing, the other is misrepresentation.
There's not really much actual law at work here, it's all civil matters.
A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than copyrights are meant to prevent.
The trademark law doctrine of nominative fair use allows you to describe your product as a hosted version of the ElasticSearch codebase, which provides the substance of the right you were describing, and it's also why you can describe the Toyota car you're selling as a Toyota, both without needing permission from a rights holder.
In the car case, you can also reference the product by name as a Toyota product because it is the same product Toyota sold, just being resold by you. But in the hosted service case, you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you call your service ElasticSearch Service without their permission.
This works similarly for lots of software products and services, even other free and open source software projects. Debian has a trademark policy and exercises oversight of modified / derived / integrated versions shipped by the major public cloud providers to make sure that it's consistent enough with Debian's software freedom values, expected functionality, and quality standards to be called Debian, using trademark rights as the way they have that leverage.
At the same time, the cloud providers do not need trademark permission from Debian to redistribute unmodified official Debian images under the name Debian, or to derive from them without using Debian in the product name. (As with the ElasticSearch example, they can still use the word Debian in a fair and accurate way when describing the nature of any derived product they make without trademark permission.)
Elasticsearch and Redis are private companies that fund most of the development themselves.
When Amazon sell Elasticsearch and Redis, they are in direct competition with its creators.
Obviously such a situation isn't sustainable in the long run, and as such both Elasticsearch and Redis (and to my knowledge also mongodb) have changed their licenses to avoid that cloud providers sell their OSS product without paying a license or otherwise contributing back.
In the case of Elasticsearch and Amazon, Amazon even used the Elasticsearch brand to sell their own version.
As I see it it's a good thing that cloud providers are forced to take part in maintaining the OSS software (forked or not) that they are cashing in on.
Postgres’ license is similar to BSD so even if Microsoft made and was the sole developer and sold it, anyone could distribute or sell it or whatever regardless of who contributes. Similar to Elastic’s old license and why Amazon was legal in what they did.
Amazon (and most all large companies these days) do a ton of OSS dev, but that doesn’t matter. The license of the various software counts.
> you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you call your service ElasticSearch Service without their permission.
I don’t know. The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing. Maybe the exact wording matters and the service name was “AWS managed elastic search” or whatever. I’m sure the Amazon lawyers knew how to name it.
This feels analogous to “Amazon Linux” where it’s clearly Amazon’s version of Linux (which is also a trademark). Or “hosted postgres” or “Postgres compatible RDS” or any number of other services based on OSS.
Yep, that was the problem, they just called it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" and it resulted in a lawsuit.
It isn’t, though, when comparing it to the ElasticSearch service offered by Elastic the company. Using the same codebase is very different than offering the same service. At minimum, pricing, billing, support, legalese, etc will all vary between the two. Downsides in Amazon’s service shouldn’t be misattributed to Elastic the company without Elastic’s permission, and trademark law quite rightly seems this more likely if Elastic trademarks are in the name of the product.
As for RDS’s PostgreSQL version, I presume the lawyers very carefully made sure it was called Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (as indeed it is) and not PostgreSQL for Amazon RDS or PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS Edition or PostgreSQL on Amazon Web Services. Wouldn’t any of these last three names quite reasonably make a lot of people blame the PostgreSQL project rather than Amazon for any failings? Doubly so if the PostgreSQL project offered their own managed service on AWS, as Elastic does.
And as for Amazon Linux, I can think of a bunch of ways they might be operating legally in this regard, but a key one is that they probably have explicit permission from the Linux Foundation or Linux Torvalds to do as they do; in any case, the Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds are both highly unlikely to sue Amazon for this usage regardless of the legalities, for purely pragmatic reasons that have nothing to do with whether a judge or jury would take the lawsuit seriously, and that don’t apply to companies like Elastic.
No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks (which weren’t in place in this case)rather than focusing on the actual details of the product
Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components that would nonconsensually report telemetry to Google from within the guest operating system beyond what is inherent to the nature of any VM running within Google's cloud, or default configurations that are unjustifiably different in ways that are undocumented and/or would surprise and disrupt the usual expectations of Debian users?
Yes, trademark law is the reason Debian got to have those in-depth discussions and collaborations with Google. Source: I was quite personally involved, both as a Debian developer and as a then-Googler. (And Debian was more pragmatic than you might think about some of the specifics. I was surprised myself.)
Trademark law is not bullshit even though the term "intellectual property" is.
> No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”.
Not in the primary technical nature of the product or the underlying software, no, that's true. But in the overall aspect of whom to blame for the service's faults or credit with the service's strengths - in other words, who is viewed as endorsing the product with the corresponding responsibility for good or bad reputational and commercial consequences - then yes absolutely the naming does change that in a reasonable person's mind.
Imagine you were not a cloud infrastructure expert but rather a stock market investor who sees a lengthy global outage occur in a managed PostgreSQL service running on Amazon Web Services. Further imagine that the PostgreSQL project were commercial enough of an organization to run their own managed PostgreSQL service on AWS in competition to the one run by Amazon, and had PostgreSQL stock traded on a public stock exchange, similar to Elastic's real situation.
In this hypothetical scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the PostgreSQL for Amazon Database" would look bad for the PostgreSQL project and would make the investor likely to sell or short PostgreSQL stock and/or (since the two services compete) buy Amazon stock? And in the same scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the Amazon Database for PostgreSQL" would entirely swap the reputational and financial/commercial impact on both organizations?
(I'm saying "Amazon Database" instead of "RDS" to sidestep the inside-baseball question of whether someone happens to know that Amazon doesn't let external vendors make flavors of the suite of services called RDS. That's an implementation detail that could easily be false at some future time and upon which trademark law cannot usefully rely.)
> (which weren’t in place in this case)
Huh? Elastic definitely had a trademark in place. Not sure why you think they didn't.
> It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks [...] rather than focusing on the actual details of the product
Why do you assume that? My assumption is that both Elastic and Amazon spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when naming their products.
> Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components
Absolutely not. But, calling it Debian on Google Compute vs Google Compute for Debian has absolutely no bearing on whether they’re doing that or not.
Like you, I’ve had similar discussions with lawyers on my side and “the opposition side” and we’ve spent hours arguing over the semantics of these things while ignoring the root problem - in this case google bundling nonfree software with Debian and calling it Debian.
> my assumption is that both elastic and amino spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when namjng their products
And yet here we are unfortunately discussing how we’ve come full circle, and I’m wondering how many thousands of people hours across google, elastic and all of their users were spent on dealing with a naming dispute.
It does have a bearing on whether Debian has a say in the matter, though. In fact, Google did ship customized images that didn't meet Debian's requirements to be called Debian alongside other ones which did until they were able to achieve good enough outcomes with the latter images - achieving this took a bunch of collaborative work over time.
Those other images were described in ways something like "Google Compute Engine-optimized images for Debian" (I forget the specifics), and indeed Debian completely agreed that they didn't have veto power over the contents of those images, assuming they were in fact for Debian instead of for a totally different operating system.
> Like you, I’ve had similar discussions with lawyers on my side and “the opposition side” and we’ve spent hours arguing over the semantics of these things while ignoring the root problem - in this case google bundling nonfree software with Debian and calling it Debian.
To be clear, Google did not bundle non-free software with Debian and call it Debian - they didn't even do that with their customized GCE-optimized images, though there were ways other than licensing in which those weren't up to the Debian trademark policy standards. Google did the right thing on this issue and only put free software inside all of those image images. But as you might imagine, plenty of people in Debian started out skeptical of that fact until they and Google collaborated enough for the truth to be clear.
> And yet here we are unfortunately discussing how we’ve come full circle, and I’m wondering how many thousands of people hours across google, elastic and all of their users were spent on dealing with a naming dispute.
My hours on this conversation don't count - I haven't worked for Google in almost a decade and am typing this in unpaid personal time.
And, speaking from firsthand memories of collaborating across Debian and Google on this, pretty much none of the discussion was about a naming dispute. Google agreed that Debian had the right to decide whether a modified image could be called "Debian", and Debian agreed that Google had the right use the word "Debian" in the descriptive way I've been highlighting when shipping images not approved to be called Debian.
The nature of the collaboration was much more productive than that: "Okay, Debian wants the images to meet this set of standards to be called Debian and meet Debian users' needs, Google wants the images to meet that other set of standards to be a proper Google offering and meet Google users' needs, some of the relevant standards / workflows / cultural attitudes aren't obviously compatible at first glance, but we acknowledge that we have some shared users who want Debian on GCE to work well for them. How do we achieve this?"
That's not a waste of time at all - and lawyers were not involved in the vast majority of those discussions, because it wasn't a legal dispute.
Similar good collaborations happened between Debian and the Azure and AWS teams, and some collaboration events even happened with Debian plus all three clouds. I must say, 2000s-era me would have been very surprised to see Microsoft hosting an event with Debian developers, giving them \\backslash\printer\paths in order to print something, and offering them Visual Studio subscriptions to enable working on Debian on Azure...
I should probably add a very clear disclaimer here: I am not speaking for Debian, their US fiscal sponsor and legal trademark owner Software in the Public Interest (SPI), Google, Amazon, or Microsoft in any of my comments on this Hacker News post, and while I retain very inactive affiliations with Debian and SPI, I have no current affiliation with any of the major cloud providers.
The confusion between ElasticSearch the software kit and ElasticSearch the hosted service illustrates some of the drawbacks of having the same name for your Open Source product and your business.
Clearly not confused with the original brand, but also advertising a service built off that brand.
But it takes a long time. And it's very costly (especially against a much larger entity like Amazon). Legal battles alone will rarely save you (in time).
[I work for Elastic]
Eg AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (2006) AWS Elastic Block Storage (2008)
I suspect if Elastic tried to take them to court they would have got the trademark thrown out.
Gonna go tell those freeloading kids who take my candy on Halloween that they're exploiting me unless they contribute to next year's candy bowl.
1) Amazon is powerful, thus bad
2) we’re discussing Amazon
3) find something potentially bad
4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1
It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.
Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.
It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that.
But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time.
If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. It’s quite simple.
But it’s ridiculous, I think, to claim Amazon is doing anything wrong by abiding by the license.
Elastic shouldn’t feel that Amazon is eating their pie because they chose to put their pie out with a “free pie for everyone” under ASL. If they feel bad, that may be so, but their feelings aren’t as important as what their intellect should set up.
I am just saying your post hugely misrepresented the argument.
That you think the argument is a load of bollocks changes nothing about that.
Not to give out advice, but if your aim isn’t to learn and debate and change minds and be changed, what’s your point? Do you just want to make noise or something?
I would like to properly characterize the argument to understand all sides. Because I want more great software to exist in the world. My belief is that the way to do this is to have people create and share, of their own free will. And I want to learn if there’s a better way.
So correcting your enormous straw-man of misinformation is "noise"? Oh just sod off with your bollocks.
So maybe they should stop releasing future contributions as OSS? Oh, wait…
It’s cool being a programmer because we have such autonomy over our actions and our creations.
But maybe we shouldn’t fund open source development via companies whose entire revenue is selling support for that product? I feel like my favorite OSS projects are ones that are created and maintained by developers working for companies whose business model is based on something entirely separate from the OSS project, but who need the OSS project to support that business. They, and many other companies who have the same need, pay developers to work on the project so they can get what they need from it, but they keep it open source because it isn’t core to their business and being OSS makes it easier and cheaper to maintain.
In this way, there is no conflict of interest between the open source needs and the companies business model.
- ElasticSearch was open-source
- Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service
- ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license
- Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch
- (Few years pass)
- Amazon and ElasticSearch are now buddies
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-dif...
AWS just offered a convenience layer over ElasticSearch
https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
I get it, Amazon is bad, I agree they are too, but not because they’re malicious, Amazon is bad because they’re too large to compete on level ground with anyone other than Google or Microsoft in the cloud.
My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps.
At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They don’t even go around acting all superior like those “open source” corps do about it.
Yeah it's not that Amazon stole the code, it's that they were distributing stolen code. It's not as bad but it's still problematic unless Amazon immediately pulled said code when they were notified.
> My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source.
I think this was less about preventing open source from being used and more about picking the wrong license for their project. The way I see it they took the long way around because they were afraid of the AGPL.
They dual licensed under the SSPL (which is the AGPL with one change that makes it problematic) and the Elastic License (which they originally also provided code under a previous version of).
Then they are now finally getting around to moving from the SSPL to the AGPL (while technically still offering the SSPL).
Had they gone straight to the AGPL none of this would have been even worth discussing but a lot of people are afraid of that license in the same way people used to be scared of the GPL.
> If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps.
Sure however if you chose an open source license, you probably don't want companies selling access to your software with a few extra closed source bits bolted on without contributing anything back. It's not legally wrong but it's a dick move and against the spirit of FOSS. So even then Amazon hadn't broke any laws but it'd make sense for a FOSS oriented company to pivot to a license they think would force upstream contribution. Elastic just fucked up and chose a bad license (SSPL) because they feared the AGPL. This is just them getting over that fear and picking the license they should have picked from day 1.
> At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product!
They do now. When Elastic was Apache licensed they did not. That was the problem. It was only when they re-licensed Elastic that Amazon open sourced their fork. Had they not, OpenSearch would still be the closed source AWS ElasticSearch.
I disagree with this. Most people use FOSS and do not give anything back, individuals included. The spirit of FOSS is creating things that others will use without compensation. If I release anything open source, it's because I'm donating it as a whole to humanity, including big corps and individuals. I understand that, because I've thought long and hard about what it means to release something with, say, an MIT license. It means you lose having full control of your creation. If I wanted to limit who can use my software, I'll sell it or license it accordingly. Complaining later that your FOSS software was "stolen" or "exploited" or whatever is just sour grapes.
If rando small business or rando dude is just using FOSS software without giving back, whatever people have priorities.
If megacorp is re-boxing it in a closed source manner and making mass profits off of it without dedicating at least some level of engineering hours or money to the project, that's a dick move.
Being unhappy with that situation is totally fine and it's understandable to change the licensing to a more copyleft license to reflect your intents.
That's what elastic did. They essentially went Apache-2.0 -> ... -> AGPLv3 but it took a while for them to figure it out.
And my complaint isn't that people make money off FOSS software or don't give back enough. It's that they make money off FOSS software and don't give back essentially at all while depriving their users of the same rights/licensing terms that the upstream gave them.
The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that.
Now, there can be a lot of opinions on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the open source community, but it should be pretty obvious why elastic didn’t like it. They were a company who had a product they were selling, and then the biggest competitor in the world starts selling THE EXACT same thing with the EXACT same name. They needed to do something to compete.
So they did, and forced Amazon to change the name of their offering to opensearch instead of Elasticsearch. Once they achieved that, they reverted the change.
Amazon first offered Elasticsearch as a managed service in 2015. Elastic began offering managed services in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Managed_services
That's one interpretation. I've another, which I've seen play out multiple times now across multiple OSS projects: company invents a thing, thinks that because they're the inventor of said thing they'll be able to sell a managed version of it, belatedly realise that inventing a piece of software doesn't magically make you the best in the world at running it at scale.
What Elastic, and most like them, can't compete with is the ability to run highly available/reliable software at the scale of Amazon.
I wanted to pay Elasticsearch to host our search cluster. And I did for a while. But it became clear we were paying for gobs of RAM that we weren't using and we didn't have enough CPU to really cover our search needs. I talked to the head of sales at the time and he said they were working on a plan that would allow us to choose machines that were more CPU heavy but that that was in the pipeline and there was no ETA.
So we switched to AWS and everything worked just fine.
All this is to say, Amazon was not offering the exact same service. They were offering a better service.
I recognize that "open source" is ok with that second way of "using" the code, but I do think it's meaningfully different.
This is very misleading. There is a lot more code than just the kernel for the Linux operating system. If you ran the numbers for a default install of Ubuntu or RHEL that would be far more useful. The Linux kernel requires far deeper skills than a lot of user-and development so it is going to have fewer contributors per year on average.
Source: I am a Linux kernel engineer.
I can't believe they didn't predict that this exact outcome would happen: Amazon forks under a more permissive license and becomes the new standard instead of Elastic because the entire package (managed service from AWS + more permissive license) is a lower risk package to the average business.
I guess you're actually saying that despite their claims otherwise, you don't believe they did predict it?
The truth that I think they are trying to hide is that they are losing adoption to their Amazon-backed competitor and that they will bleed more customers if they don’t go open source again.
I think that when they made the original decision to change the license they thought their product had more pull than it really did. They thought customers would leave Amazon’s managed product for their “superior” product rather than Amazon’s “inferior” fork. They thought people wouldn’t trust Amazon to have the expertise to continue development. In reality what customers wanted was a managed solution from their cloud provider, they didn’t really care if it was Elastic or not.
I totally understand that the situation was a pickle for Elastic in terms of being able to be a sustainable company and perhaps they had to do something. But the thing they did didn’t work, or else they would have stuck with it.
In my experience companies that modify the licensing of their products or get bought by bad stewards like IBM (Hashicorp) or Progress (Chef Software) scare away the engineering managers who make purchase decisions.
Can you share more? What friction did you experience with ELv2?
Also briefly touched on one of the issues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41395663
"So why the change? AWS and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse. If we don’t stand up to them now, as a successful company and leader in the market, who will?"
I agree that this is probably not the picture of the huge win they are painting. Still, it must have been frustrating for Elastic to have to explain to potential customers that they weren't reselling an Amazon product.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252513588/Amazon-drops-E...
If Elastic the company sold a product called "Elastic Amazon EC2" and it was an API compatible copy of EC2 cloud compute, you can reasonably assume that Amazon would be pissed off about it.
Edit: As was Amazon's choice to offer a service named that once Elasticsearch was established, to be clear.
When Elastic changed the license, all vendors of APM products based on Elasticsearch jumped to OpenSearch.
Maybe, they want to pass the message that the fork, OpenSearch, is enough different to not represent real competition, and in any case, now that it exists, after the investment done, AWS will offer that as an alternative to Elasticsearch and not Elasticsearch itself but managed by AWS as it used to be before the license change.
Now, who wants a managed Elasticsearch service will only buy it from Elastic.