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Is Amazon's AWS Approaching 'War' for Control of Elasticsearch? (datanami.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader jasenj1 and Striek both shared news of a growing open source controversy. "Amazon Web Services on Monday announced that it's partnering with Netflix and Expedia to champion a new Open Distro for Elasticsearch due to concerns of proprietary code being mixed into the open source Elasticsearch project," reports Datanami.
"Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, responded by accusing Amazon of copying code, inserting bugs into the community code, and engaging with the company under false pretenses..." In a blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, the vice president of cloud architecture strategy for AWS, says the new project is a "value added" distribution that's 100% open source, and that developers working on it will contribute any improvements or fixes back to the upstream Elasticsearch project. "The new advanced features of Open Distro for Elasticsearch are all Apache 2.0 licensed," Cockroft writes. "With the first release, our goal is to address many critical features missing from open source Elasticsearch, such as security, event monitoring and alerting, and SQL support...." Cockroft says there's no clear documentation in the Elasticsearch release notes over what's open source and what's proprietary. "Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code," he wrote. "This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid)."
Elastic CEO Shay Banon responded Tuesday to AWS in a blog post, in which he leveled a variety of accusations at the cloud giant. "Our products were forked, redistributed and rebundled so many times I lost count," Banon wrote. "There was always a 'reason' [for the forks, redistributions, and rebundling], at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence. None of these have lasted. They were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community." Elastic's commercial code may have provided an "inspiration" for others to follow, Banon wrote, but that inspiration didn't necessarily make for clean code. "It has been bluntly copied by various companies and even found its way back to certain distributions or forks, like the freshly minted Amazon one, sadly, painfully, with critical bugs," he wrote.
"Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, responded by accusing Amazon of copying code, inserting bugs into the community code, and engaging with the company under false pretenses..." In a blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, the vice president of cloud architecture strategy for AWS, says the new project is a "value added" distribution that's 100% open source, and that developers working on it will contribute any improvements or fixes back to the upstream Elasticsearch project. "The new advanced features of Open Distro for Elasticsearch are all Apache 2.0 licensed," Cockroft writes. "With the first release, our goal is to address many critical features missing from open source Elasticsearch, such as security, event monitoring and alerting, and SQL support...." Cockroft says there's no clear documentation in the Elasticsearch release notes over what's open source and what's proprietary. "Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code," he wrote. "This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid)."
Elastic CEO Shay Banon responded Tuesday to AWS in a blog post, in which he leveled a variety of accusations at the cloud giant. "Our products were forked, redistributed and rebundled so many times I lost count," Banon wrote. "There was always a 'reason' [for the forks, redistributions, and rebundling], at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence. None of these have lasted. They were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community." Elastic's commercial code may have provided an "inspiration" for others to follow, Banon wrote, but that inspiration didn't necessarily make for clean code. "It has been bluntly copied by various companies and even found its way back to certain distributions or forks, like the freshly minted Amazon one, sadly, painfully, with critical bugs," he wrote.
is a much of giant megacorps making a lot of money leveraging open-source work they paid virtually nothing for.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
In general, the open source business model is to be open source enough to be included by distros and thus have widespread distribution, and monetize a small percentage of that.
This model has a few flaws:
- Maybe nobody wants to pay, especially if 3rd parties make free alternatives to the commercial hooks.
- The business value of open source is 99% free and 1% open.
- Hard to sell off the business because anybody, including the owners of the company, can just make a copy of the source and resume business after selling it off (see MariaDB). Someone would be stupid to acquire an open source company unless it can be fully covered by existing support contracts or there is a greater scheme at play than the value of the company (see RedHat).
- Business fully vulnerable to the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. IMO, at this point for any successful open source company it's just a matter of time before Amazon takes it over. Jeff Bezos didn't grow his fortune by giving back.
So, I think it's better to either plan on growing the pie and immediately accept that many other players/competitors will take a slice and therefore adjust expectations accordingly, or not think of open source as a business model at all. These two options are probably more inline with open source philosophy anyway.
And the response to Mongo should have had people very angry at AWS and scared for the future of the FOSS economy.
What it has established is that if you make a successful FOSS app, AWS will immediately jump in and offer a badly supported cloud version to all of your users. They will not collaborate on making sure they and the engineering team that made it succeed together on some meaningful level.
And if you fight back a la Mongo, they'll just build a proprietary, API-compatible version and tell you to go eff yourself.
Maybe you should have listened to the GPL folks and chose GPLv3 for your license. This is EXACTLY what they were talking about. Now it has happened. All of these proprietary cloud services are running open source code and selling it and not giving back.
The problem is ES was not well designed with cloud computing in mind. It's super painful to secure and tune in the cloud. So, of course Amazon is going to try to bridge those deficiencies when all their customers keep using Amazon support resources to walk the complicated tightwire. ES should build better packaging and management tools. It's that simple. Elasticsearch sucks.
Today's FLOSS licenses were not created by divine intervention. They were a good start, but not the end of the story.
There is no fundamental reason why a more insightful and fair open license could not align rewards more strongly with the profits being made. The capitalists who want all of the rewards but none of the costs will of course reject the idea entirely, but ultimately they are powerless.
Create better licenses. The MIT/BSD ones enshrine the unpaid slavery of developers to those making billions in profit, and even the GPL does not distinguish between good end evil use, nor reward developer effort.
If you find today's unpaid abuse of developers unfair, make better free and open licenses and use them.
Developers don't release quality code under open source unless it was paid for by a corporation. Who do you think makes all these projects? Unemployed software engineers? No. Developers don't license their off hours work to corporations. That's why all the free software is literal garbage except for the few that believe in open source. Both because developers don't use other people's projects and developers believe their own projects superior, as another AC stated.
"Developers don't release quality code under open source unless it was paid for by a corporation." - Ok, who stepped in the corporate bullshit? Check your shoes.
"Developers don't release quality code under open source unless it was paid for by a corporation."
Try again.
"Developers don't release quality code under open source unless it was paid for."
The majority of software developers do what they do in order to make a living. Idling away in your parents basement writing code for free isn't going to get you out of the basement anytime soon. Do you know who makes the most money in the opensource world? It's the opensource evangelists who are already financially well off telling everyone that giving away your work for free is socially responsible. The only way to make a living off of opensource is to work for a company that pays you to do it. Did you know MS has the largest staff of opensource developers in the world? Or that MS has lead all others in the amount of opensource code released into the ecosystem?
Unfortunately a lot of developers and companies who are publishing code under open source licenses do not get what open source means to their code: You are giving away a lot of control. The less viral the license, the more control you give up. Up to the point where you are basically donating them to the public with no moral or actual right to be compensated for it.
If you want to fully control monetization, keep your code proprietary. But then good luck with having to pay developers for every single line of code and every tiny little bugfix. No standing on the shoulders of giants.
Face it: If you want to build a business on open source, trying to fight others who make use of your code is futile. It is often unfair itself as well: Because there hardly is a successful open source project that has been possible without countless other open source projects that came before it. Projects that created the tools, programming languages, libraries and frameworks that make your own work possible.
If you take that upstream code for granted (which you would have to make or buy if it was not open source), you should also take for granted that others will take your open source code for granted and make money with it without caring for your precious montetization strategy. This is not unfair. It is playing by the rules. The rules just are not built to protect the interests of the original authors of the code, but to protect the freedom of the code itself.
I get the feeling you are fisting yourself thinking about the prospect of anally raping guys.
For anyone else wondering:
Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java.
Neither did yours. Good going.
But ... Elastic is much more proficient at releasing code with "critical" bugs than AWS ever has been, in addition to being pretty black-boxy. So this particular complain of Bannon's outright fails the laugh test.
Meanwhile Elastic has always led AWS, obviously, with releases by weeks or months, and has its own AWS-hosted service, with its own pricing model, so there's been plenty of opportunity for Elastic there.
Meanwhile, it's not trivial to upgrade an ES cluster. Even if the cluster-side upgrade is solid, there can be breaking client-side changes (json content-type I'm looking at you). Many (most?) customers stick with the ES that they are running that works for them, even if it's a 2-3 year old 1.x. Nor is the value prop of the non AWS supported features obvious when you get down to it due to the lack of integration with the rest of the computing and cloud ecosphere.
So, I dunno. There was probably a way for this to work out better. At this point I'm not even sure which entity has more coders working on the relevant ES code. It's true that AWS hasn't committed a lot of code to OS projects in the past. I don't know how that will work out in the future. Apparently AWS thinks that this is an important service, though, and is motivated, at least this once, to deliver on the blockers.