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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.
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.
Then why didn't you build your own AWS AMIs for your users who all want to use your software on AWS anyway? Why didn't you properly package your software for `yum` and `apt`? Why did you make setting up your software so difficult and bespoke that it's easier to use someone else's version?
Why did you release your software as open source without understanding the business model behind the license you chose?
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.