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Is Amazon's AWS Approaching 'War' for Control of Elasticsearch? (datanami.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the world-domination dept.

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.

14 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. All I see here by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:All I see here by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In a way, it's sad. And in other ways, it's great. I'd like to see the authors get more of the pie, but I like that the corporations are motivated to keep the pies coming.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:All I see here by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "I like that the corporations are motivated to keep the pies coming. " Oh? What IS their motivation, did you ever stop and think about that? It varies - considerably. The original authors' motivations no longer apply.

      Commercial entities have contributed a lot of code where it served their interests, and due to the licensing, we get to use that code for our own purposes, regardless of their motivations. I think that's pretty cool.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:All I see here by EvilSS · · Score: 2

      If they want to get paid, they can get day jobs. They knew when they contributed to an open source project there was right to expect to be paid anything.

      --
      I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
    4. Re: All I see here by brunes69 · · Score: 2

      You talk about Elastic like it is some kind of altruistic charity. It's a 6+ billion dollar company.

      Trust me, all of the developers get paid, handsomely.

  2. Open Source business model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: Open Source business model by art123 · · Score: 2

      I didn't see any whining. The parent poster simply stated an opinion on the business flaws of a creator monetizing open source.
      You on the hand added zero value to the conversation.

    2. Re:Open Source business model by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      The business value of open source is 99% free and 1% open.

      In my experience, that's not true. At least, companies I've worked for have been willing to pay for open-source libraries. Getting closed-source (or closed to me) libraries have caused me serious problems in the past, though.

      As an example many people are familiar with, Google was willing to pay Sun for using Java. It wasn't about money. Sun didn't want to let Google change Java though, which is what Google wanted.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  3. Yes, they are by MikeRT · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re: Yes, they are by reanjr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

  4. GPLv3 by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. ES sucks for the cloud by reanjr · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. False assumptions about open source. by bavarian · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. What? by dohzer · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.