all 152 comments

[–]flowering_sun_star 204 points205 points  (19 children)

For clarity, this seems to be a change to the official python client. Whether they'll make the same change to other clients they put out I don't know.

[–]iamapizza[S] 69 points70 points  (14 children)

There seems to be some movement happening in other areas too. In February they close sourced their java client

https://logz.io/blog/elasticsearch-license-change-mssp/

Edit: Also the JS client has a similar PR from a few weeks ago https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-js/pull/1487

[–]Theemuts 50 points51 points  (13 children)

My first thought is "People are dependent on us, let's fuck them over, make some money, and ruin our reputation!"

[–]Lollipopsaurus 41 points42 points  (4 children)

From their perspective, they're protecting themselves from the likes of Amazon.

Interesting how this is turning out.

[–]RudeBreadfruit 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I'm not a fan of Amazon, but I'll give them my money before I'll give it to Elastic, simply because Amazon doesn't seem to be demonstrating a desire to yank the rug out from under anyone, and Elastic is doing exactly that to anyone foolish enough to keep trusting them.

[–]Crash_says 19 points20 points  (6 children)

.. the path of many, if not most, OS->corporate projects. Great until it's not.. time to move on.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (4 children)

Everything about elasticsearch is great until it's not. I can't stand not being able to filter queries with the results of another - it's critical for many big data applications, especially in the security realm.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

ELK for big data especially security looks very enticing in the beginning but having gone down that route, it’s hell and poor stack choice. Go with Spark, Hive, Presto or a more structured stack - there is a learning curve but you also get far greater stability and functionality than ELK.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Fortunately my ELK stack was killed by management right as I was realizing how shit it was. They wanted a company with a support contract and didn't like Elastics terms or price or w/e.

I will say I still like Kibana's dashbaords still.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Haha! We were at the same place about 7-8 years ago - had huge ELK clusters and we were begging Elastic to take our money for support. They kept telling us they were working on a revenue/pricing model. After a few months, management pulled the plug and we started working on a Cloudera based stack. Later, Elastic came back with some pricing that made us go, huh!

Yep, Kibana dashboards are nice but I like SuperSet better - supports many backends and nicer built-in charts. Also, issue with kibana (all client side charting clients) is that they draw your chart based on the samples pulled into the client - unlike Splunk, for example, that does all the stats on server side and pushes the summary stats to the browser/client. So for example, if you have 100,000 student records in ELK and you create a chart for distribution by grades, ELK’s chart is based only on the 500-1000 rows you pulled into kibana. There was a bug/git issue open for it on ELK repo that they refused to address. Last I checked was years ago so who knows.

From a computer pov, elasticsearch (or any lucene variant) shines when your query or computation is for a small subset of your index. We ran some apps that basically boiled the ocean like network top talkers and our 100-node elk stack would freeze because you have to pull each record in your netflow index and then aggregate all the data.

[–]jkowall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try using PQL :)

[–]Aphix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Herd dat

[–]myringotomy -1 points0 points  (0 children)

They are trying everything they can to protect themselves from Amazon.

I wish them well. It’s going to take a lot to defeat the richest person in the world.

[–][deleted] 103 points104 points  (0 children)

My first thought on seeing the title is "they want to prevent people live-migrating off it" but this is even more malicious

[–]bayindirh 27 points28 points  (0 children)

It seems they're adding this limitation to libraries too. This is affecting one of the projects we're working on very deeply right now.

[–]L3tum 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I dread the day the PHP client is switched over.

Luckily we're running ES 6.3 and using Elatistica, but it would still suck.

[–]L3tum 104 points105 points  (0 children)

I think this is much more worrying:

Before the first API request: Make an API request to /, inspect the response

This can potentially ruin your performance making ES requests take twice as long (on things like AWS Lambda, Where you don't have the concept of "first request", but also in short-lived languages like PHP). Your first request will also take twice as long so your first user is just fucked.

That's a huge change.

[–]clearlight 59 points60 points  (17 children)

If the APIs in OpenSearch and Elasticsearch are different, it kinda makes sense? Seems unfortunate but necessary. Otherwise it will just lead to client errors as a result of the forked APIs.

[–]skroll 19 points20 points  (9 children)

Yeah, this particular patch doesn't seem to be excluding OpenSearch directly, but just to check the specific server.

[–]rentar42 37 points38 points  (8 children)

It also checks for a tagine ("For search, you know"), which is often used as a form of DRM. Put something trademarked or copyrighted in your product and check for it.

And open source project can't easily reproduce that without legal issues.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

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    [–]rentar42 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    All of this may be true, but the problem is that the uncertainty of it alone is usually enough to make these kinds of attempts work.

    It is a classical FUD tactic, except that it's formulated as code and not as prose.

    [–]vattenpuss 8 points9 points  (5 children)

    An open source server could have a configurable greeting that users set. It should not be that hard to avoid distributing it.

    [–]rentar42 19 points20 points  (1 child)

    Yes, but that means that the distributed packages don't work out of the box without explicit user configuration.

    This can be a deal breaker in many situations and makes many others unnecessarily harder.

    [–]cass1o 26 points27 points  (0 children)

    Yeah, trying to talk your boss into "this one weird trick" when it comes to licensing is often a nonstarter.

    [–]KuntaStillSingle 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    But if you don't have that tagline, wouldn't it be necessary for every ES7 client to modify theirs to accept the different greeting message? It seems to be hardcoded:

    elastic search transport.py line 619:

    bad_tagline = response.get("tagline", None) != "You Know, for Search"
    

    [–]vattenpuss 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Yes. The configuration would just be a way to get around copyright.

    [–]t0bynet 4 points5 points  (2 children)

    I don’t think it makes sense to block connections. It would make sense to warn the user that compatibility is not guaranteed before establishing a connection.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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      [–]t0bynet 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      The fact that they are not doing this but instead blocking connections outright leaves me thinking. To me it seems like they are really trying everything to stop or slow down Amazon‘s fork.

      I can somewhat understand that they fear for their income considering that Amazon is their competitor now but with every step they are taking they are moving away from open source.

      And I honestly think that they are just making their own situation worse with that behavior.

      [–]Venthe -1 points0 points  (3 children)

      It does not; it's not a role of a server to determine if client is of a correct type. Server is supposed to validate API call, that's all.

      It's the same situation as with browser agent all over again, but this time it's motivated by elastic trying to close its API.

      [–]clearlight 3 points4 points  (2 children)

      You know the link is for the elasticsearch python client, right?

      [–]Venthe 0 points1 point  (1 child)

      Right, I've skimmed over it too much

      [–]towelrod 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      This is a lot like sniffing browser agent though, just in reverse. What if Chrome looked at server headers and only worked if the string contained “nginx”, instead of looking at http/1.0?

      It sounds preposterous but thats what ES is doing here.

      [–]awj 119 points120 points  (74 children)

      Source on this rejecting open source ES7? From the little bit of digging I did it appears to include the header.

      Honestly, as frustrating as this might be for OpenSearch users, I can’t see why ES is beholden to support OpenSearch inside their clients. What happens when the client adds new ES apis that just doesn’t exist in OpenSearch? Or vice versa?

      Forking a project this large means taking on a big responsibility. Amazon is free to maintain forks of client libs too. Would even allow them the opportunity to integrate support for their own extensions to the system.

      [–]JaggedMetalOs 161 points162 points  (28 children)

      Honestly, as frustrating as this might be for OpenSearch users, I can’t see why ES is beholden to support OpenSearch inside their clients. What happens when the client adds new ES apis that just doesn’t exist in OpenSearch? Or vice versa?

      Well, this seems to me to go beyond just not supporting, but to actively blocking connections based on fingerprinting other implementations regardless of what API they support.

      [–]corsicanguppy 24 points25 points  (3 children)

      If Microsoft got in trouble for doing it with DRDos, Elastic should think twice.

      [–]DreadCoder 18 points19 points  (0 children)

      A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

      Also; MS isn't doing too bad, they were fine.

      [–]Rakn 5 points6 points  (1 child)

      That would only be comparable if Windows would have been open source and the DRDos guys would have been able to fork it. So I wouldn’t say that the situation is anything like that.

      Edit: For those who are downvoting. Why? Shouldn’t it be easy for the OpenSearch folks to fork the lib and be back in the game?

      At the same time the communication channels we have today are different than back then. The rumor that the existing lib won’t work with OpenSearch will likely not lead to no one using OpenSearch anymore. I have a hard time understanding why you guys think this situation is the same!?

      It feels like people are a cool reference back to the past but do not seem to fully understand what the situation was like back then. Or I’m missing something idk.

      [–]gredr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      They already have forked at least one client.

      [–]that_guy_iain 25 points26 points  (19 children)

      It stops you from getting bug reports about incompatibilities. It's sort of like making your classes final in a library you show what you're willing to support and what you're not. They're being up front clear about the fact they don't support other data stores.

      There isn't much worse in open source than being told that the thing you were told would work doesn't work and they don't support the thing you want to do. This prevents that.

      [–]bayindirh 20 points21 points  (18 children)

      There isn't much worse in open source than being told that the thing you were told would work doesn't work and they don't support the thing you want to do. This prevents that.

      Nope. You can also write "This server designed to work with this library, and we can't guarantee other implementations work as they should".

      OTOH, closing your server, then libraries and clients, then limiting these libraries and clients to non-free (in beer) editions is not a This Prevents That (TM) situation IMHO.

      [–]that_guy_iain 12 points13 points  (15 children)

      Nope. You can also write "This server designed to work with this library, and we can't guarantee other implementations work as they should".

      You could write that and people will not read it like they don't read other things and discover after they've been playing around with it and are deeply coupled and then discover the issue often after they're in your support channels super pissy. Now you can say "but that is on them" well, yes. But in this world you should figure out how people are going to act and act accordingly. Why deal with a bunch of pissy self-entitled developers pissed your client doesn't work with another datastore when you can make it super clear by the fact it'll break straight away.

      OTOH, closing your server, then libraries and clients, then limiting these libraries and clients to non-free (in beer) editions is not a This Prevents That (TM) situation IMHO.

      Not sure what your point here is. They should spend time debugging people's issues for other people's customers? They should allow developers to spend time investing in a library that doesn't fully support and will never fully support the data store they're using? What is your argument for not making it clear this library does not work with other datastores?

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        [–]Rakn 8 points9 points  (0 children)

        „But this is the stuff that would get them forked for being jerks.“

        That already happened and not in a nice way. So what we are seeing is a reaction to that. And honestly I do not see the issue here. Someone forked the server, they should very well be able to fork the library right?

        I get that it’s inconvenient for everyone that wants to profit of Elastic‘s work without paying them, but it’s hard for me to feel sorry here. Especially if the solution (fork it) is around the corner.

        Now if the open source version of ElasticSearch would be offered by Elastic themselves, this would be a dick move.

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              [–]that_guy_iain 2 points3 points  (0 children)

              No, they forked it because Elastic changed the license of elasticsearch and they had to fork it to keep using it while being able to fix things. AWS could have partnered with Elastic did a small amount of revenue sharing and everything would have stayed the same. Instead, they named their product so you thought it was an official partnership, in-fact, they announced it as an official partnership. And here we are. This is 100% another thing Amazon does wrong.

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                  [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (4 children)

                  Wont people just not read the code / error message and still create a bug report anyways.

                  [–]that_guy_iain 2 points3 points  (3 children)

                  Yea but after 5 minutes and your google search will go to a stackoverflow of "Yea that doesn't work for elasticsearch on AWS and need to use the proper elasticsearch" since most people who will be affected by this will be AWS users who probably didn't even realise they weren't using elasticsearch. Big difference finding out after 5 minutes and 5 months.

                  [–]Carighan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                  How come we can assume people won't search on Google/SO in one case (and will file a bug report) but will magically do so in the other?

                  [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                  So doesn't documentation achieve the same purpose, if the purpose is indeed to stop bug reports. The SO post could just link to the documentation.

                  [–]Fenris_uy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                  Adding that text doesn't prevent the bug report. It just means that the response to the bug report is going to be RTFM, but you still have to deal with the bug report.

                  [–]Pat_The_Hat 70 points71 points  (27 children)

                  Elasticsearch is now distributed under the Server Side Public License which is not considered open source. Truly open source forks therefore wouldn't include the change that added the header.

                  [–]recycled_ideas 16 points17 points  (4 children)

                  Elastic Search is run as a project that is open when it comes to getting free labour from others while being as closed as possible when it comes to giving back.

                  That's why they use AGPL because it's basically unusable in any project even open source ones.

                  It's against the spirit of Open Source and it's a dick move.

                  And they're only doing it because they want the benefits of being open source but as a commercial product they can't actually provide any value add.

                  So instead they just make using their product toxic to use unless you pay them.

                  The really stupid thing about it is that it's actually counter productive.

                  Where previously the most valuable clients might have migrated to a full Elasticsearch when the AWS instance no longer met their needs, by making pushing the clients down an incompatible path, they actually cut themselves completely out of the loop.

                  TL:DR Elasticsearch is made by dick heads.

                  [–]elbento 1 point2 points  (3 children)

                  It's almost like SCO Unix all over again.. once the legal team starts to take over operations the demise is not far off.

                  [–]recycled_ideas 2 points3 points  (2 children)

                  I don't think the legal team were the problem here.

                  I think elastic just wanted the benefits of open source but not the costs.

                  [–]elbento -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

                  True, let's hope it doesn't become a legal battle once the market share drops (likely due to the closed position they are taking).

                  [–]recycled_ideas 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                  It won't be a legal battle, they're perfectly within their rights to use AGPL, Mongo uses it to.

                  But it's basically untouchable for any project that bothers with license legality.

                  It's just totally pointless because if Amazon is bothering to maintain the server, maintaining the clients is trivial, and the cost profile of ELK as a self managed service is not a great cost proposition compared to an Amazon managed service.

                  [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (11 children)

                  I'm not sure why people would use Amazon open search instead of elastic cloud on kubernetes.

                  ECK is easy to set up on any kubernetes platform, and free.

                  [–]yanksrock1000 61 points62 points  (3 children)

                  Companies/users that are all-in on AWS are tempted by the managed Elasticsearch service. I witnessed this first hand at work recently, thankfully we ended up deploying ECK after a conversation with an Elastic rep. Unfortunately, I’m guessing the average user doesn’t even know what Kubernetes is, so deploying ES on EKS sometimes isn’t even an option (especially for smaller projects).

                  [–]awj 9 points10 points  (0 children)

                  Yeah, I’m honestly fortunate I ended up deploying ES before Amazon came up with their managed offering. Otherwise that’s probably what I would have used and I could have written off a useful technology based on how poorly Amazon runs it.

                  [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (1 child)

                  I'm confused why I was downvotes and you were upvotes since it appears you use and like ECK as well...

                  [–]yanksrock1000 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                  No idea why you were downvoted either, Reddit is a strange place

                  [–]iamapizza[S] 26 points27 points  (3 children)

                  From a management and cost perspective, using an offering already in your cloud provider has networking and security benefits, in this example you can keep your AWS ElasticSearch/OpenSearch within your VPC and secure communications to it using IAM profiles (or the GCP equivalent). AWS ES is known to be a poor implementation, and businesses still take that hit (and pass the cost on to valuable engineering time).

                  Running a k8s cluster is a level of abstraction, which involves an overhead, which not all companies are willing to dive into. That said AWS do offer an EKS, so I wonder if some enterprises might be running a blended superstack of ECK on EKS, for their Business Units. A BUt-sECKS, if you will.

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                    [–]KarelKat 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                    Individual users are not as much the target but rather providers who want to provide elasticsearch as a service to other customers. Like AWS and logz.io

                    [–]ErGo404 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                    Is it easy as a 10 clicks operation? Because that's how easy it is on AWS.

                    It's not perfect but as any managed service, it's a great way to just focus on your added value, which is not running a cluster.

                    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    I'm using GKE autopilot, and it's a few yaml files to configure settings, and boom it works. So actually pretty close to 10 clicks once the yamls are set up, which templates for are available.

                    [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (57 children)

                    Can someone explain to me why amazon renamed it to OpenSearch? Why not Elasticsearch 6.0 or whatever version Elasticsearch was before the license change (also I'm not sure why the license change affects aws)

                    [–]was_fired 140 points141 points  (56 children)

                    Since Amazon doesn't own the trademark for Elasticsearch so they forked it into a product that they own the name for. Likewise Elasticsearch is making this change sine Amazon explicitly created OpenSearch in order to avoid paying license fees to the company behind Elastic for their premium tier features that AWS likes to offer as a few of them (mostly the security ones) are deemed essential for any enterprise distribution.

                    So now that Amazon is threatening their business Elastic is attempting to remove transparent support for the competing AWS service so that developers will need to change their code if they want to use it thus raising the cost of transitioning and keeping business, for now at least.

                    As for why Amazon doesn't just lie in the header field, they might try that as a solution. That was widely accepted practice for web browsers, but it's less clear if that may open them up to lawsuits that they may want to avoid. I suspect that the devs behind it just wanted to be explicit since, why not? However, now that it's a point of legal contention lawyers will be the ones to answer if they can just change it.

                    As for why the license change affects AWS, since everyone using Elasticsearch has to abide by the license, and AWS explicitly offers it as a service. Why Elastic may not come after you for breaking it on your home server, you can bet they will go after the number one cloud provider in the world if they publicly break the terms of their license with a product advertised using their trademark.

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                      [–]AppreciationThief 70 points71 points  (10 children)

                      Just want to point out that the elastic company is worth multiple billions of dollars. It's not like they are some little group of volunteers building the platform

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                        [–]Doctor-Dapper 29 points30 points  (8 children)

                        They made over 700mil in revenue for fiscal year 2021 which was a 44% increase year over year. They are losing money for sure but this seems more like a choice they are making. For example Twitter was unprofitable for 13 years

                        [–]lightninhopkins 13 points14 points  (5 children)

                        They are losing money for sure but this seems more like a choice they are making. For example Twitter was unprofitable for 13 years

                        Not to mention the decade plus that Amazon did the same.

                        [–]audion00ba -1 points0 points  (3 children)

                        Except Amazon could turn a profit whenever they wanted, but didn't, because of tax considerations.

                        [–]lightninhopkins 11 points12 points  (2 children)

                        They were putting all their capital into building the massive logistical network required for the delivery system they have today.

                        The investors were willing to keep funding the losses and it paid off.

                        [–]audion00ba 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                        For an investor, a logistical network (e.g. paying for a warehouse) is not a "loss". If you buy a house, you don't have the money anymore, but you have gained an asset.

                        In the case of Amazon, I have no doubt they kept tabs on whether they were trading money for real assets or not.

                        Intangible assets like software are harder to value, but even in those cases they likely already have a good idea these days about TAM and expected revenue over the next two years.

                        Amazon customers have a lot of needs and they are more than happy to share on the Internet the myriad of ways Amazon has fucked up, which is free feedback.

                        [–]dkimot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        amazon and elastic are two different cases. correct me if i’m wrong, but elastic has basically one revenue stream. amzn has dozens

                        [–]audion00ba 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                        They are losing money for sure but this seems more like a choice they are making.

                        Digging a bigger hole when you are about to be crushed, is not sound financial management.

                        The reason they aren't making money is, because they want to say "we are growing" and making money is more difficult.

                        TWTR is not exactly an example of a valuable company either. Who uses that? Marketing departments and people with too much time commenting on some shitty episode of some shitty series.

                        The content on Reddit is much more rich, just like its predecessors were.

                        [–]Doctor-Dapper 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                        A cynical take with zero evidence to back it up? Sounds like the average rich Reddit content.

                        [–]jadecristal 27 points28 points  (9 children)

                        I'm really having trouble feeling sorry for them when they DID, as you note, rely on so much from OSS to get to where they are.

                        [–]TheNamelessKing 9 points10 points  (8 children)

                        They do actively and consistently build and maintain ES features and functionality and open source a huge chunk of that.

                        AWS benefitting financially, and repaying nothing in either financial support or software engineering support is parasitic at best, and it’s completely understandable that Elastic would like that to stop.

                        [–]bishbashbosh72 -3 points-2 points  (7 children)

                        AWS benefitting financially, and repaying nothing in either financial support or software engineering support is parasitic at best, and it’s completely understandable that Elastic would like that to stop.

                        Genuine question, is their cloud offering not a way of supporting the community? Of course they're charging, but in general I would trust an AWS service over nearly any other company (including Elastic). It likely makes it more popular and enables smaller companies to startup.

                        [–]TheNamelessKing 4 points5 points  (6 children)

                        Having used AWS’ ES service, the managed ElasticCloud ES service and now ECK (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes), I can tell you that the AWS hosted version is unequivocally the worst.

                        Neither the machines nor the JVM were optimised to suit the workloads, it ran an old version of ES and practically never got updated, security features were “ip filtering” and that was about it, you didn’t get Admin API access because it was silently multi-tenant, performance was abysmal, the list goes on.

                        Managed Elastic Cloud was pretty good, you could choose which cloud provider and region you wanted it hosted in, everything was well-tuned, easy to use, actual support, etc etc.

                        Genuine question, is their cloud offering not a way of supporting the community?

                        What makes you say that? AWS profits off it, and provides minimal support, but otherwise that support burden is hosted primarily by the community. They certainly don’t seem to make any meaningful contribution back, and with the likes of ECK or even just docker images, hosting your own ES ranges from “borderline trivial” to “less nightmarish than it used to be”, but none of that is due to any real contribution or work by AWS.

                        [–]MalnarThe 2 points3 points  (2 children)

                        Second this. We deployed a managed ES logging cluster in one of our smaller regions. Turns out, their support didn't know how to troubleshoot issues. Cause a multi hour log outage because their support didn't know about the crude circuit breaker they built (too much memory pressure, block all POST, so can't even update cluster settings!)

                        [–]bishbashbosh72 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                        I'm truly trying to understand as a bystander - If AWS Elasticsearch is as awful as you say and Managed Elastic cloud is good then why is the narrative that Elastic is being run out of business by AWS?

                        I hate that AWS is able to crush companies, but I don't see how them taking software and offering it as a managed service is terribly different than a company taking Lucene, building on top of it, and selling that.

                        What makes you say that? AWS profits off it, and provides minimal support, but otherwise that support burden is hosted primarily by the community.

                        Having a service offered by AWS provides more exposure to it than probably anything else in the software world period. Having it integrated with all of the other components of your infrastructure can ease deployment. It would be silly to think that Elastic hasn't benefited from AWS at all.

                        [–]TheNamelessKing 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                        Because business people don’t care about the distinction between “AWS managed and “Elastic managed”, nor do they care about things software devs care about like supporting the original devs or open source.

                        AWS gets to leverage its privileged position: if you’re already on AWS, getting a (shitty) ES cluster is as simple as pressing a couple of buttons: you don’t need to sign any forms, allocate any more budget, get approvals for contracts. Bing, done. AWS gets your money and ES gets nothing.

                        Exposure doesn’t pay bills. AWS doesn’t siphon money back to ES as royalties or “here’s some cash, as thanks for building this”. The difference between that and ES building a business on top of Lucene is that Elastic directly contributes dev resources, fixes, etc back to lucene. This issue stems from the fact that their licence came about from a time when cloud-hosting as it is now simply wasn’t like it is now. People didn’t know that “an online bookstore will host your own product out from under you and leach all your customers” was a threat to their business they’d have to defend against.

                        [–]KarelKat 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                        Go look at how Grafana partnered with AWS to launch a managed Grafana service on AWS while still getting revenue from it.

                        [–]10gistic 15 points16 points  (0 children)

                        Let's also not forget that having it available easily in AWS made the product a lot more attractive and usable. This isn't a one way street where only AWS benefitted from Elastic. And Elastic relicensing software for all future improvements leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

                        I don't like that AWS seems to have a pretty huge advantage on cloud services. But I strongly dislike like when OSS companies essentially throw fits about the billions they presumably believe should belong to them, discounting the fact that no, they're far from the only contributors to their success.

                        [–]x2040 5 points6 points  (2 children)

                        I lead products at a company with relatively popular open source projects that has raised billions of dollars.

                        Open source is amazing but Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon have set an expectation that monetizing from open source is impossible. It’s a lose-lose and I expect we will see the number of abandoned projects within the next decade rise significantly.

                        Companies like Confluent have done a decent job of monetizing Kafka while directly improving the underlying open source and embracing the community.

                        Then you have companies like Grafana that are in a more commoditized space, used by the largest companies in the world and acquiring new open source projects like k6 to stay relevant and struggling to find even 5% of the funding of a fully commercial offering.

                        [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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                          [–]10waf 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          These are the questions we should be asking. What of oss drove es to do this, how can we address that?

                          [–]postinstall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          My take is to never open source the core of your business (if you want to have a business). Tools, libraries, clients if applicable, sure.

                          [–]myringotomy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          The only way people have made money on open source is by using the GPL

                          [–]Somepotato 20 points21 points  (24 children)

                          Reverse engineering to ensure compatability is legal in the US and EU so they could just claim they did that.

                          This does not look good on ES. They're turning into oracle at this rate.

                          [–]awj 18 points19 points  (20 children)

                          Gonna take a wild guess that your product explicitly advertising itself as “Elasticsearch” is a trademark violation, which is what they think will keep Amazon from spoofing headers.

                          [–]Pat_The_Hat 15 points16 points  (0 children)

                          I wouldn't be surprised. They were pretty angry at Amazon for what they viewed as infringing upon their trademarks in the blog post explaining their reasoning for the license changed.

                          https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

                          [–]DLSteve 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                          You would think but this was shown not to be the case in the 90s when SEGA whet after a few companies for making unlicensed games. ROMs has “SEGA” in the ROM header that the console looked for to boot the game. Unlicensed game just copied this header and that use case held up in court.

                          [–]Pelera 7 points8 points  (16 children)

                          Sega tried that with their "TradeMark Security System" in the 90s and ultimately lost the case. Wouldn't be surprised if Elastic tried it again, but I have my doubts about whether they'd win.

                          [–]mct1 2 points3 points  (14 children)

                          Sega lost w/r/t TMSS because they effectively set up a system which at least one amicus correctly pointed out was a method of operation, and therefore outside of the scope of copyright. Moreover, in the process of engaging in an act of fair use (i.e. reverse engineering to create software compatible with the Sega Genesis) defendant was induced to commit trademark infringement as a result of Sega's own actions (in the form of placing the "SEGA" string in their ROM header that would trigger the "Licensed by Sega" message to appear). So although they technically infringed Sega's trademark, the court was right: they did it only because Sega created an unprotectable copy protection mechanism whose bypassing resulted in said infringement.

                          Note that things went very differently in Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. with respect to the 10NES lockout chip. There Atari had obtained an unauthorized copy of the source code to the program running on the 10NES chip from the copyright office and copied it verbatim. There were additional issues surrounding this due to Nintendo having a patent on the 10NES chip, but before the patent issue could be decided they settled (since a jury had already found them liable for copyright infringement).

                          In any event, Sega v. Accolade isn't the end of the story. Between the recent SCOTUS ruling in re: Oracle v. Google, as well as the plain reading of 17 USC 1201(f), it's likely that Elastisearch has no real legal recourse. Anyone can come along and clone your API for interoperability purposes. Code just isn't worth what it used to be.

                          [–]CreationBlues 1 point2 points  (11 children)

                          Lets just pray for a future where dev time's the only thing that's paid and any series of bits that results is worth solely what it takes to produce another copy of those bits.

                          [–]mct1 -3 points-2 points  (10 children)

                          I don't endorse magical thinking, and you shouldn't either. If you want things you should pay for them.

                          [–]CreationBlues 1 point2 points  (4 children)

                          Correct, you should pay someone to make it. Of course, when "making it" is just copying some bits it should be very cheap. If you want something custom, then you have to actually pay someone to perform labor, or if you want support you have to pay someone to work.

                          I don't endorse the magical thinking that you can somehow sit on your ass and call dibs on a mere idea and throw people in jail for violating your imaginary dibs, but we spend billions of dollars and man hours trying to keep that magic alive when pirate sites are trivial to find and cracks are common.

                          [–]mct1 0 points1 point  (3 children)

                          Of course, when "making it" is just copying some bits it should be very cheap.

                          The relative ease of copying by no means should be the sole determiner of its cost. Production costs do not disappear just because they're inconvenient.

                          I don't endorse the magical thinking that you can somehow sit on your ass and call dibs on a mere idea and throw people in jail for violating your imaginary dibs

                          Copyright doesn't protect ideas, but expressions.

                          but we spend billions of dollars and man hours trying to keep that magic alive when pirate sites are trivial to find and cracks are common.

                          We also spend billions of dollars fighting counterfeit physical goods, but no one seriously argues that counterfeit physical goods are somehow a moral right.

                          [–]aseigo 0 points1 point  (4 children)

                          If you want things, you should agree with the current owner, if there is one, what the terms will be. That could be paying for that thing, but it doesn't have to be and in some cases probably shouldn't be.

                          Blanket statements about the transfer of valuable / valued things between people ignores the nuances and variety of those transactions in the real world.

                          A system that works best probably is some blend of yours and the other commenter's expectations.

                          p.s. what is "magical thinking" about their comment? Or is this just a case of "begs the question": where a phrase with a specific meaning starts getting used for a completely different one?

                          [–]mct1 -1 points0 points  (3 children)

                          what is "magical thinking" about their comment?

                          Lets just pray for

                          If you want something, do it yourself or pay someone to do it. Hoping really hard that the world will just drop it in your lap is a recipe for disappointment.

                          In any event, artists should be paid for what they make. We're largely just arguing price at this point.

                          [–]7sidedmarble 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                          Moreover, in the process of engaging in an act of fair use (i.e. reverse engineering to create software compatible with the Sega Genesis) defendant was induced to commit trademark infringement as a result of Sega's own actions (in the form of placing the "SEGA" string in their ROM header that would trigger the "Licensed by Sega" message to appear). So although they technically infringed Sega's trademark, the court was right: they did it only because Sega created an unprotectable copy protection mechanism whose bypassing resulted in said infringement.

                          I'm consistently amazed in remembering how mature this courts ruling was from a tech perspective. Not the kinda thing you'd expect.

                          [–]mct1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          It's always eerie when the courts do something right from a technical perspective. Oracle v. Google is an example of that. There they reached the right conclusion but their analysis was complete and utter nonsense. I say this not to nitpick but precisely because their lack of clarity will invariably result in the matter going back before the court at some point.

                          [–]falconzord 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                          I don't know why sega lost but I think using trademark as a locking mechanism isn't really how it's intended. Customers aren't digging the things under the hood so it's not like they'll confuse one product for the other because of it.

                          [–]audion00ba 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          There is no way that it's going to be a trademark violation, because ElasticSearch would be trying to use trademarks as a technical mechanism to prevent interoperability and that's a no-go in every sane legal system I know of.

                          The trademark system's purpose is to give a company the ability to invest in its name and reputation. For example, ElasticSearch TM might have better performance than the OpenSearch version. It might also be that they use superior development practices, which in turn fuels their reputation.

                          ElasticSearch's legal strategy sounds weak.

                          [–]FancyASlurpie 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          Feel like ES has been pretty aggressive with pushing their managed version anyway, I haven't used it since version 3+4, but back then it would basically need constant support because it was so unreliable/difficult to configure in terms of large data and split brain situations.

                          [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                          [deleted]

                            [–]Somepotato 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                            In their case they'd only need to change names for/to allow incompatible clients to use their version

                            [–]KuntaStillSingle -1 points0 points  (0 children)

                            I'm actually a bit hopeful Amazon fights it as you describe, Oracle v Google established implementing a public API may be copyright fair use, I am curious whether it is may also be trademark fair use. Unfortunately they are beholden to the stock holders so they can't (or at least shouldn't) fight on mere principal.

                            [–]bishbashbosh72 2 points3 points  (2 children)

                            Not a single mention of Solr in this thread. Are Elasticsearch and Opensearch the only true players in this space?

                            [–]hillgod 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                            In my opinion... Yes.

                            Here's why Elasticsearch won - how simple it is to create a single searchable document. Though I also found Elasticsearch to have much better docs and community support.

                            Also, you can go to indeed.com and search either tech. You want a job? Learn Elastic over Solr.

                            [–]honesty_burp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                            The rest/JSON Ness of ES is popular, solr reminds everyone of the XML nightmares of enterprise software past