Remember that in this story, as strange as this is to say, Amazon is the good guy. Elastic changed their products from a FOSS license to a proprietary one, and Amazon did exactly what you're supposed to do in that case: fork and continue development of the last FOSS version.
They're literally keeping the source open. Call Amazon out for other stuff, not this. Enough with this good vs. evil attitude. People and companies are more complex than that and have varied interests. They do not fall neatly into one camp or the other.
It’s one of those things. Until Amazon does this to you, you will love that company no matter how many people they will screw over.
Mind you this company basically is a monopoly in multiple domains. I’m afraid of the world where we align with the villain on something only because it’s convenient for us.
> We have experienced significant growth, with revenue increasing to $608.5 million in the year ended April 30, 2021 from $427.6 million in the year ended April 30, 2020 and $271.7 million in the year ended April 30, 2019, representing year-over-year growth of 42% for the year ended April 30, 2021 and 57% for the year ended April 30, 2020
I don't fault Elastic for choosing to change their license. I fault them for their choice of the new one. They should have moved to the AGPL instead, like Grafana did under basically the exact same circumstances.
You talk like they're entitled to that. When you make software open source, the social contract is that you accept free contributions, in the form of commits, issues, and code reviews, in exchange for being held accountable by the community to ensure you provide the best product. If another company provides a superior service and support, that's part of the risk. If they want to go back to closed source, they can't be surprised if everyone jumps ship.
Elastic did all of the hard work. Amazon came in and took it.
Open source is fair when there aren't giants plucking it out of the hands of workers and co-opting it into their massive platform options with god-tier leverage. You can't compete in that world.
We need licenses even stronger than the AGPL to require that platforms running the code are open all the way down to the billing stack.
You could similarly say that Apache did the hard work with Lucene, then Elastic came and took it. Except, of course, if you think that simply hosting is not worth any money, but then Elastics own paid offering is void as well.
I really don't fault Elastic for disliking the situation; someone making billions with you work while you're still counting coins sucks. But they reached their size due to OpenSource and AWS, so painting them as the profitless victim really does not show the whole picture. And their handling of the situation so far was horrible; they've even gone so far as to embed code in their client libraries so that they don't work with Amazons offering.
So yes, in conclusion, Amazon really has the moral high ground here.
Elastic is welcome to license their code how they want. If they want to write a license that says “to use our code, everything down to the billing stack must be open source”, they’re welcome to. But when they license their code and then throw a tantrum when Amazon uses the code in line with the license, I’ve got no sympathy for them.
If I was a mole for Amazon working at Elasticsearch, I can’t think of a better way to accelerate the shift onto AWS’s offering than breaking client comparability with previous versions of Elasticsearch. If a customer needs to upgrade the client for some reason, they are forced to update the server as well. Maybe they’ll just update the client and server to OpenSearch while they’re at it so they don’t have any more forced updates in the future.
As far as I'm aware, this is the first major "hostile" fork AWS has done. In fact, it's probably one of the largest ones overall. It will be really interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.
Google certainly didn't support Amazon forking Android into FireOS. I believe that was just about when Google began migrating tons of APIs from the Android OS to Google Play Services.
While this is tangentially related to Amazon's fork of Elasticsearch, it's more related to Elastic's trademark infringement suit against AWS's use of the trademarked Elasticsearch name in their managed service, especially egregious given AWS's attempt to portray it as a "partnership" with Elastic in a since-deleted tweet:
I doubt Amazon cares about that suit. If anything, it's elastic that hugely benefited from calling their product after countless Amazon products that have the word elastic in them.
Amazon can show that EC2 predates the company by half a decade atleast
So many people in this discussion take sides. The only thing I see, is divergence. APIs will now evolve separately, and compatibility will break soon. I think this competition and diversification will be good for innovation in search. But it’s also going to be confusing for a while. If you use Elasticsearch in Amazon, you better decide very quickly whether you want to hitch your wagon to the OpenSearch future. Migrating is going to be a pain in a year or two.
This didn't happen with MySQL/MariaDB split -- they are still mostly compatible.
Granted, it looks like Elastic is trying to break compatibility pretty hard (see the new version checks in clients for example) but hopefully Amazon will release universal connectors, it certainly in the Amazon's interests.
Good point about MySQL/MariaDB. I think this is different though because search engines are at a big pivot point to include approximate-nearest-neighbor dense vector search (it has before been only sparse vector search for Lucene based platforms).
Specifically, this feature https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/42326#issuec... will be a big change for Elasticsearch. OpenSearch might try to mimic the API, but implementation details here will matter a lot, since this type of search is really picky when it comes to performance/recall balance. OpenDistro has already been working on their own version: https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/features/knn.... ...so will they switch their API? Perhaps - but the results are going to be very different.
Why would most companies need to migrate if they're happy with the features in a past version? Why not stick with it (assuming there are no major security flaws?)
Well, how far is Amazon going to take OpenSearch? Elastic is all in on innovating and building their flagship product forever with significant dedication. AWS just needs something good enough as an offering to go with the rest of their OK cloud services.
I think most people can see both sides of this conflict. But, as you yourself pointed out at the end of your comment, finding a side to pick quickly is important.
If the elastic product were better, they shouldn't have bait-n-switched the licence to non-free.
They would have competed on the merits of the product. Looks like whoever is making these decisions is not familiar with what made them popular with Devs in the first place.
We are doing the transition and everything is just so smooth. Adding new nodes is easy and fast. There's an actually good and consistent UI.
Last time we tried to upgrade our cluster version on AWS we ended up waiting for weeks until it randomly updated mid day on a busy day and broke everything.
It's a ton of small things that really make a difference.
Readit News
This is exactly what Amazon wants you to think. That's why they're calling it "OpenSearch" and not "AmazonSearch".
And mind you, Elastic is no tiny startup. It has 2000+ employees.
Mind you this company basically is a monopoly in multiple domains. I’m afraid of the world where we align with the villain on something only because it’s convenient for us.
https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_downloads/2021/Elas...
Revenue for FY2018 and 2017 was $160M and $88M respectively.
Is that what Amazon taking all their revenue looks like?
That is so twisted.
Elastic did all of the hard work. Amazon came in and took it.
Open source is fair when there aren't giants plucking it out of the hands of workers and co-opting it into their massive platform options with god-tier leverage. You can't compete in that world.
We need licenses even stronger than the AGPL to require that platforms running the code are open all the way down to the billing stack.
I really don't fault Elastic for disliking the situation; someone making billions with you work while you're still counting coins sucks. But they reached their size due to OpenSource and AWS, so painting them as the profitless victim really does not show the whole picture. And their handling of the situation so far was horrible; they've even gone so far as to embed code in their client libraries so that they don't work with Amazons offering.
So yes, in conclusion, Amazon really has the moral high ground here.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ppgosavi/status/11791819009690378...
Amazon can show that EC2 predates the company by half a decade atleast
Granted, it looks like Elastic is trying to break compatibility pretty hard (see the new version checks in clients for example) but hopefully Amazon will release universal connectors, it certainly in the Amazon's interests.
Specifically, this feature https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/42326#issuec... will be a big change for Elasticsearch. OpenSearch might try to mimic the API, but implementation details here will matter a lot, since this type of search is really picky when it comes to performance/recall balance. OpenDistro has already been working on their own version: https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/features/knn.... ...so will they switch their API? Perhaps - but the results are going to be very different.
They would have competed on the merits of the product. Looks like whoever is making these decisions is not familiar with what made them popular with Devs in the first place.
But I don’t know how much of that is just ES and how much is Amazon
Last time we tried to upgrade our cluster version on AWS we ended up waiting for weeks until it randomly updated mid day on a busy day and broke everything.
It's a ton of small things that really make a difference.