8 ms·

Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software) https://en.wikipedia.or

by rank0 1y ago

Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software): > On September 16, 2024, the Linux Foundation and Amazon Web Services announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.[15][16] Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation. OpenSearch is Apache License 2.0. You can do whatever you want to/with it. How are Elastic the good guys in your mind?

BoorishBears 1y ago
Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. And they were using an open source piece of software, but scaling it with closed source secret sauce on top of that. The license was saying they'd have to open up their secret sauce or pay, and their response was to leave the table instead. OpenSearch still lacks tons of really basic functionality from Elastisearch, and watching how far ahead Elasticsearch got as a product shows how much free lunch Amazon was getting... and how much they actually cared about the product when it was time for them to put their money where their mouth was (despite AWS pulling Elastic's yearly revenue every 4 days). Elasticsearch has generally matured like it has a passionate builder with a vision. They pushed on two major fronts (LLMs and Observability) and managed to execute effectively without letting product quality slip. Meanwhile OpenSearch is still the place where tickets requesting 3+ year old ES functionality go to die. - I'm honestly on the opposite side: how is the hyperscaler offering a strictly inferior product with closed extensions and still managing to eat the main developers' lunches for the sole reason they already have sales pipelines established not the bad guy? I guess I'm not really someone who believes in infinite scaling rules: something that can work at the individual scale doesn't have to work when hyperscalers do it (like selling hosted clusters)
- motorest 1y ago
  > Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. Irrelevant. Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services. That became a big part of their business model as it drove up it's adoption rates and popularity. If Elastic kept things like Elasticsearch proprietary, they would hardly have the same adoption rates. You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?
  - palata 1y ago
    > You can't have it both ways. I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place. The problem is not the open source licence, but rather the fact that TooBigTech can screw the competition whenever they feel like it.
    - motorest 1y ago
      > I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place. Irrelevant. If you grant a right to everyone under the sun, you do not get to retroactively pull those rights from someone you decided to target.
      - palata 1y ago
        Of course it is relevant. TooBigTech is killing smaller companies just because it is too big. When there are issues like this ("we made a successful product and someone forked it and it's killing us"), the "someone" is generally a BigTech, not 3 students in a garage. Then people complain about open source working/not working, and forget that the root problem is the monopoly that is screwing them.
        growse 1y ago
        Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.
        motorest 1y ago
        > Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. It's more fundamental that that. It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them. This is not limited to any managed service provided by a random cloud provider. The core reasoning is a corporation identifying end-users who are profiting from a service that directly or indirectly involves a project they release to the public under a FLOSS license. They see people getting paid, and retroactively change terms to coerce them into paying them. The same argument they throw at AWS providing a managed service also applies to any company using their project. How does this make any sense?
adastra22 1y ago
> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? Is this sarcasm?
- rank0 1y ago
  Not at all. Free information is free information.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Interesting that you use the word "free." Long before there was open-source, it was called "free software" and the restrictions on use that required derivative software to give back their changes was the entire point.
    - rank0 1y ago
      Except for all the instances where thats not the point. People of every community just love to gatekeep.
mkhalil 1y ago
Most (all?) open source licenses allow you to sell hosted clusters. They offered a hosted solution well before they changed its license. You can also fork it; but depending on the license, you might need to open-source any fork. : I don't know of any open source license ones that don't allow someone to sell hosted cluster. Even AGPL, which is copyleft, allows it; so long as the hosted version is either: the same as the open-source version, or it's version is also open-sourced.
- adrr 1y ago
  It’s a copyright license not a EULA. Grants rights for copying and can’t put restrictions on the using part.
- zwaps 1y ago
  Nobody knows what the AGPL actually says, since it has not been determined sufficiently in court (at least in the EU) which is why the license is blacklisted by most companies. If you want corporate adoption except AWS, you still cannot use AGPL. I feel like there should be a license that doesn’t allow hyperscalers alone to fork without releasing source while being palatable to smaller companies
palata 1y ago
> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition. That would be the point of antitrust, I guess? I mean if regulations were actually enforced.
- growse 1y ago
  This is not a suddenly emerging "gotcha". This risk has always existed. It existed when they chose to open source it in the first place. Time and time again we see the lesson being learned the hard way that "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".
  - larodi 1y ago
    > "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away". perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some very outspoken open-source proponents do not open-source their core business components. I can understand they do it in order to exist as a company, as busineses, but I don't understand why they have to endure being shamed for staying closed-source, while all their stack is open. many such companies exist. and let's add to this all the fact that everything released in 2025 as open-source gets slurped by LLMs for training. so, essentially, you feed bro's models breakfast with your open-source, like it or not. in the very near future we'll be able to perhaps prompt a 'retell' of Redis which is both the same software, but written so that it is not. in essence there seems to be now little reason to open-source anything at all, and particularly if this is a core-business logic. open-source if you can outpace everybody else (with tech), or else you shouldn't care about the revenue.
    - palata 1y ago
      I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem. I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Permissive don't protect the users in the first place, so...

by rank0 1y ago

BoorishBears 1y ago

Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. And they were using an open source piece of software, but scaling it with closed source secret sauce on top of that. The license was saying they'd have to open up their secret sauce or pay, and their response was to leave the table instead. OpenSearch still lacks tons of really basic functionality from Elastisearch, and watching how far ahead Elasticsearch got as a product shows how much free lunch Amazon was getting... and how much they actually cared about the product when it was time for them to put their money where their mouth was (despite AWS pulling Elastic's yearly revenue every 4 days). Elasticsearch has generally matured like it has a passionate builder with a vision. They pushed on two major fronts (LLMs and Observability) and managed to execute effectively without letting product quality slip. Meanwhile OpenSearch is still the place where tickets requesting 3+ year old ES functionality go to die. - I'm honestly on the opposite side: how is the hyperscaler offering a strictly inferior product with closed extensions and still managing to eat the main developers' lunches for the sole reason they already have sales pipelines established not the bad guy? I guess I'm not really someone who believes in infinite scaling rules: something that can work at the individual scale doesn't have to work when hyperscalers do it (like selling hosted clusters)

motorest 1y ago
> Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. Irrelevant. Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services. That became a big part of their business model as it drove up it's adoption rates and popularity. If Elastic kept things like Elasticsearch proprietary, they would hardly have the same adoption rates. You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?
- palata 1y ago
  > You can't have it both ways. I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place. The problem is not the open source licence, but rather the fact that TooBigTech can screw the competition whenever they feel like it.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place. Irrelevant. If you grant a right to everyone under the sun, you do not get to retroactively pull those rights from someone you decided to target.
    - palata 1y ago
      Of course it is relevant. TooBigTech is killing smaller companies just because it is too big. When there are issues like this ("we made a successful product and someone forked it and it's killing us"), the "someone" is generally a BigTech, not 3 students in a garage. Then people complain about open source working/not working, and forget that the root problem is the monopoly that is screwing them.
      - growse 1y ago
        Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.
        motorest 1y ago
        > Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. It's more fundamental that that. It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them. This is not limited to any managed service provided by a random cloud provider. The core reasoning is a corporation identifying end-users who are profiting from a service that directly or indirectly involves a project they release to the public under a FLOSS license. They see people getting paid, and retroactively change terms to coerce them into paying them. The same argument they throw at AWS providing a managed service also applies to any company using their project. How does this make any sense?

adastra22 1y ago

> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? Is this sarcasm?

rank0 1y ago
Not at all. Free information is free information.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Interesting that you use the word "free." Long before there was open-source, it was called "free software" and the restrictions on use that required derivative software to give back their changes was the entire point.
  - rank0 1y ago
    Except for all the instances where thats not the point. People of every community just love to gatekeep.

mkhalil 1y ago

Most (all?) open source licenses allow you to sell hosted clusters. They offered a hosted solution well before they changed its license. You can also fork it; but depending on the license, you might need to open-source any fork. : I don't know of any open source license ones that don't allow someone to sell hosted cluster. Even AGPL, which is copyleft, allows it; so long as the hosted version is either: the same as the open-source version, or it's version is also open-sourced.

adrr 1y ago
It’s a copyright license not a EULA. Grants rights for copying and can’t put restrictions on the using part.
zwaps 1y ago
Nobody knows what the AGPL actually says, since it has not been determined sufficiently in court (at least in the EU) which is why the license is blacklisted by most companies. If you want corporate adoption except AWS, you still cannot use AGPL. I feel like there should be a license that doesn’t allow hyperscalers alone to fork without releasing source while being palatable to smaller companies

palata 1y ago

> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition. That would be the point of antitrust, I guess? I mean if regulations were actually enforced.

growse 1y ago
This is not a suddenly emerging "gotcha". This risk has always existed. It existed when they chose to open source it in the first place. Time and time again we see the lesson being learned the hard way that "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".
- larodi 1y ago
  > "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away". perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some very outspoken open-source proponents do not open-source their core business components. I can understand they do it in order to exist as a company, as busineses, but I don't understand why they have to endure being shamed for staying closed-source, while all their stack is open. many such companies exist. and let's add to this all the fact that everything released in 2025 as open-source gets slurped by LLMs for training. so, essentially, you feed bro's models breakfast with your open-source, like it or not. in the very near future we'll be able to perhaps prompt a 'retell' of Redis which is both the same software, but written so that it is not. in essence there seems to be now little reason to open-source anything at all, and particularly if this is a core-business logic. open-source if you can outpace everybody else (with tech), or else you shouldn't care about the revenue.
  - palata 1y ago
    I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem. I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Permissive don't protect the users in the first place, so...