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Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform To Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers (medium.com) 111

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elastic isn't the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar "rule changes" designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services. In his blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), argued that by making part of its product suite proprietary, Elastic was betraying the core principles of the open source community. "Customers must be able to trust that open source projects stay open," Cockcroft wrote. "When important open source projects that AWS and our customers depend on begin restricting access, changing licensing terms, or intermingling open source and proprietary software, we will invest to sustain the open source project and community."

AWS's announcement did not attract the immediate attention of the Democratic presidential candidates or the growing cadre of antitrust activists who have recently set their sights on Amazon. But in the world of open source and free software, where picayune changes in arcane language can spark the internet equivalent of the Hundred Years War, the release of AWS's Open Distro for Elasticsearch launched a heated debate. [...] Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon's move a "hostile takeover" of Elastic's business. Steven O'Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the "existential threat" that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose.
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Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform To Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers More

Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform To Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

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  • License terms (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Is amazon using the license within its terms? If yes then it is the fault of the open source companies for using a shitty license. If no, then sue amazon.

    • Oh No! They picked the wrong vendor and signed the standard contract. Now their screwed.
      Pro Tip: Research Vendors that you may be paying a lot of money too, to make sure they will work for you. Secondly, if there service is that valuable to you, you may want to work on a custom contract vs just blindly signing the standard one. You may pay a bit more, but the contract will make sure the vendor doesn't just drop you at a notice.

      Cloud Services, while cheaper and often cheaper in the long run, however you sac

      • Re: License terms (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You are absolutely right, and Amazon, in particular, has engineered their console UX and even their boto API very carefully, much akin to a casino: it is very easy to walk in with a cocktail and sit doewn at the table and spend money, and then find that you can not easily stop.

        Its a great service, but Ive seen too many businesses dive in too fast without a strategy and qucikly get iverwhelmed with costs. Amazon is there to take your money, not help you save money.

  • Nothing wrong here - working as designed (Score:5, Informative)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:12AM (#58488904) Homepage
    Elasticsearch was open source and Amazon used entirely within the terms of that license. Elasticsearch then changed the license to restrict, so Amazon stayed on the last open source version (it's unclear if Amazon have gone so far as to fork as yet).

    Nothing wrong here on either side.

    • Re:Nothing wrong here - working as designed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fortythirteen ( 5606969 ) on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:20AM (#58488964)
      Nothing legally wrong, but this exposes a systemic flaw in the open source model - at least with how it functions within the free market. What is the motivation for someone to make an open source project that is more than a basic library, if you know that at least one of the big players is going to suck all the potential profit out of the room?

      • Re:Nothing wrong here - working as designed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by scourfish ( 573542 ) <.moc.oohay. .ta. .hsifruocs.> on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:32AM (#58489020)
        The big players that use open source also spend a lot of money on software developers that contribute patches back to the open source projects. The free market is doing just fine with open source software.

      • Re:Nothing wrong here - working as designed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:57AM (#58489188)

        The issue is of conflicting business models. Elasticsearch wanted to be a for profit software company but also wanted to make its software open source. Those two decisions are incompatible. If you want to be open source but also for profit then you have to take the Red Hat approach. It has been successfully repeated by others like SUSE and Canonical. If you dont care about profit then the foundation route is perfectly fine, this is how most of the FOSS organizations operate.

        So yeah AWS are taking advantage of Elasticsearch, but anyone who knows anything about the tech world knows that's just Tuesday. The industry is built on making money off other people's hard work and that will likely never change. Elastisearch is guilty naivety in thinking they could have their cake and eat it when it came to business models. If you are a FOSS company then the software IS NOT the product. RHEL is not Red Hat's product, the support, consultancy and cloud services are their products. RHEL is the freebie the products are built upon to entice you to buy in.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          Mod up

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 25, 2019 @01:51PM (#58491122)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        That's the risk you take with an open source project though, if your primary goal is to earn a profit from it (vs the goal of many open source startups companies: Get acquired and cash out). Usually the project isn't worth the effort for another company to fork and develop their own version, but occasionally you will end up in a situation like this, where you make something very useful and someone else sees it's use and decides it's cheaper to fork and develop their own than to pay you for it. You can't hav

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Elasticsearch made money before this change. There is profit to be made, Amazon is demonstrating that with their fork. But you can and do answer to the community and risk a fork if you adopt non-open terms.

      • There's nothing wrong with the model. There just seems to be something wrong with mentality of those who choose an open source model only to decide years later to close the source.

      • Seriously, people, The Magic Cauldron is twenty years old by now.

        There's no flaw in the "open source model" being demonstrated here. There's simply the old flaw in the proprietary software model being shown, which is that somebody else can come along and develop a replacement for your proprietary bytes and then the profits you make from selling the proprietary bytes go away.

        Sometimes your proprietary bytes get replaced by a proprietary rival (Visicalc -> 1-2-3 -> Excel), sometimes they get replaced b

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          somebody else can come along and develop a replacement for your proprietary bytes and then the profits you make from selling the proprietary bytes go away.

          True in some fields, false in others. Tetris v. Xio, for example.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by SEE ( 7681 )

            Yes, well, there are issues of artistic expression in the selection of visual elements. Xio made theirs look like Tetris down to the color choices. Just because your code doesn't infringe doesn't mean it's impossible to infringe otherwise. The judge's opinion in the case is a pretty good guide as to what to change to make a legal clone.

            • I read the ruling [mst.edu]. From page 14, with my emphasis:

              Xio was also free to design a puzzle game using pieces of different shapes instead of using the same seven pieces used in Tetris. [...] The style, design, shape, and movement of the pieces are expression; they are not part of the ideas, rules, or functions of the game nor are they essential or inseparable from the ideas, rules, or functions of the game.

              From page 15, with my emphasis:

              I find the following elements are also protected expression and further supp

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by SEE ( 7681 )

                1) This is one of the usual conceptual problems people have with understanding rulings in copyright law. A list of similarities that establish a work is infringing does not mean that no non-infrigning work can use any or some of those elements. It means that use of the totality of the list, under the circumstances of the case, constitutes an infringement. The moment you A) started highlighting specific isolated items, and B) put the reason for using those specific items in a new context (esports competit

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by tepples ( 727027 )

                  An esports league would compete with a league organized by Tetris, in much the same way that ball/puck sport leagues competed before merging: NL vs. AL in baseball, BAA vs. NBL vs. ABA in basketball, NFL vs. AFL vs. USFL in gridiron.

                  The difference between NBA and international courts is about 2 percent: NBA's 94 by 50 feet vs. FIBA's 91.9 by 49.2 feet. I concede your point about international ice hockey using a 98.4 foot wide rink compared to the NHL's 85 feet, but I'm not familiar enough with ice hockey to

      • This is not a flaw, it is exactly the crowning feature of "free markets". The motivation for making "an open source project that is more than a basic library" is exactly: do so only when it is profitable to do so. For an individual this is likely to be never, and so we can conclude that many open source programmers (and certainly almost all Free Software programmers!) are irrational actors. It is sometimes rational for a corporation; for example an open source project for ingestion or UI to their proprietar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Nope, it's called a fork and it is the community working as intended. Amazon is a community member. If you don't like the direction of a project, fork it and may the best fork win.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Amazon contributes nothing back to the main line and reaps all of the rewards.
        That is problematic since it perverse the spirit of open source.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          They contribute to their fork or it won't win. If the main line wants something from their fork it is right there to take and merge.

          There is no perversion to the spirit of open source. Users get Amazon's changes.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          They have a link to the source repo as well as an affirmation that they will continue to submit patches and contributions upstream.

          https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/

          They also claim it isn't a fork but obviously that is just semantics. It is a fork.

        • They contribute it upstream but Elastic doesn't accept the PRs because the Amazon changes undercut their business.

          Elastic doesn't offer a fully functioning product in the open core. You not only don't get a lot of extra bells and whistles. You not only don't get multitenancy. You're not just missing RBAC. You're missing more than a few hand-added accounts. It's worse than not integrating with OIDC or SAML2, or even LDAP. The open source core doesn't have a user and password. You have to build that or put i

          • " The open source core doesn't have a user and password. "

            Yeah ... you will notice that although there are still regular colossal "AWS" (as in handrolled ES on EC2) open access ES cluster hacks (generally faux ransomware: you get a note in an index that you need to give x bitcoin to someone to get your data back, but in reality your log has some DELETEs in it), it's nontrivial to hack a wide open AWS Elasticsearch Service domain now. The first huge wave of "ransomware" attacks on ES clusters (also Mongo, bu

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by PetiePooo ( 606423 )
          I disagree.

          Amazon publishes all their updates. Elastic is free to incorporate them into their base distribution. I wish they would, in fact, but I very much doubt it will happen, as it undercuts their revenue stream.

          Remember all those stories about people leaving their base ElasticSearch cluster open on the internet? That's because the base distribution does not include security!

          Who does that? People who sell security as an added "Enterprise" feature. Elastic's response to those stories has al

        • I hear that in order to get bug fixes as well as fixes for idiotic inefficiencies back into mainline, certain developers working for a large company wind up using pseudonyms due to resistance from the repo owner. This is something for which the developers could be fired.

          But I'm probably hearing wrong.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      Not so long ago, Slashdot would have been howling for Elastic to be burned at the stake. They've taken an open source project and made it (partially) proprietary. I still see that as evil in the open source world.

      Ope source advocates have long said "if a company closes their open source product, you can always just fork it, so there's no risk there." But when someone does just that, we're supposed to be angry for some reason? Because Amazon?

    • If Amazon does fork it, they will be doing the entire community a service! That too is as designed.

  • Who is Elastic? What is their primary product? I have never heard of them.

    • Re: Elastic (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Elastic Search is a cool database of sorts that you can stuff a bunch of text in and perform searches very quickly. It is hard to describe how cool it is if you need that sort of thing. Way better than a sql db. Go look it up if you need to know more.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Elasticsearch which is a distributed nosql database/object storage system. It is commonly used in a stack with logstash and Kibana. The ELK stack.

  • Amazon could fix this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by epiphani ( 254981 ) <epiphani@dal . n et> on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:55AM (#58489178)

    By actually contributing or partnering with the companies that build open source software, and not just taking it all - lightly forking, rebranding, and selling a hosted version of the same software.

    The issue is pretty straightforward- these companies believe Open Source is the Right Way to do software, but at the end of the day they have bills to pay, engineerings to employ, and revenue to generate that allows them to do all of those things. Amazon doesn't build competing products and sell them, they take the same product and compete head to head. Without either major open source contributions back, or some type of revenue sharing deal. These companies built and matured the product to a certain extent before Amazon picks them up.

    Yes, it's a risk of the Open Source model. That's why you're seeing companies throw up their hands and say "yeah, we can't do it this way anymore, the big guys aren't acting in good faith with the Open Source model".

    So this is a logical result. Amazon should be partnering and supporting these companies - instead they take their work and compete head on. Of course we need to change the models and licensing.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Or elastic could sell support like profitable open source businesses do.

      • Or elastic could sell support like profitable open source businesses do.

        Including and specifically for Amazon's packaged version, which will have quirks compared to the standard distribution. These are the differences, this is what Amazon broke, this is what's available in the newer standard distribution and Amazon is now behind, etc.

        Decent documentation is the number one failing of open source, along with that last 20% of polish. This is what the commercial company should be concentrating on. If they're not, they're useless.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          They do concentrate on it. Generally on making it extensive and written in coded jargon so that any level of proficiency requires paying for training and support.

          Personally, I think it is a poor strategy. The enterprises you want to buy support will do it in any case, even if they don't need it, so a head doesn't roll when something fails. All this does is reduce adoption. You'd end up with a larger user base and therefore selling more support by making the solutions as easy to learn and use as possible. Wh

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      By actually contributing or partnering with the companies that build open source software, and not just taking it all - lightly forking, rebranding, and selling a hosted version of the same software.

      *snip*

      Amazon should be partnering and supporting these companies - instead they take their work and compete head on. Of course we need to change the models and licensing.

      This is the key problem. And it's worse once you get to monopoly or oligopoly size. If there were 15 different Elastic Search hosting companies, there would be and would continue to be competition and growth among them.

      When Amazon (or Google) steps in and throws a billion dollars at it, no matter how much of a loss-leader it is (hint: using funds from one market to steamroll another is bad), no one else can possibly compete in a meaningful way. And not only does it blow away those other 14 hosting/consultin

  • Enough already (Score:3)

    by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Thursday April 25, 2019 @11:50AM (#58489880)

    People are saying Amazon doesn't open the source or contribute back, etc, etc.

    Here is the source.

    http://opendistro.github.io/

    Here is the statement where they assert they will continue to contribute patches upstream their assertion that this is not a fork when by definition it is a fork notwithstanding:

    "Today we are launching Open Distro for Elasticsearch. This is a value-added distribution of Elasticsearch that is 100% open source (Apache 2.0 license) and supported by AWS. Open Distro for Elasticsearch leverages the open source code for Elasticsearch and Kibana. This is not a fork; we will continue to send our contributions and patches upstream to advance these projects."

    https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/

  • You mean someone can take your open source code and use it to run you out of business?

    Who would have thunk it?

  • "AWS's announcement did not attract the immediate attention of the Democratic presidential candidates or the growing cadre of antitrust activists who have recently set their sights on Amazon. "

    This SJW from online communities and governments is growing out of control. We're going to have to start doing businesses in space with defense fields so people can create businesses that can run independent of prying asshole SJW types that think their damn furry cat posts are so worthy of protection in exchange for

  • Elastic is a proprietary software developer which happens to distribute some open source software as a come-on to attract customers for their proprietary products.

    Now someone (and why should anyone care who?) is attempting to replace their proprietary software with an actual open source solution, code available on GitHub.

    Elastic is accordingly bleating about it just like SCO bleated about big companies supporting an open source rival to their proprietary product. And they deserve the exact same same sympat

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