On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

Related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961

Why write emotionally charged letter instead of one backed with facts? Amazon is claiming [1][2] that Elastic has been intentionally unclear about what part of Elastic stack is open source vs proprietary. It would best serve Elastic if they respond to that with facts.

If the claims are true, and done intentionally, it's a really bad move on part of Elastic. The ambiguity around licensing hurts all their users and not just Amazon.

[1] "Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary."

[2] "Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate"

Clicking through to the other blog posts, it becomes apparent the the author plays fast and loose with the word "open", to their benefit. They "opened up" by providing gratis licenses to some of their software. They don't call it "open source", but the phrase "open source" is also scattered around the articles, so that "open" benefits by proximal association.

They're free to license their software however they want; I don't use it so I really don't care. But it really rankles when someone extols the virtues of open source and waxes rhetoric about how open they are, and yet the software they offer is proprietary by default. They "double down on open", but the open source distribution is opt-in.

I cannot help but feel that the articles are deliberately constructed to mislead. That's a serious accusation and I wish I could be more charitable in how I interpret them but the terminology is so consistent that it cannot be an accident -- gratis-but-proprietary is always "open", libre is never just "open" but always "open source".

Technically correct isn't enough. No-one's explicitly staked "open" as being the same as "open source". But in the context of this conversation "open" is an obvious contraction of "open source" and to use the obvious contraction to mean something diametrically opposed is not reasonable or ok; especially when "source available" is widely understood. The same thing was attempted with the Commons License.

The intent behind words is important. Persuasive oratory is fine but using those tactics to mislead does not engender trust, especially when the beneficiary is the one speaking and not the audience.

This is a really great response and I'm curious how AWS will respond. It's particularly damning because AWS was arguing from a position of moral authority on the move, which I think was disingenuous. They wanted to create a fork and act like they weren't. Shay just called them out on it.

I also wrote up my own thoughts, but it's obviously not as relevant as this. I'm a little more blunt about what AWS is doing. I even throw in a comparison to Microsoft abusing their monopoly power in the 90's by distributing Explorer for free to kill off Netscape: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-pr...

Longer term, the real question is how Elastic will respond to this commercially. Will they create more closed source? Go higher up the stack into specific applications? It's going to be an interesting and tumultuous couple of years in open source infrastructure software.

It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party.

When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing.

When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either.

It may be that the collective HN vibe is critical no matter what. But also maybe "we" in aggregate legitimately don't like either option given.

I know open source devs need to make money somehow. I also wish there was a way to do it that was open source. I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source.

In the original period of open source, people generally worked on open source on the clock at their existing jobs, a building tools they needed for that job, a job not dedicated to that particular product but to getting something done that product helped with. People were getting paid to write open source, but it wasn't by "productizing" it. The results were still shared freely.

(this is how/where apache httpd, for one, came from; people with jobs who needed an http server writing one on the clock, even though their job was not "writing an http server." They needed an http server to accomplish what was needed for their employers, but their employers had no desire or capacity to be in the business of selling an http server. Why not collaborate on one we can all use?)

But those days are gone, software has just gotten _so much more complex_ and time-consuming to develop. The open source software we have and need can't be developed in someone's "spare" (even on-the-clock spare) time. Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product. But we see the perils of that when an employer decides "wait, why aren't we making money selling this? Why are we contributing our employee's time to it?" (thanks Oracle).

So that leaves people trying to productize it one way or another. It is not clear to me how to have a healthy open source ecosystem in that market environment. I don't think "proprietary layer on top" is actually good for open source, especially if it's gonna lead (naturally) to rejecting contributions from outside to add those same features as open source (why would we want to spend time working with a contributor to make the feature solid, when we _already wrote it_, and when accepting the contribution would _harm our business model_ because that feature is what we want to charge for?), and then resistance to the "right to fork" which I consider the fundamental basis of open source freedom.

Actions speak louder than words. Amazon's words [1] were backed up by action- specifically, the public release of Open Distro for Elasticsearch and several useful, advanced features under an Apache 2.0 license.

This post from Elastic consists of vague claims of 'FUD' and of their commercial code being 'bluntly copied', without any further clarifying details or responsive action to back them up. (E.g., if you have real evidence of Amazon copying proprietary code, which I doubt, then announce the copyright infringement lawsuit you have just filed, don't weakly allude to your grievances in a blog post.)

Conspicuously, the post did not contain any defense or even mention of Amazon's key accusations of "significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base", or its claim that "the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular." The only response offered is a vague, generic "we believe in open source" - again with no concrete action backing up those empty words.

If this is the best and only response Elastic is able to offer, I fully expect Amazon to keep the high ground in this controversy.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit.

If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro.

Anyone have a different take?

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS.

At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care.

Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist.

But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?

With the rise of cloud computing, the effort by cloud providers to commoditize their complements, i.e., software, inevitably leads to this particular kind of conflict between companies backing OSS software who wish to deploy their own SaaS offerings and cloud providers with their own SaaS offerings. A common response is that OSS backers can build businesses based on support and consulting but I believe that's overly restrictive. Those kinds of businesses don't scale nearly as well as managed services and it will definitely have a chilling effect on OSS development if the kinds of companies that are permitted to be built on them are simply support and consulting. I don't believe that companies backing OSS have an exclusive right to offer managed services for their software, but the current situation with cloud providers offering managed services with only token engagement with the OSS community (and then only when forced into it by licensing restrictions) is not beneficial to OSS, either.

OSS is a great business model if you're one of the 3 multi-billion dollar major cloud vendors co's who are collectively the primary beneficiaries of everyone else's OSS investments since relatively no-one pays to acquire/use free OSS software, only to host it, so it's of course in their best interest to keep everything OSS so they can collect rent at the point where people pay to utilize its value - for hosting their production systems.

It's easy for AWS, Azure or GCP to be altruistic and suggests everything should be OSS for the betterment of humanity, since they've become the primary beneficiaries of the wealth created by OSS which benefits them more than anything else. Then use the profits to develop billion dollar cloud infrastructure moats to ensure a barrier to entry that prohibits anyone else from partaking in.

This is ultimately the core issue between companies behind developers of OSS software like Redis Labs, Confluent, Elastic.co, etc. They've put in the investment to build and support their OSS products but it's the cloud vendors end up reaping most of the revenue derived from it given they're the only entity Customers pay to host their production systems. This is what the extended OSS licenses are designed to target which are typically free for everyone else but prohibits the cloud vendors from absorbing all the rewards from hosting their software without revenue sharing anything back.

I think that AWS are the "bad guy" here. I am happy to be proven wrong but they don’t have a track record of contributing code to the OSS projects they provide as a service. Whenever they are forced like it was the case with Mongo and now with Elastic they are using their power to have a competing OSS project. There is nothing wrong with this business wise but it's totally against spirit of OSS.

If you look at Red Hat on other hand when they decided that Kubernetes was the way to go for their OpenShift project they put lots of engineering resources for upstream k8s.

This letter is clearly not written by someone who interacts with customers. As someone who has tried to work with Elastic, their pricing is atrocious even for the most basic of features.

You can't get alerting without paying a king's ransom for features you'll likely never use.

It would be interesting if someone pushed a PR that contains more or less all the "secret sauce" of X-Pack, and see what reasons they'd use for rejecting it.

Clarification: Not push X-Pack itself, but features comparable. Like they suggested people do in the post.

While the original movement behind open source was one of benevolence that isn't to say that the economic model of open source at scale actually works as a competitive advantage.

There are costs associated with running a business and one of the largest is marketing. What open source allows you to do is defer these costs by charging nothing for adoption. This allows you to acquire users, build up an ecosystem, and create a moat against competitors to your business. Competitors not in the sense of AWS which is adjacent, but competitors in the sense of another replacement for Elastic Search itself.

At the beginning you are losing 100% of your revenue opportunity, but you have to remember that you are either modeling yourself as a consumer company or business company. Simply put, consumers companies make more money from consumers while businesses make more money from businesses.

AWS is a business company so the majority of their revenue is from businesses. With most open source projects you are also a business, which means if you find 10 years of success 90% of your revenue will eventually come from businesses.

Those early adopters are usually smaller entities so they aren't really a large opportunity loss and the big businesses want to see massive adoption before they really consider switching. So effectively you are cutting out 20% of your revenue opportunity to build up an ecosystem moat as well as marketing budget. It isn't money directly out of your pocket, but instead is paid purely in head count, which by the way is much cheaper and more effective than trying to market your software to hundreds of thousands of people across the world.

The "free" component isn't just one of benevolence but actually an attack on any future competitor because why would those early adopters pay $5 for something that they can get for free. Most early businesses rely on these smaller customers and open source actually cuts that out of the equation, reducing competition.

So it's a very interesting dynamic in the sense that something that was started for a "good" purpose can accidentally actually stifle future competition, when you would assume otherwise.

I'm sure Shay et al have good intentions, but to have any degree of usability with elastic.co you need to buy x-packs which goes against the grain a little. I'd still like to have auth (not just basic-http) on personal projects.

"When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. This happened numerous times over the years, and only recently again, this time with Amazon. Some have aligned and became wonderful partners to us and the community. Others, sadly, didn't follow through. We have a commitment that we will treat a single developer contributing to our products the same as others. There is no preference, and we will reject any ask to have one. Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself."

The way this is written, it seems like there was a difference of opinion in terms of the product architecture, and not a purely commercial decision by Amazon. I would think it would make commercial sense for the team at Elastic to align with Amazon than the other way round. On the other hand Amazon claims that Elastic was moving away towards proprietary code [1].

Overall, being in open source for a decade, I am against this trend in dual licensing (which I fear is pushed by Venture Capitalists). People forget that the fact that you have freedom and zero friction, is what makes open source awesome. There are other ways to make money, like building a kick-ass consulting practice around the open source offering.

[1] https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/faq.html

Very specifically, the open core of Elastic's offering doesn't do authentication. It's not that there's a limited number of users. It's not that it's a single user and password in a config file somewhere. It's that you go from having all the features of a licensed version including multiple users with configurable access to different data sets down to needing to run elk with no native authentication and authorization and then wrap authentication around it one way or another if you want the community edition. This is 2019. A data aggregation and inspection system that by default sits open on a port for anyone to use is not quite fit for purpose.

I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations.

That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead.

Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason to choose ElasticSearch over RethinkDb? ElasticSearch does have a larger ecosystem, but with how good RethinkDb's API is, I'm not entirely sure any 3rd party packages would actually be necessary.

Add to that RethinkDb's ability to do joins and changefeeds and this decision becomes a no-brainer for me.

I think a lot of open source people forget that large companies worry a lot about licenses and clarity around that. Without that clarity and control they get sued left and right and on this very forum we end up discussing how evil this large company has been.

Elastic search is a great product and there is no doubt about it. However I understand Amazon's viewpoint that it should be clear which part of ES are open source and which are not.

A the end of the day Amazon or Google can easily buuld a clone of ES from ground up.

Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. Elastic, mongo, Kafka, redis, all are being preyed upon.

This response doesn't address why Netflix and Expedia Group is joining AWS open distro effort. Licensing is major headache for them I assumed.

Personally, as current and former administrator of multiple ES cluster, I'm quite worried how this "intermingling of open source and proprietary code" will affect my current and previous team. We certainly not aware of it before this week.

This was bad. I was expecting a move towards transparency that could've outmaneuvered amazon. This is just appeal to emotion.

what would be the next move from Amazon? Open distro for Kafka, MongoDB and Redis, and all other successful opensource tools?

Just don't know where Amazon is going with this approach of re-packaging existing opensource tools and calling it their opensource contribution.

Lot of bitterness about people forking and bundling ES. If it was so painful for Elastic maybe they should have gone for a more suitable model - you get everything open source and pay for support and priority /early access to security updates. Unlike the current model where you get basic features as open source and have to pay for and use different license if you want to use essential features like monitoring and performance analysis.

Someone else with a business model that benefits from providing these features for free and making them open source to reduce their development/maintenance burden - cloud providers like Amazon - are going to do just that. And they're well within their right to do so.

The claim that Amazon says they work with Elastic for their service is bogus. I've asked many times, and its been made clear to me that they have some additional services they run, but aside from those run upstream Elasticsearch. (Same with Kubernetes).

Elastic's licensing is very hard to navigate, and the per node nature of it often makes it more cost prohibitive than Splunk.

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to Elastic to start delivering value that can't simply be added by third party contributions. If thats the case, what purpose is Elastic (corporation) actually fulfilling?

This is why I like Thanos. Bullshit is everywhere. Even a person doing behind a great open source software is getting criticism now. Good days!

They write this big post and end the last paragraph saying "It is always Day 0 at Elastic". What does that remind you of? :D

> When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no.

I think this may have been the crux of the friction between the companies. Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP [0][1], if not other enterprises.

> Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself.

I look around and spot at least three substantial bug/fixes from AWS employees (?) [2][3][4], so I don't see any lack of effort from AWS? AWS engs were sending pull requests, just like the others. That said, any sort of heavy handedness from maintainers of elasticsearch might also play a role in forcing enterprises to take control of software they depend upon so much where legally allowed. We have seen this happen with Node.js/IO.js and MariaDB/MySQL before.

> The FUD mostly comes from large(r) companies that fear what such a movement can cause.

The irony of this statement is not lost on me. Elastic is that larger company (one that crucially controls a majority of the ecosystem around elasticsearch: kibana, logstash, beats, xpack to name a few), and AWS is an upstart here with their investment in open-distro, presumably to fight FUD.

> We all sometimes need to self reflect on what and why we did that made us successful, to make sure we stay true to our course. [..] to others out there, that face so many reasons to be distracted, keep your focus [..] And last, to express our shared commitment to continue to build great products [..] It is our true north.

I think one right way for Elastic to show commitment to opensource would be to entrust the projects to a community agreed governance model, like others before them have done [5][6][7][8].

Also, what's interesting is that its not just Amazon here, but Expedia and Netflix as well putting their weight behind open-distro [9].

Like someone pointed out, this response from Elastic does seem to be emotionally charged [10].

---

[0] https://www.elastic.co/about/partners/google-cloud-platform

[1] blog.google "With the Elastic partnership in place, we’re kicking off our joint engineering work and will start rolling out managed Elasticsearch on GCP later this year." https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-p...

[2] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/27628/files

[3] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/31479

[4] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/29531

[5] GridGrain and https://ignite.apache.org

[6] Various networking companies and http://opennetworking.org

[7] Cloudera and https://impala.apache.org

[8] LinkedIn/Confluent and https://kafka.apache.org/

[9] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

[10] "It is always Day 0 at Elastic (like the developers we serve, we use zero based numbering)."

Yeah, Elastic doesn't look great here. Anyone else getting deja vu about Mongo?

so, any license changes?

time to forget elastic and use open distros

As an alternative to parsing 3 HN links (plus comments) and reading between the lines, can someone please summarize what's going on ?

Thank you.

Wow elastic seems salty. I don't think this blog post was a great idea. While I understand that they need to monetize their project, I have been put off by them putting their security features behind a paywall. They literally advertised "Security" as non-existent on their XPack pricing page for their basic free plan. Furthermore, I am still laughing about how the author litteraly wrote that Amazon "bluntly copied" them, "sadly, painfully, with critical bugs".

I read all of that as a rant about "pleople cloning my open source project and making it better, stop plz".

Duh, I'm glad about the direction Amazon is going.

Elastic, like Redis and MongoDB before it, decided that Open Core isn't enough, but that they need to go against the Open Source Initiative (a grassroots organization that represents the Open Source movement very well, and runs https://opensource.org/ which contains the open source definition) and confuse users by misusing the well understood, but non-trademarked term "open source". This phrase in the post from the article:

"When others closed down, we opened up."

...links to another article called Doubling Down on Open [1] where they say introduce their source available strategy and in some places call it open source (with and without capital letters) and in other places differentiate between it and open source.

Please don't call things Open Source that don't fit the Open Source Definition. You have a right to do so since it's not trademarked, and I'll defend that right, but it adds confusion (the D part of FUD). And while the OSI doesn't have a trademark to Open Source (perhaps rightfully so since it's a generic term, though more generic terms like Apple have been trademarked), they do own opensource.org.

[1]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open