I'm not sure I can recommend them anymore. The company doesn't seem to understand their customer's journey and are rejecting the methods that brought them success.
Imho, the problem isn’t “well it’s not open source anymore then.” The problem is people who give more weight to a religion/philosophy than sustainability. Who cares if it’s open source if the people developing it can’t support themselves?
Fair code > open source.
Sony forked FreeBSD and used it as a substantial component of their operating system for their PlayStation 5, a product which they will make money off (in the long run, at least). No changes are available to anyone. No one at FreeBSD is jumping up and down about it. Maybe because there's more to a software project than maximising profit.
Of course, once you add-on that they've basically done to Lucene what AWS did to Elasticsearch, then the whole thing is a joke. I also just checked and Elastic are NOT sponsers of the ASF: https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.
Absolute garbage company in terms of open source and community. I will never willingly install their software ever again.
The person you responded to didn't even assert that open source software is morally superior to alternatives, but instead said that by moving away from open source, Elastic is failing to understand its customers. His argument doesn't require any judgement about the morality of the relicense.
When customers see Elastic circling the wagons to remove some of the differentiators of their open source software, they're going to have to reconsider their options.
Elastic didn't, and AWS stepped to give customers what they wanted. And in case anyone wants to argue that it's impossible to compete with AWS, please go ask Snowflake how they built a better product on top of AWS itself and became one of the best SaaS success stories so far.
I don't care about VC's money to be honest. I design IT architectures for big banks, and apparent excessive greed from software companies tend to stress me.
Well, it's more like they made a sandwich, Amazon stole it, and now Amazon is selling it to other people. Meanwhile Elastic.co is starving.
It's not a fair game anymore.
I hope the DOJ breaks them up into three or more companies.
The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch.
So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry.
[0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting
> Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) ("Elastic"), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced strong results for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year (ended April 30, 2021). Total revenue was $177.6 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year, or 39% on a constant currency basis.
[1] My Conversation with Jeff Bezos (2000) - https://web.archive.org/web/20040215160333/http://www.oreill...
The search is what it does but most of it's value is centered in the management/scaling/monitoring of full text search over many machines.
I love Postgres but it's "clustering" story is definitely not as user friendly.
Instinctively I believe what you're saying, just wondering if you know for sure.
b) PostgreSQL does not compare to Elasticsearch when it comes to full text searching capabilities.
c) PostgreSQL has no vendor-supported, built-in solution for horizontal scalability which is a big reason why you would choose Elasticsearch over a more lightweight search system.
However, it does get one up to that 80% mark for text search. But that other 20% is why Elasticsearch and Algolia etc exists.
Example here https://www.judyrecords.com/info
also, that "you know, for search" tagline is featured on t-shirts sold by Elastic [0]. seems entirely plausible to me that Amazon & Elastic lawyers could get into a pissing contest about potential trademark or copyright protection of that term and whether sending it as an HTTP header constitutes infringement.
0: https://elastic.shop/products/you-know-for-search-t-shirt-st...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-warns-off-os-pirates-wit...
> If call to '/' fails with 401 or 403 pass the check and show a warning (message will be linked later). This happens if the monitor permission missing for user. The subsequent checks must be ignored.
And perhaps it'd be a good idea to override that method anyway, unless you're fine with your code doing some unnecessary handshake every first time you use a client.
Facebook made a similar unilateral decision in relicensing React from Apache 2 to "BSD + Patents" many years ago. They faced quite a bit of pressure, resulting in another relicensing to MIT.
What they're saying is that this is a breach of community norms.
Secondly, being released under a permissive open source license definitely helped with its adoption. I was working as a senior developer in a UK Government department in 2013 and we had need for a full-text search engine for a project - and even before v1, ES was a contender, and it was eventually selected once v1 was released. This was largely due to a) ease of set-up/use and b) it’s release under an open source license. If it had been under AGPL, would we have still used it? Yes, probably - our specific use case wouldn’t have been affected by such a license, and the dept. was relatively open to more complex OSS licenses - but I have worked for several other orgs. where even just the AGPL would have resulted in a hard “no”.
Thirdly, ES has had contributions from a wide range of people. I honestly don’t know how I’d even begin to evaluate how much value ES has got from community contributions, but I feel it’s likely to be greater than the costs of managing those contributions.
But of course eventually Elastic got funding and had shareholders to placate. I don’t really have much sympathy for them about this conflict - their early choices were in part clearly made to maximise their value, and they decided to cash in on that value at a later date - the fact that those decisions had implications for their value should have been somewhat obvious to any investor who did any due diligence. I’m still not entirely convinced that the open source model is antithetical to commercialisation, but I think it does highlight how early decisions around OSS licensing can affect such processes.
Does the AGPL really place such burdens on the organization such that the benefits of a locked-open, community-guaranteed (albeit popularity not guaranteed) technology aren't worthwhile?
Or is it kind of a cargo-culting and cultural-norms phenomenon where people don't use AGPL projects because they've heard that other people don't use them, thus continuing the cycle?
If a company risks installing it or supporting it company wide then your risk lawsuit and having your business shutdown. The work-around is that for every user's computer IT must manually install the driver (a windows DLL file).
To me if I see AGPL it makes me think that it's likely a predatory business with good lawyers; and for this reason I would stay away from it even on personal projects unless there is no alternative.
I frankly doubt there’s any sort of cost-benefit analysis being done here. Certainly in my experience it was much more driven by legal uncertainty and risk-aversion.
I have revisited Loki after all this new though, but I think its still missing full text search.
That's very much by design, by not having indexing of the logging content it's much much leaner and efficient. It's aimed at a completely different use case where you already know the set of log streams you want to monitor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28103389
What surprised me was how many commenters seemed unhappy with Amazon's Open Source alternative and the level of resources they appeared to be committing to it.
Amazon is actually the more open company when it comes to Elastic at this point. Open source does best when it’s not the meal ticket of the company developing it.
Sure, there are about 5-6 open source search engines one could pick from in a greenfield project, with amazing differences of features and maturity, but choosing between Open Search and ElasticSearch is likely a "political" decision, since they are (ahem, mostly) API compatible and have very similar operational needs.
