Elastic, like others at the time, have used open source to their advantage - to start. The obvious one is that it is built around the Apache Lucene, and I have no doubt that this is one of the reasons ES ended up being initially released under the Apache license.
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.
This should be forked to be opensource compatible. Opensource doesn't mean that you get to control everything. If what you're offering doesn't stand on its own merits then what's it worth? I get that we wish Amazon couldn't do what they do but that's what the license permits.
I’m not going to say that Elastic has no real competition, but as a whole package it stands alone. It’s speed and versatility definitely differentiate it from other similar systems. The fact that it can be a log aggregator, search engine, personalization system, seim, analytics tool, and forecasting tool make it a lot more useful than typical full-text search systems, often which can’t process aggregations or run in a single instance. I think they know their position in the market is strong and that helps them feel empowered to make risky moves with their licensing. I’d rather use anything else, but for interactive analytics (sub second response times on millions of data points) it’s tough to beat. It’s a fussy app to self-host or run in a non-managed cloud environment. I wish them the best, but worry these kinds of moves will inspire more competition from totally other projects, let alone it’s fork(s).
Hacker News had a good discussion about this earlier today.
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.
Can't Amazon just serve these bogus headers and keep opensearch compatible? It's not like headers are copyrighted...
People who want open source search should take another look at Solr, it's doing fine.
PostgreSQL should be everyone’s first choice for a data store. It can do so much, including serving as your full text search system.
Oh my. I'm not sure if there is any Open Source company which fell so low - to Break the Drivers... I'm also not sure what they are looking to reach with this step as Developers who want their applications to work both with Elastic and OpenSearch will not need to go right into AWS hands...
It’s nigh time to fork the ElasticSearch API.
This is definitaly going to blow up in their face.
I know at least a dozen people who learned open source elastic search in a research environment and then moved jobs to doing it in a for profit company.If the paid vs open source products are not going to be the same then your losing training that companies want.
I also have ran into the scenario that others have described where we use the open source version for proof of concept b/4 moving to the paid version when needed.
At the least, this muddies the waters and creates extra research time for engineers just to understand the licensing and cost implications of the product.
Why would they waste their time testing and maintaining it for the forks?
Those other forks are (alsoA) open source, what's the problem? Maintain your own library if you need it.
that sucks.
What differences cause issues?
Good? Amazon deserves no support in branding their version 'open'.
I use to be a huge proponent of Elastic.co for search. I paid for their Elastic Cloud Enterprise product to offer an internally hosted Elastic as a Service. We ran a proof of concept with the the open source Elastic Stack before requesting the funding to get commercial support and the extra management features.
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.