This is a very surprising move from AWS. In the past they haven't seemed to be willing to contribute to the OSS that they pick up and host. Even though they claim they'll contribute changes upstream, I doubt that Elastic would accept changes that are competitive with their commercial offerings. So you effectively get a fork.
I think this is a win for the Elastic community as a whole, but presents a real problem for Elastic the company. And that begs the question of what happens to the Elastic community if there's a real fork. And what happens if Elastic the company is very negatively impacted? Do we see a fracture of the community?
Looking even farther out, at this point does it make sense for any startup looking to create infrastructure software to open source it? If their project becomes successful, they'll get eaten up by the hosting providers. It makes smaller scale open source more commercially viable because you won't attract the attention of the providers that would come in a take your business.
Will be interesting to at least watch what early stage VC investment in open source companies looks like over the next 12-24 months. Will the open source pitch work for series A investments or will investors shy away?
Adding another thought to this, which is that I doubt the code behind this is a direct response to Elastic's recent license changes. This is a ton of work and I'm guessing AWS has been working on the code side of this since well before last summer. By all accounts their hosted Elastic offering is wildly successful so they've probably been hard at work to add features that Elastic formerly had as closed and commercial (before the license change).
I think their open sourcing of this work is a direct response to the recent license changes. If it weren't for those, they might have just kept this work closed and in use only for the hosted product (like they do with many other projects).
They took the closed XPack code and put it into the open source Elastic repo, but under a commercial license. It muddied the waters for anyone looking to use or contribute to the open source.
Prior to this move, the default install of the Elastic Stack was 100% open source. X-Pack had to be intentionally installed as a plugin.
Now the default install includes X-Pack, and you have to go out of your way (assuming you even realize that there is difference) to install the 100% Apache 2.0 licensed version.
> Looking even farther out, at this point does it make sense for any startup looking to create infrastructure software to open source it?
Of course it still does, just not under permissive licenses. Hopefully the industry will converge on Kyle Mitchell's license for this, instead of everyone coming up with their own licenses:
https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license
I view that as a significant negative impact to OSS. I have a strong preference for liberal licenses like MIT or Apache 2.0. Infectious licenses like copy-left put restrictions on it that make it less appealing as open source. I wrote a bit on it here: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/copyleft-and-community-licen...
While I understand your argument, I dispute that copy-left makes things inherently less appealing as open source, or that you can make any objective claim that liberal licenses ultimately result in broader utility.
1. I personally find copy-left inherently more appealing (as something to potentially contribute to) purely because of my ideological leanings.
2. While the first order calculation of use for liberally licensed software seems clearly in favor of them, it's impossible to ever know what benefits the copy-left restrictions would bring one or more orders removed from the original distribution.
I wonder why you say that? It's kind of obvious that somebody was going to do it sooner or later to protect themselves, no? Perhaps fearing the license change?
Oh I assumed that someone would do it. I just didn't expect it to be AWS. Elastic is popular enough and the core open source license permissive enough that I expected some sort of fork eventually. The license of the original project is an important factor in this. For example, I wouldn't expect a fork of MongoDB because of the limitations of the AGPL license make it less appealing. With that case I'd expect what AWS already did, which was to create an API compatible system. Also notable is that they're not open sourcing that.
With Elastic, this looks like it's half marketing on AWS' part. They want to start repairing their image in the OSS world so they say they're doing this for the community.
> This is a very surprising move from AWS. In the past they haven't seemed to be willing to contribute to the OSS that they pick up and host
I’m actually suprised they’re moving so slowly with OSS. I assumed they were going to go a lot more aggressively in this direction when they hired Adrian Cockcroft over 2 years ago now.
> It makes smaller scale open source more commercially viable because you won't attract the attention of the providers that would come in a take your business.
Small scale open source isn't technologically viable.
> In the past they haven't seemed to be willing to contribute to the OSS
How is small scale open source not technologically viable ? There are tons of small open source companies that build great niche open source products which are technologically competitive. I run such a tech/business (XWiki) for 15 years now. They just are not known and don't interest VCs unless you are ready to start going open core. However it is possible to be sustainable, just don't expect to be startup-rich.
I think this is a win for the Elastic community as a whole, but presents a real problem for Elastic the company. And that begs the question of what happens to the Elastic community if there's a real fork. And what happens if Elastic the company is very negatively impacted? Do we see a fracture of the community?
Looking even farther out, at this point does it make sense for any startup looking to create infrastructure software to open source it? If their project becomes successful, they'll get eaten up by the hosting providers. It makes smaller scale open source more commercially viable because you won't attract the attention of the providers that would come in a take your business.
Will be interesting to at least watch what early stage VC investment in open source companies looks like over the next 12-24 months. Will the open source pitch work for series A investments or will investors shy away?