About Open Distros, Open Source, and Elastic

Original author: Shay Banon
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In the context of the events about Open Distro , the discovery of the X-Pack source code , as well as the article “The Cloud and Open Source Powder Keg” is a translation of the post by Shey Banon (founder and CEO of Elastic).



At Elastic, we focus on creating great products, building communities around them, and ensuring success for users of our products.

In 2009, I sat down and wrote the first few lines of Elasticsearch and opened its source . I quit my job and spent two years investing in creating a product and helping the great community that was built around it. In 2012, we established Elastic. We invested in our user community and built an ecosystem of open source products developed around it. We added so many features to Apache Lucene that I lost track of the score, creating a solid foundation for our solution. We added Kibana, created by Rashid , Logstash, created by Jordan , and PacketBeat, created by Monica and Tudor , and much more. We created products, the communities around them, and focused on ensuring that our users could get the most benefit. Today we have hundreds of Elastic developers who work on this vast commitment every day. We have hundreds of thousands of community members contributing to our common success every day. And I'm proud of the company we createdto facilitate this (process - approx. per. ).

We have built a trusting level with our users, whom I am proud of and bow to. We need to start with the fact that we are open and continue to be honest with our community and users in what we do. We also focused on nothing distracting us from this.

Since we started, for many years we have been dealing with FUD. If you create something successful, it will definitely happen. FUD mainly comes from (more) large companies that are afraid of what such a move might do. This is a natural process. "Do not use the product, this is a toy." “He has only a few developers, what happens if they get hit by a bus?” "They don’t know what ″ Enterprise ″ wants." “They are not true X or Y or Z (enter your word of the day).” We never allowed this to influence us or occupy our thoughts. This is done in order to distract us and our community from the main goal: to create great products and communities that users love so much. If we let this happen, we just let our users down, and we never let you down.

Our products have been forked, redistributed and understaffed so many times that I have lost count. This is a sign of the success and scale of our products. From various vendors to large Chinese companies, which now include Amazon. There has always been a “cause”, sometimes masked by false altruism or goodwill. None of them (meaning "reasons" - approx. Per. ) Did not last. They (solutions based on Elastic products - approx.) were created to meet their own needs, contribute to confusion and destroy the community. Our commitment and focus on creating great products and communities that users like has shaped our way, and it resonated with you, our users. We have reached a confidence level (communication) with you, the expected level of innovation and amazing cooperation, which is simply there, and you have seen it.

We believe in open sourceand the power he brings. We also said from the start that some features will be commercial and why. I believe that our honesty is one of the main reasons for our common success. We have created our open source code in such a way that it is easy to connect and implement. From the very beginning, we did not change our path, strengthening the trust of our users over the years, that we remain true to our word and to them (to users - approx. Trans. ).

Our sales code was a “source of inspiration” for others, it was blindly copied by various companies and even returned back in certain distribution options or forks, such as, for example, Amazon just stamped it, unfortunately, with critical bugs. We continued to focus on creating great products and communities that users like. We did not allow this to distract us, and this focus paid off tenfold.

Our brand was used and insulted, stole and distorted information about it many times. Companies falsely claim that they work in collaboration with our company, in particular, Amazon. We didn’t let this distract us, we continued to create great products and communities that users liked. Weakening focus is the enemy of the company, and we never allow this to affect us. Only our users are important, not the noise around.

When we joined forces with companies, we opened the code. When we saw that our users were using us for APM, we were all excited about it. We teamed up with a fully SaaS company in the APM area called OpBeat, which was a major commercial investment on our part, and most of this code was made publicly available.and all this for free. It was a simple decision, because we are focused on creating great products and communities that users like, and you, our users, deserve it.

When others closed we opened. We have kept our open source code under the same license and doubled our openness as a company. We re-licensed our existing commercial code under a less strict license and opened the code. We are trying to create the same level of cooperation and transparency as in our open source code in everything we do. This is a backlash to the many discussions that we had with our users, and I am so glad that it caused you a lot of resonance. Since then, our level of investment in open source has only increased, as has our commitment to freer functions and experience that are clearly defined and understandably shared.

When the companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked to establish a special working relationship for working together on the code, requiring preferences that would put them higher than our users, we said no. This has happened many times over the years, and only recently again, this time with Amazon. Some have joined and become great partners for us and the community. Others, unfortunately, did not follow this path. We have a commitment that we will relate to one developer who contributes to the development of our products, as well as to everyone else. There are no preferences, and we will reject any request for its availability. Our answer has always been constant: send a pull request, like everyone else. Quality will speak for itself.

I write all this for several reasons. First, we all sometimes need to think about what and why we did, what made us successful, to make sure that we stay true to our course. You, our users, our community, our company. Secondly, for everyone else who can be distracted by different reasons, that maintaining concentration and being honest is the only thing that matters. And finally, to express our common desire to continue to create great products and communities that users like. This is our true course .

Elastic is always day zero (like the developers we help, we use numbering from scratch). Nothing has changed since the first line of code I wrote during the 10-year journey that we have walked with all of you, our users, and many of the years ahead will not change. I ♡ all of you.

Several links were added to the text that were not in the original post. This should not change the essence of the text.

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