Amazon released Open Distro for Elasticsearch

    This article is a news review of how:

    • Amazon released Open Distro for Elasticsearch
    • Why would they do that?
    • What does this mean for Elastic and for Open Source in general?

    Elastic


    There was a company Elastic.

    They had several Open Source products :

    • Elasticsearch itself: a server that receives, stores and allows logs to be searched
    • Kibana: frontend engine that takes data from Elasticsearch and draws beautiful reports from them
    • some more utilities that collect logs. For example LogStash

    Elasticsearch is sometimes called ELK (moose), as an acronym for the main elements:

    - E lasticsearch
    - L ogStash
    - K ibana

    Although the components “L” and “K” can generally be replaced by others: Beats, Grafana, ...

    Elastic also has X -Pack .
    This is a commercial product. Some of the features of X-Pack are paid (quite expensive) and some are free (but the license is still commercial).

    X-Pack extends ELK capabilities:

    - security
    - alerting
    - monitoring
    - reporting
    - graph
    - ...

    Moreover, if you do not install the X-Pack, then some fairly significant features are missing. For example, by default, ELK does not have authentication, then all the data sticks out. You can screw the reverse proxy and do basic authentication (so-so option), or you can buy an X-Pack.

    Step 1: Elastic slyly changes license



    In June 2018, Elastic wrote an article in the spirit that we are supposedly so open that now even our commercial X-Pack is open .

    But the people quickly realized that it was a setup.

    Because starting from version 6.3, the repository for ELK and X-Pack is one, and there are two licenses:

    • for ELK - Apache 2.0
    • for X-Pack - commercial license. That is, the code is now open, but you have to pay as before.

    image

    And now having installed ELK for yourself, you never know for sure whether you have an Open Source version or a commercial one?

    When you fix something in ELK and send PR - does it go to the open part of the code or to the commercial?

    That is, Elastic made it so difficult to install the Open Source version of ELK.
    And people began to worry that if you have a commercial version of Elasticsearch, or Elasticsearch is part of your product, it may happen that you owe money.

    Although some representatives of Elastic explained that this was not so: there used to be a closed commercial X-Pack, and now there is an open commercial X-Pack - how could this be worse?

    For ordinary users, the matter was complicated by the fact that in the Docker images, Elastic included the X-Pack, which worked in Trial-mode (which was not very obvious), and after some time fell off and demanded to pay. Yes, the X-Pack in these containers could not be used, but those who were not in the subject could get caught.

    And Amazon did not seem to like the fact that since these changes, all new features (Index Lifecycle Management, APM UI, Infrastructure and Logs UI, Kibana multi-tenancy, Kibana Canvas) Elastic began to add only under a commercial license (although often free for users ) in which the ban was written to use these new features for SaaS offers, that is, just for what Amazon did.

    Move 2: Amazon Launches Open Distro for Elasticsearch


    On March 11, 2019, the AWS blog released the announcement of Open Distro for Elasticsearch.

    And also an article in which they explain why they released Open Distro for Elasticsearch. .

    The essence of which:

    • We at Amazon love Open Source and depend on many cool Open Source products.
    • We support and invest in Open Source
    • We do not like what Elastic did. We asked them to make a clean open version of Elasticsearch and we were ready to invest, but they refused
    • Therefore, we release our open (Apache 2.0) version which we call Open Distro for Elasticsearch
    • And there we include many features that were in the paid X-Pack. Such as security, notifications, SQL, Performance Analyzer, etc. Everything is completely open and free.

    In this regard, a number of questions arise for which they have already prepared a FAQ . These couple of points seemed important to me:

    • Open Distro for Elasticsearch is not a fork. Amazon will contribute to Elasticsearch
    • Amazon will try to keep up with Elasticsearch: when Elastic releases new versions, corresponding versions of Open Distro for Elasticsearch will be released.

    Reaction, consequences


    On the one hand, Amazon’s move is seen as aggressive towards Elastic:
    - Elastic invests in Elasticsearch development, and makes money on this Amazon: Amazon has a number of Elasticsearch offers on its AWS .

    Amazon, on the other hand, writes that Elasticsearch builds heavily on the success of other Open Source products:

    - Apache Lucene, which started developing 11 years before Elasticsearch
    - Jackson for parsing JSON
    - Netty, as a container for the web
    , and others

    If Elastic can make money with other Open Source products, why can't Amazon make money with Elasticsearch?

    Here's an interesting discussion of this news:
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602

    People write that now many Open Source developers will think twice: is it worth it to open your code under open licenses when there are such examples that others take this code and make money on it?

    Moreover, even the “open core” model is not a panacea, because the interested party can add its code from above as Amazon did for Elasticsearch.

    Update (2019, May 20):
    Today, Elastic announced that they are a series of “security features”, for which previously had to pay now are free. In particular, it will now be possible to manage users for Kibana.
    Well, and free - does not mean that Open Source.

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