from Hacker News

Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

by dhd415 on 2/16/22, 9:33 PM with 184 comments

  • by rmccue on 2/16/22, 11:25 PM

    Hopefully this will let each of them compete on their own merits.

    I’ve been tossing up moving our workloads to Elastic Cloud anyway, because AWS ES Service is a source of constant headaches for us. Feels like at least once a week a server ends up in a state where we can’t fix it, and AWS engineers have to manually fix their internal state.

    Their standard response is “add more nodes”; well, we did that, and it is costing us an arm and a leg, and it didn’t fix the problems. (Plus, now we have new problems where networking blips appear to be causing quorum problems and sending the cluster into a death spiral.)

    Purely off the customer experience, it feels like Elastic Cloud has to be better; the whole licensing debacle has definitely turned me off Elastic though.

  • by uji on 2/16/22, 10:12 PM

    Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream.

    One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it.

    https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/

    Enhanced version means patched made by AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/

  • by WaxProlix on 2/16/22, 9:50 PM

    I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields:

    ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)

    Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... '''

    This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand AWS has a history of gobbling up OSS and productizing it, and that that's detrimental, but it's hard to see Elastic, Inc as anything but sore that they got their lunch eaten here. Maybe that's justified. But it comes off as incredibly petty.

    (disclaimer: i used to work at aws, but not anywhere near the referenced offerings).

  • by sdesol on 2/16/22, 10:16 PM

    Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the insights.

    When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share some more up to date insights here.

    Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 contributors

    https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D...

    while Elasticsearch had 181

    https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D...

    The metric that I'm most interested in, is knowing how many people committed within the last 14 days compared to those that committed more than 14 days ago. For Elasticsearch, they had 87 contributors which accounts for 68% of all contributors. OpenSearch had 20, which accounts for 67%. With these numbers, I can ball park how many people are working on Elasticsearch and OpenSearch full time and I would say Elasticsearch at the present moment has probably 5 times more people working on it fulltime vs OpenSearch.

    An important thing to note is, Amazon has other projects that are related to OpenSearch so these numbers don't necessary give the full picture, but it is pretty obvious that Elasticsearch is evolving at a much faster pace and time will tell if they (OpenSearch) can keep up.

  • by stevefan1999 on 2/17/22, 3:03 AM

    For anyone who wanted out of this fiasco, checkout MeiliSearch: https://docs.meilisearch.com/

    It's written in asynchronous Rust with native application speed albeit using much lower memory usage than ElasticSearch, and comes with even more features than ES, so it's feature-rich, blazing fast and can still benefit on multithreaded CPUs. Downside is that it does not have distributed indexing mode yet, but it is scheduled on this year (presumably Q4 2022 I guess)

  • by baobabKoodaa on 2/16/22, 10:21 PM

    This announcement is confusing, because it makes no mention of OpenSearch. The announcement implies that OpenSearch should no longer be available on AWS, but (of course) it is.

  • by StopHammoTime on 2/17/22, 12:01 AM

    Honesty sounds like AWS is giving up on providing hosted elastic search. I hated using it, it always was failing and I spent more time administering it than anything else.

    I recently used Elastic Cloud, and as much as I hate the company, their product is actually really good. I’d always recommend Elastic.

  • by josephcsible on 2/17/22, 7:35 AM

    Reminder that Amazon is the good guy and Elastic is the bad guy here. Elastic changed their license from a FOSS one to a proprietary one, and Amazon's fork is a FOSS continuation of the last version before the change. Yes, Amazon is evil in a lot of ways, but there's nothing even remotely evil about what they did here. And yes, Elastic had a legitimate problem that their old license was open to abuse, but the right way to fix that is the AGPL, not going full proprietary.

  • by temuze on 2/17/22, 1:11 AM

    The fact that their main product is "Elastic Cloud" and AWS EC2 means "Elastic Compute Cloud" is... unfortunate

  • by DonHopkins on 2/17/22, 6:25 AM

  • by nijave on 2/17/22, 1:48 AM

    AWS has gobs of open source software. I think they open source everything that runs client side (all the agents and integrations for EC2 for instance).

    It's pretty disingenuous to say they don't open source.

    Based off experience with AWS and GCP, AWS has significantly more widely available. On the other hand, Google the company has contributed a lot to OSS (like cgroups in the Linux kernel)

  • by Otek on 2/17/22, 8:20 AM

    So what does it mean? We will have on AWS OpenSearch and ElasticSearch or still just OpenSearch?

  • by pabs3 on 2/17/22, 2:14 AM

    What is the AWS fork called again?

  • by ummonk on 2/17/22, 5:30 AM

    What is the Amazon fork being called now?

    Edit: I see it’s called OpenSearch now.

  • by deknos on 2/16/22, 10:41 PM

    What does this mean for opensearch?

  • by jbverschoor on 2/16/22, 9:55 PM

    It would be nice if we can get some sort of standard license agreement for cases like this..

    It’s such a shame that this happened