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Open Source Businesses Cloud

Amazon's Elasticsearch Fork 'OpenSearch' Reaches General Availability 1.0 Milestone (thenewstack.io) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the ready-for-production dept.
Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column shares an update on Amazon's ongoing battle with scalable data search solution ElasticSearch: Earlier this year, AWS completed its fork of ElasticSearch with the first release of OpenSearch. If you haven't followed along, the whole affair was a bit of a tug of war between AWS and Elastic, with AWS eventually coming out seemingly on top. After Elastic changed the licensing on ElasticSearch in an attempt to prevent AWS from selling a service based on the then-open-source project, AWS forked the project to release OpenSearch under Apache 2.0, effectively preserving its open source status.

Now, OpenSearch has reached 1.0, which AWS says not only "marks the first production-ready version of OpenSearch," but also introduces "multiple new enhancements," such as data streams, trace analytics span filtering, report scheduling and more. The 1.0 release also involved quite a bit of code cleanup, removing proprietary code and marks, and adds the ability to upgrade from ElasticSearch to OpenSearch as if you were performing a normal upgrade of ElasticSearch.

If you're interested in learning where the project is going, head on over to the public roadmap to learn more.
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Amazon's Elasticsearch Fork 'OpenSearch' Reaches General Availability 1.0 Milestone More

Amazon's Elasticsearch Fork 'OpenSearch' Reaches General Availability 1.0 Milestone

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  • Look at RDS and more importantly RedShift - AWS may pretend to be pro-open source, however they keep a complete lock on the key parts of the code. If they continue this way they will suck the life blood out of all the key server side open source software.

    We need some licence widely agreed upon, similar to the SSPL I guess, which ensures that service providers have an obligation to share their code. If that doesn't count as "open source" then the definition of "open source" needs to be updated.

    • BSD is open source.

    • We need some licence widely agreed upon, similar to the SSPL I guess, which ensures that service providers have an obligation to share their code.

      Sure, sounds good. Maybe it could start with a supplementary license that could be applied to any other license that permits such things?

      If that doesn't count as "open source" then the definition of "open source" needs to be updated.

      What you're talking about falls under the broad banner of "open source", but it isn't very specific. That's why e.g. "Free Software" became a thing. "Open" was used in middle-era Unix days to denote documented standards, sometimes with open source code (like Motif) but oftener only with well-documented APIs and freely readable header files.

    • If they continue this way they will suck the life blood out of all the key server side open source software.

      Continue in what way? The other project is still running, this is a fork. Everyone is free not to use it.

      We need some licence widely agreed upon

      No such thing. Everyone wants something different from their licenses which is why there are so many to choose from. There are plenty of licenses that meet the definition of open source, and the software creators are free to license them as such if *they* so choose.

      • It's a rather old debate [techcrunch.com] actually. Problem with all these "gotchas" is where's the limit [onesaitplatform.com]? At what point will "open" become meaningless?

    • We need some licence widely agreed upon, similar to the SSPL I guess, which ensures that service providers have an obligation to share their code. If that doesn't count as "open source" then the definition of "open source" needs to be updated.

      Elastic and Mongo moved to the SSPL which does prevent this problem.

      I've read the explanation of why it's not really open source [opensource.org], but I can't say I understand it. They quote a blog post to support their position, instead of the actual license.

      • Well they reference on their own site.

        6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
        The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

        As I mentioned elsewhere this could be "cloud computing" but it could also be "usage by the military or government" (ethical code).

      • > I can't say I understand it

        OSI makes some weird calls. They rejected WTFPL 2.0 despite knowing that it's needed in jurisdictions where public domain doesn't exist.

        They have their opinions about what 'open' means and not everybody agrees.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        Section 13: "If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License."

        Under Debian's heuristics for determining whether a license satisfies the Debian Free Software Guidelines, this would violate the Desert Island Test (because you can't offer free downloads to everyone from a dessert island) and the Dissident Test (because doing s

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In this case the amazon code is far less restricted than elastic's new license.

      A lot of people are giving amazon flak for this, but imagine if apache decided after it got popular that they were not ok with other people using it to sell services, or nginx, or bind, or any number of other open source projects thats success has become a building block of the modern internet.

      I'm not pro amazon, but in this case, elastic is the bad guy.

    • I've had a hand in a couple approaches standardizing license terms for these use cases.

      For those who want copyleft to cover service wrappers and extensions, but not straightforward applications, there's Round Robin [roundrobinlicense.com]. This began as my attempt to "reimplement" SSPL without "patching" AGPL, and without the proprietary-license style of SSPL section 13. Round Robin's has benefited from a lot of excellent feedback from programmers, particularly around the level of abstraction in the language setting the bounds of

  • It somehow doesn't rub me the right way to install an entire Java stack just to have some index/search thing for my application. If elastic search is so awesome, could someone just build a binary implementation so I can avoid the whole Java thing? That would be awesome.

  • Really? (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday July 18, 2021 @01:45PM (#61594837)

    Then why do I have to use Google to search for Amazon stuff they have and their search does not return?

  • Nice to see it built in Lucene and Java (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Sunday July 18, 2021 @01:48PM (#61594845)
    ...but I am a biased Java fan. I love Lucene. It's been one of the better products I've worked on. I've quickly built a lot of cool prototypes using Lucene, very quickly. It's been one of the more pleasant and fun platforms I've used.

  • This is just the way that Amazon operates - screws the life out of anything not Amazon.

    • They did no such thing. ElasticSearch was just whining that someone is getting rich off their work. Welcome to open source. Unfortunately for them their product could be be forked and it was done so.

      • Amazon forked it without contributing back in any way.

        ElasticSearch was upset about this, and changed their license to prevent it from happening again in the future.

        • Re:Could Amazon not afford to support Elasticsearc (Score:4, Informative)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday July 18, 2021 @03:44PM (#61595107)

          Exactly. All of this is entirely on ElasticSearch. They pretended to be an open source project and then got upset when they realised it meant other people could use their software to make money. Honestly, boo fucking hoo. If they wanted to be a for profit or wanted to demand some kind of contribution then they should have picked an appropriate license up front.

          Amazon is entirely in the right here. Are they a nice benevolent corporate citizen? No. But no where does the license require them to be.

      • There's something else to keep in mind. Code accessed by an API. [wikipedia.org]

        If case law favored Oracle, the current owners of Unix, Micro Focus, could have sought damages from any POSIX-based operating system developer intending to use the operating system for commercial use.

        One party financially (directly or indirectly) benefiting off the work of another. Sound familiar?

        • One party financially (directly or indirectly) benefiting off the work of another. Sound familiar?

          Yeah: See, every open source program in the history of open source programs.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      comgreats youu dust described the wet dream of almost any business
  • When an individual complains about an open source project they're told "you're welcome to fork it and do what you like with it" - when a large corporate who has the resources to do so, does it, then the sky is falling.

  • I am using the "free" version of Elasticsearch for a while now and I wasn't aware that it had a restriction against commercial use. Could someone point me to the change that was made that prompted Amazon to do an Apache 2.0 fork?

    Also, for whomever is knowledgeable on this, if I plan on taking my ES application public/commercial is there a good reason for me to changed to OpenSearch?

    • Re:What was the license change? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jarkus4 ( 1627895 ) on Sunday July 18, 2021 @03:59PM (#61595149)

      Its not prohibition against commercial use. You can sell your service that is using elastic just fine (with elastic being just part of the backend of your application). Its just you cant offer elastic itself as a service to someone else (eg "we will host and administer elastic for our customers")

      Relevant part of license:
      "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software."

      • Thanks for that. After posting I did find a statement from Amazon, but they used a lot more words than you did, making your posting more useful.

      • "any substantial set of features or functionality" is a very vague way of putting it that will scare of most would-be commercial users. If I have a software stack that provides some measure of search functionality leveraging elastic then it seems like at least I could be in violation of their terms.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 1s44c ( 552956 )

        "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software."

        A clause aimed squarely at AWS. Good luck with that Elastic.

  • Elastic is a shit company with shit business practices who have been making it very difficult to use elasticsearch without paying for it
    They are not white hat FOSS heroes and I could see this specific case being a net positive for FOSS
    But, that doesn't change the fact that Amazon are manifestly evil

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