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by alichapman 1772 days ago
Amazom were contributing changes back to Elasticsearch before the license change - the license change basically explicitly says "you can't run this as a service and sell it to people".

With this in mind what could Amazon do? Their options were: A. Stop selling their Elasticsearch service, or B. Fork Elasticsearch.

This change from Elastic is really shitty though, and sort of proves that all their finger pointing at Amazon saying that they're acting against the spirit of open source was all bullshit.
2 comments
martypitt 1772 days ago
Those aren't the only options. AWS could've paid to license the software.
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arp242 1771 days ago
> Amazom were contributing changes back to Elasticsearch before the license change

Not very many by my count; something like 2 patches/month on average. I mean, of course this is great, but there are several ES-based companies that contributed more, and about >95% of ES was written by Elastic.

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_tom_ 1771 days ago
> about >95% of ES was written by Elastic

Nope.

I'm not sure what the numbers are, but Elasticsearch is based on Lucene, so a large chuck of what makes up Elasticsearch predates Elasticsearch.

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arp242 1771 days ago
It's based on looking at the ElasticSearch commit log; some details in [1].

Lucene is not included in this; as far as I can tell it's just imported as a dependency. I mean, obviously Lucene is an important part, but by this standard something like "Jane Doe wrote about half of Docker" would also be "wrong" because we'd have to count the people who worked on cgroups and all the other Linux stuff Docker uses, all the Go dependencies, etc. Realistically, almost everything we do is based on various things other people did. "To make an apple pie from scratch we must first invent the universe."

Maybe that would be fairer/better to also count Lucene, but that's a different discussion and wasn't really my point, which was that almost all code in the ElasticSearch GitHub repo comes from Elastic employees, that Amazon never contributed all that much code, and that based on this plus the severely reduced levels of activity of OpenSearch vs. Elastic don't really paint the most rosy long-term prospect for OpenSearch vs. ElasticSearch.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...

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