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Amazon is trying to combat the perception that it is not giving back open source software, but it could also be a new threat for Elastic, an open source software company.
Since 2015, Amazon Web Services has been selling Elasticsearch, an open source software project originally created by Elastic Corporation, with a budget of $ 6 billion, in the form of a service aimed at software developers. Elasticsearch is popular on its own merits and is used by applications like Uber and Tinder to store, search and analyze large amounts of data.
On Monday, AWS, in partnership with Expedia and Netflix, announced Open Distro for Elasticsearch, a version of the software that Amazon will support with new features and updates, but which is also available as free open source – an initiative that according to AWS, is also intended to highlight its commitment to open source software.
In open source language, a distribution, or "distribution", is a customized version of an open source software, hence its name.
The first version of Open Distro for Elasticsearch will include some features that Elastic, the company, had made available to paying customers only from its own premium version of Elasticsearch. Amazon says it has made Elastic aware of its plans, but has decided to stay the course. Elastic was not immediately available for comment.
Amazon under fire
This decision comes as Amazon is scrutinized for its relationships with open source software, while small businesses such as Redis Labs, Confluent and MongoDB have all taken dramatic steps to modify their software licenses to prevent AWS and other major cloud providers to include and sell its open offerings. source software as a service. These new licenses have in turn sparked criticism for what some perceive as an attack on the basics of open source.
Read more:The MongoDB open source database company abandons a major battle in its fight against leading cloud computing vendors
In the blog post announcing Open Distro for Elasticsearch, Adrian Cockcroft, AWS Vice President in charge of Cloud Architecture Strategy, warns that these efforts are "blurring the cards" in open source, making uncertain what is considered open source and what could be considered exclusive intellectual property.
Indeed, this is why AWS decided to launch Open Distro for Elasticsearch, in order to bypass what it describes as a "mix" of proprietary and open source code in the original Elasticsearch project, which could be a problem for Amazon or its customers. , in his opinion.
"This is hard to follow and to govern, could lead to a license violation and an immediate termination of rights," wrote Cockcroft. "Individual code commits also contain more and more open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to work in open source only to contribute and participate."
Cockcroft said that AWS had discussed its concerns regarding Elasticsearch with Elastic.
"We discussed our concerns with Elastic, the Elasticsearch leadership, including proposing to devote significant resources to creating an unmixed version of Elasticsearch, led by the community," wrote Cockcroft. "They made it clear that they had the intention of continuing their momentum."
Amazon's contribution to open source
Cockcroft wrote about Amazon's commitment to open source in AWS, including the Apache Lucene, Hadoop (which started at Yahoo) and Kubernetes (in Google) projects, and that the company was investing in open source communities by training developers and developers. sponsorship events.
Some in Silicon Valley, however, feel that the company does not support open source. According to data analysis done by Felipe Hoffa, Google's developer advocate, AWS is lagging behind Microsoft and Google in contributing to open source projects, even though its contributions have increased significantly in 2018.
AWS announced its own major open source project in November; and then another, focused on artificial intelligence, in January. These have come across a little surprise because Amazon does not have the reputation of contributing to this type of major projects. Cockroft says the pace will only continue.
Read more:While tensions with small software companies are exacerbated, Amazon is expanding its business with a new open source project
"Over the years, the use by customers and dependencies with regard to open source technologies have been steadily increasing, which is why we have been committed for a long time to. open source, and our pace of contributions to open source projects – ours and those of others "continues to accelerate," wrote Cockcroft.
Forking the code
With Open Distro for Elasticsearch, it seems like AWS is basing the code – it essentially copies the original Elasticsearch code and mixes it again to make it a separate software. However, Cockcroft said that Amazon did not intend to totally take precedence over Elasticsearch from the outset and that AWS would continue to contribute to this project.
"Our intention is not to develop Elasticsearch, and we will make contributions to the upstream Elasticsearch project, licensed under Apache 2.0, as we develop further enhancements to the core open source software," wrote Cockcroft.
Cockcroft said it was important first and foremost that open source projects do not detach users by radically changing their conditions, or by focusing on one company over another.
"If we look closely at several successful open source projects, they all have access to unimpeded open source software – in fact, it could be argued that these projects would not exist today." without an ability to quickly assemble and innovate over pre-existing open source software ", wrote Cockcroft.
This is not the first time that AWS is pulling such a move. For example, when Oracle announced that it would stop providing free public updates for Java unless users buy a subscription, AWS began offering Corretto, its own free Java distribution, for which AWS is committed to providing security updates.
"When important open source projects that AWS and our customers depend upon, such as the need to start restricting access, modifying the terms of the license agreement, or linking open source software and proprietary software, we will invest to make it sustainable. project and the Open Source community, "wrote Cockcroft.
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