They're literally keeping the source open. Call Amazon out for other stuff, not this. Enough with this good vs. evil attitude. People and companies are more complex than that and have varied interests. They do not fall neatly into one camp or the other.
I’m not so sure, they are also continuing to build a walled garden elk hosting alternative and already invested a lot of development into open distro for elasticsearch.
People often run this software on their compute, so obviously eliminating proprietary license complications makes that an easier option for their customers to deploy, and redirects some of that licensing money into the customer’s aws spend.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy there is a FOSS fork, but at the same time it feels like Amazon again has eaten another company’s lunch while feigning innocence.
You are not so sure that the world is not black and white? I assure you it's in color. Perhaps we do live in The Giver and only a few people realize this after all.
It's still myopic to say everything Amazon does is for the greenback. Engineers at Amazon likely pushed for OpenSearch because it provides personal growth to work on open products. Working on closed source may mean you can't bring as much knowledge to another job. It's likely less people will use your work and that may be less satisfying. You may like to switch jobs for reasons other than money. And to retain employees, Amazon may agree to allow employees work on open source.
Without a solid and forward-looking understanding of the internal cultures of both Elastic (the company) and also the specific team(s) at Amazon that will be managing the future of Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, respectively, I think it's too early to tell who will end up being the better steward of the search commons here.
Also worth noting that other open-source search engines exist out there; it's entirely possible that other alternative technologies will become more attractive, depending on how all this plays out.
> Without a solid and forward-looking understanding of the internal cultures of both Elastic (the company) and also the specific team(s) at Amazon that will be managing the future of Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, respectively, I think it's too early to tell who will end up being the better steward of the search commons here.
Amazon is the better steward of open sourced Elastic Search, hands down, because nobody else is doing it. I'm not even sure that stewardship of the technology's proliferation is TBD. Didn't Elastic close the source because they feared Amazon was taking too much of their potential revenue? Elastic gambled that only they could carry the technology forward, and they lost that bet. I'll grant it's possible Elastic could become more competitive with Amazon+OpenSearch somehow down the road, however it appears that right now Elastic is on its heals while Amazon is driving forward. It's also possible that another closed-source search engine becomes popular. That said, Elastic is built atop Lucene, and as long as an open sourced version of Elastic exists I'm not sure why you would start from scratch or with something else.
> Also worth noting that other open-source search engines exist out there; it's entirely possible that other alternative technologies will become more attractive, depending on how all this plays out.
Which open-source search engines do you think are competitive?
I'm biased, but I'd like to think that when it comes to site/app search, Typesense is quite competitive to Elasticsearch. Of course, ES has tons of features and configuration options, which is a blessing and a curse in terms of complexity and learning curve, so I wouldn't want to claim feature parity. But in terms of getting a good out-of-the-box search solution that works well for most use-cases and is easy to deploy and scale, I'm hoping for Typesense to be that go to.
> it appears that right now Elastic is on its heals while Amazon is driving forward
Perhaps - what are the commit/accepted contribution rates for the two projects like at the moment? (I'm not saying that's a perfect metric, but it could provide some information)
> Which open-source search engines do you think are competitive?
MeiliSearch[1] is an impressive-looking candidate. Perhaps two of the stronger innovations of Elasticsearch were horizontal scalability and the ability to pass documents to it over-the-network (basically, the ability to curl a JSON document and instantly have it be searchable -- and I'll admit/credit that Solr may have gotten there first with XML documents). Those two features make it easy to get started, and easy to scale up if needed (a common architect's concern).
Maybe. That one distinguishes itself from Elastic and hasn't set its sights on big data.
> Elasticsearch is very powerful when it comes to massive datasets; it can quickly scale horizontally and allows one to build complex queries. The flipside of that is that nothing is easy. Even if all you need is simple search functionality that handles typos, synonyms, or filters, you're looking at hours of training, documentation, and configuration.
Spending some hours learning a new tool doesn't seem so bad to me when I'll be working with it as part of my product.
> For big tech companies dealing with enormous logs, Elasticsearch might make sense. But when it comes to medium-size datasets (i.e. less than five million rows) and smaller apps, it simply isn’t right for the job. Nonetheless, since no open-source alternative has historically been available, developers still go for Elastic as their default solution and wind up losing a disproportionate amount of time on setup and training.
> MeiliSearch is not made to search through billions of large text files or parse complex queries.
I'm not sure I'd like to assume that my dataset will never grow. This is kind of like using training wheels. Some may find it helpful but I don't think it will grow to the widespread adoption Elastic has seen without a change of vision.
When we say company we tend to subconsciously level them to any other business,
But there's absolutely no way a company at the scale of Amazon could have got there without hiding some skeletons in the closet so it's good for the society in general to view ~~companies~~ Mega Corp. which has more money(read power) than several countries combined together always with suspicion.
Why not just call them out for the bad things and support the good things? Assuming everything will inevitably go bad at some point is (a) false and (b) misses the point: While Amazon carries the Open Search torch right now, at any point in the future everyone else can contribute.
They do deserve credit for stepping in to help even if it does support their own profit margins. Profit in itself isn't evil.
> Why not just call them out for the bad things and support the good things?
Not just calling them out, Even punishing them(fines) for their mistakes is not even a slap on their wrist at their scale we've seen this happening time and again with all Mega Corps.
There's just no incentive to not do something evil.
So extraordinary scrutiny for every single action seems to be the optimal approach until the governments decide to break Mega Corps. into smaller companies which can actually get hurt from punishments.
They're a huge company. If you want to attack you need to be able to identify where they are acting badly and strike at that weakness. Calling the whole thing an evil empire isn't going to make any progress: your attacks are easily fended off.
> If you want to attack you need to be able to identify where they are acting badly and strike at that weakness.
Can you give an example?
>> Even punishing them(fines) for their mistakes is not even a slap on their wrist at their scale we've seen this happening time and again
If this wasn't true then there wouldn't be sub-list for every wrongdoing spanning decades[1] i.e. If the punishments achieved it's purpose we wouldn't see continued offenses under same category.
Forcing employees to pee in bottles is pretty bad.
> If the punishments achieved it's purpose we wouldn't see continued offenses under same category.
Hah, the notion that punishments always work is funny. Good one. Try that on your kids. Look, making a punishment bigger may or may not help. I don't know about that. You can't just fine them out of existence for no reason, however. Bezos isn't Jack Ma and this isn't China.
> Forcing employees to pee in bottles is pretty bad.
Yes it is(Like dozens of other things listed in that Wiki), But I didn't ask that. I wanted to know how do you suggest we strike at 'the weakness of Amazon' to fix it (Like you suggested) that it treats it's employees with dignity and respect after that?
Because IMO if there's anything, It could have been done when Amazon's mistreatment of its workers surfaced way back in 2001.
>Hah, the notion that punishments always work is funny. Good one. Try that on your kids.
That's the point of punishments, isn't it? Just calling them out is convenient but does nothing.
> Look, making a punishment bigger may or may not help.
That's the whole point. They're too big for any punishments, Hence qualified people have been arguing that private companies shouldn't get that big(It undermines the basic tenants of democracy reg accumulation of power); But unfortunately those who can take action about it are also getting big thanks to $AMZN.
> however. Bezos isn't Jack Ma and this isn't China.
>> Calling the whole thing an evil empire isn't going to make any progress: your attacks are easily fended off.
> I wanted to know how do you suggest we strike at 'the weakness of Amazon' to fix it (Like you suggested) that it treats it's employees with dignity and respect after that?
You call them out for the individual wrongs like those listed on the Wikipedia page. Vote with your wallet. Debate and discuss.
> They're too big for any punishments
I don't agree with that. No company survives forever.
> Jack Ma & China
The US is not going to fine Amazon out of business like the CCP did to Jack Ma. The CCP is evil, not the people. Their crackdown on people's ability to freely debate and discuss just shoots the country's most valuable asset, its people, in its own foot over in over in order to maintain footholds for a relatively small group controlling the party. Any creative ideas are squashed. If the CCP would let up they would give rise to a new generation of ingenuity in China. Of course some CCP members might face criticism for that. It's up to them to decide whether or not to move in that direction. Nobody likes to be on the receiving end of criticism and you need to be strong to take it.
The East India Company was rightly criticized for holding trade monopolies that were later abolished. It's fair to consider whether a company the size of Amazon also has some monopolies and to ask the FTC to investigate or act.
