Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services announced Open Distro for Elasticsearch — its own version of Elasticsearch, an open source software project created by publicly-traded software company Elastic.
Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services announced Open Distro for Elasticsearch — its own version of Elasticsearch, an open source software project created by publicly-traded software company Elastic. In the blog post, Banon writes that this isn't the first time Elasticsearch has been forked — the term for when an open source project is copied and then modified to create a totally new software project with its own community and priorities. He writes that several Chinese companies have done it, and now, Amazon, too.."None of these have lasted. They were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community.
In his blog post, Banon said that others have bluntly copied the proprietary code in question — including, he says, Amazon. In addition, Banon addressed how Amazon wrote that it offered Elastic to"dedicate significant resources to help support a community-driven, non-intermingled version of Elasticsearch." Instead, Banon says, Amazon was"demanding preferential treatment," and claims that Elastic does not give any developers priority over others.
"I think Amazon is better positioned to earn trust and respect of the Elastic user community if instead of treating Elastic with hostility and a competitivity dynamic, they treat them with a partnership dynamic," Jacks said."That would lead to a better outcome of everyone."Others say that Amazon's move is just how it goes with open source, and that it deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Previously, Oracle has forked the enterprise version of the Linux operating system, says Luis Villa, cofounder of Tidelift, but it was not a threat to Red Hat or other companies selling their own versions of Linux. Similarly, he does not think Open Distro will pose a major threat to Elastic over the long haul.