The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
Thu, 24 Oct 2024
Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. Yes, Elasticsearch is open source, again! We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to open source.
Thank you.
What's up this week on The Change Law? We're talking about something that's unprecedented. Elasticsearch is open source again. Yes, we're joined by Shea Ban, the creator of Elasticsearch and the founder of Elasticsearch, the company, to discuss what it's like to do a reverse rug pull, something Jared is calling a rug push. I think reverse rug pull sounds better. What about you? Okay.
On this episode, we discussed the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license in the first place, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to open source. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at fly.io.
Fly is the public cloud built for developers who are productive, who ship. That's us. That's you. You should try it. Learn more and deploy your app in five minutes at fly.io. Okay, let's rug push. What's up, nerds? I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. You know we love Fly. So, Kurt, I want to talk to you about the magic of the cloud. You have thoughts on this, right?
Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind the cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff, but you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.
So when you say clouds aren't magic because you're building a public cloud for developers and you go on to explain exactly how it works, what does that mean to you?
In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.
They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Like Lambda is really black boxy. You can't like pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside.
You have to sort of just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time.
The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it. And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of.
And what machines are is just these VMs. that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitives actually, there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.
Specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.
Very cool. Okay, so experience the magic of Fly and get told the secrets of Fly because that's what they want you to do. They want to share all the secrets behind the magic of the Fly cloud, the cloud for productive developers, the cloud for developers who ship. Learn more and get started for free at fly.io. Again, fly.io.
So, Jared, I would say a reverse rug pull is even more cooler, obviously, than a rug pull.
Would you agree, Jared? I would agree. Shay, we have a saying around here, rug pull, not cool. But you and Elastic are the first ones to do a reverse rug pull. You know, you're putting the rug back where it was. So we're trying to figure out, is it cool? Is it not? It's definitely cool. How do you feel about it, Shay?
To be honest, I'm very happy. I don't know if we'll describe rug pull, but I'll go with it.
Take it offensively if you have to.
Don't take offense. Don't take offense. No, no, I know. I know.
It's kind of obvious what it means, but when you rug pull, like you've changed the license on the community.
Yeah. Whether you like it or not, it is rug pull.
Right.
So I'm very excited. And I think as someone that has been in the open source world for, gosh, 28 years now or 25 years or something like that, I love open source. And I think having less open source in the world is bad and having more open source in the world is good.
Yeah.
And I think... I hope that what we do at Elastic will help change some trajectories that we've seen happen with other companies and cause for having more open source in the world versus less.
Yeah. Well, we are 100% in alignment on that, Shay. We are absolutely all in alignment on that. Can you take us back now? I guess it's been four years since the initial relicense. That decision made big waves. A lot of people upset. Some people okay with it.
It was AWS versus Elastic in terms of this rehosting and trademark dispute relevant today in light of automatic versus WP Engine, of course, and trademark disputes. So can you tell us that story from the original license change and that decision you all had to make back then?
I was always saying that that's probably the hardest decision that I've ever made at Elastic. So that was a really tough decision. And like any tough decisions, you don't come to it lightly. Like you understand the implications, you understand the impact. Also, just on a personal level, it's like the open source has been a big part of my life.
I was trying to calculate back like how many hours I worked on open source while I had another job. And I think I was... Since 2004 or 5, I've been basically working like 30 to 40 hours a week just on open source, whether I had a job or not. When I didn't have a job, I would work more. And that's a lot. And I do it because I love it. I do it because I cherish it. I love the community aspect.
I love the engagement. I love building software that is accessible by so many users. Yeah, yeah, I love it. So that was a really tough decision. It also, it took time to get to it, you know, because you always hope, kind of like hope that somehow you won't have to do it.
And hopefully, I don't know, Amazon will change the name of Amazon Elasticsearch or somehow it managed to work some sort of like an agreement with Amazon or something on those lines. But...
When it gets to a point where so many users just confuse, either because they think you work with Amazon, either because they think that Amazon Elasticsearch is Elasticsearch or your cloud service or something along those lines, that we felt like we had to just go and change the license so it will force a change of name and a clear distinction between the two products.
Mm-hmm.
That was not there. I wish that we didn't have to do it. I wish that there would have been another way to solve it. And I know a lot of people have a lot of ideas on Twitter on how this could have been solved. Oh, yes. But I can tell you that as someone that was one of the hardest decisions, if not the hardest decision that I've ever made, we tried a lot of them.
And we felt like we had to go and do something about it.
Isn't that what trademark law is all about? Isn't it all about like there's confusion in the marketplace with them using your brand. And so your trademark should stop them from doing that, right?
Yes. And until you understand the complexity of going through the legal process, if that makes sense. So I think there's two aspects to it. I think the first part is if you go back to open source and I'm relatively old school open source, a big part of building an open source software was registering a trademark and owning it, right? It's like Red Hat did it and others. And
The first thing that I did even before I released Elasticsearch was take a loan and register Elasticsearch trademark. And I don't know if you know, but there's many different types of trademark, but I actually registered two types of trademark, one for downloadable software and one for software as a service.
So even back then, I wanted to make sure that when we build or someone builds Elastris as a service, it doesn't get confused. And at least for a while, people respected trademarks, you know, Apache and Red Hat. And that was like a wonderful protection because you could go and fork the project. You can do and do all of these things, but it's just different from that point on.
It's a different project. I think cloud changed the game. And I think because Elasticsearch was so popular and Elasticsearch was one of the first services that Amazon decided to take and provide, I don't know. I'd like to think the best of people and afterwards try to figure out why not. I think they just took Elasticsearch and said, we'll call it Amazon Elasticsearch.
Maybe they didn't have experience with open source. They didn't have experience with this type of things. You know, naively, some product manager takes a product, provides it as a service, and that's the name. Right. And I think that you can see that they learn after that, right? Because when they took other open source projects, they called them differently.
They call it ElastiCache and they call it Amazon Managed Service for Kafka versus Amazon Kafka and things along those lines, right? But Elasticsearch was one of the first ones and that name stuck. And that part, I don't know, for whatever reason, Amazon just refused to change the name, regardless of how much we try to talk to them and try to process through it. And you'll have to ask them why.
And basically it was kind of like the answer is I'll see you in court. And people think, oh, you're a big company and you have lawyers and you can pay for it and go through the process and whatever. But it's exhausting. You have to give testimonials and you have to do this. And it's like at least a few years of process. And, you know, it's like maybe it gets resolved.
And we ended up resolving the trademark infringement. By the way, thanks to the fork because it made it really easy. But it just takes a long time and it takes a lot of time. attention. And it just, it never felt right to me. I want to be focused on building great products, not, not like doing lawyery stuff, if that makes sense.
Well, that's the boring stuff, right? Like legal stuff is, it's necessary, of course, but it's, it's not building software. It was not your living room back in Paris when you first wrote the first lines of Elastic. Well, what would become Elastic? That's the fun stuff, right? The innovation part of it, not the licenses and the boring stuff that's like legalese. Yeah.
Definitely. I mean, like any good open source community member, I've spent a lot of time thinking about licenses since 2005 and LGPL and Apache and the difference between GPL and Apache, even within the open source licensing world.
Yeah, the fun stuff is to build products, to talk to users and figure out what their problem is and try to go and figure out how do you solve them or sometimes think slightly ahead of where they're heading and build it. Yeah, it's fun. That's where the fun is.
What is different about a license versus a trademark when it comes to the law? Because isn't a license also a legal mechanism? Couldn't they just violate your license and you'd also have to go to court similar to a trademark?
Totally, potentially. But I think the thing is that... Elasticsearch was under the Apache license. Amazon was totally within their rights to take Elasticsearch and provide it as a service. That was never the issue. I think that sometimes companies have a problem with strip mining open source by cloud providers.
There's that saying, and it's not fair to take open source software and provide it as a service. And then it's like, there's a company like Elastic that invests so much and And other companies that don't invest as much in the open source end up ripping the benefits of it. But to be honest, it's legal. It's like if you have an Apache license, then what they do is what they do.
And that's totally fair. The part that bugged us is just the confusion. It's like that's the thing that was really weird for us.
Right.
And that's where the trademark comes in.
No, I get it. So I guess my disconnect is you had a trademark established, which they were violating via the name. And then you had this license, which allowed them to do whatever they wanted to with the software. They weren't violating that. You could have gone to court. You could have sued them over trademark.
Or change the license and they could have then just violated the license and then you'd have to sue them over the license. That's where I'm kind of getting that. Like, couldn't they have just continued to, or started to break your license? Just like they're already breaking your trademark.
They could have decided to. I think the world has changed. I do think that the early days of cloud were kind of like a bit hectic, if that makes sense. And I think norms have been established around which projects to use, which licenses are we going to use or not, what's the intent of the open source project, how to think about licenses. I wasn't worried about Amazon taking...
Elasticsearch and breaking the license, if that makes sense. It was pretty obvious to us or to me specifically that Amazon would just decide to fork Elasticsearch, which was fine because a fork means a different name and then that name ends up slipping back into the Amazon service and then It's great. We compete. I love competing.
Amazon had a cloud search product before Amazon Elasticsearch, and it was fun competing with it. It was based on Apache Solar. That's great. So yeah, if we can compete, I'd love to compete. It's just hard to compete with yourself. And it's hard to express how frustrating it is. You know what I mean? It's like you see in the forum, oh, Elasticsearch sucks. It doesn't run as well as it does.
And then you go, oh, it's running on Amazon Elasticsearch. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not what we built. It's not how we run it. It's not the expertise that we have when it comes to running the service, even at that level. So that was difficult. And yeah, we try to figure out how to solve it.
Yeah, I can see how frustrating that would be because in that circumstance, if there is confusion, people have this bad experience with Amazon Elasticsearch. And instead of that pushing them towards your Elasticsearch, it actually just sullies your Elasticsearch. They think it's you. And so they're like, well, this sucks. Versus being like, well, Amazon sucks at this.
I'm going to go check out other providers of this open source thing. I can understand how frustrating, especially as the creator of it, that would be.
But what you're saying, Jared, is that it may have just been, and I don't want to use the word simply to make it seem simple, but simply a trademark issue. Because that was the issue, right? AWS and Amazon Elasticsearch Service was the quote from the original blog post back in the day. Why relicense this? It was Amazon not okay. Why we had to change Elastic licensing.
Right.
And what you're saying, Shea, is in retrospect, things were different then. Maybe a license change was not the right potential way, which obviously we get the reverse rug pull. So we're back here again discussing this. We're trying to understand why it happened in the first place.
Could it have been just simply a court ruling or a court dispute over trademark law and a trademark misuse over a community disruptive license change? Right.
It potentially could have been. I know that we tried a few years to try to resolve it outside of the court because nobody wants to go to court and get bogged down by it. When we were talking at least to our lawyers, it was going to be a multi-year effort.
And when it gets to a point where Amazon Elasticsearch exists for enough years, it becomes a fact whether they end up changing their name or not.
Right. It's almost too late to matter.
Exactly.
That's why I didn't want to use the word simply either. The word simply there simplifies things by nature of the word. Right. In that light, it makes sense.
So what you're saying is that because the legal route, while it could have been and potentially might have been the in quotes better route, it would have been multi-year, which would have just then continued to, you know, you use the word sully, sully the waters or muddy the waters of the brand Elasticsearch and really put it after the word Amazon, Amazon Elasticsearch.
It would have been owned in ways because they had such a big megaphone, you know, to muddy the waters of the Elasticsearch brand.
Yes, and especially when it wasn't even it's Amazon's Elasticsearch version or something like that. It's done in partnership with Elastic, right? Like that was the additional layer of confusion that kind of like made it really big. And that was really confusing to users because it's like, because if I naively look at it from the outside and I go Amazon Elasticsearch, you go like, oh, amazing.
Elastic managed to do partnership with Amazon and they take Elasticsearch and provide it as a service and I'll go and use that. And, you know, we all think that we live in hacker news on Twitter or something like that, but most users don't. They just go and say, oh, Amazon's Elasticsearch. I'll just go and use that.
And they don't understand the nuances or the fact that it's not us or something along those lines. And, you know, nothing bad with Amazon as well. You know, they're a great partner of us now and we work well and actually think that Amazon matured a lot in how they run their cloud versus the early days. But we just felt like we had to make a difference and that's where we landed.
So let's talk about what you lost because it's very important to you, open source. And when you changed the license to, it was SSPL, correct? Was the available license was server-side public license?
Yeah, we changed it actually to two licenses that you could choose from. The SSPL one that MongoDB changed to. So MongoDB did that change as well. Or a license that we wrote that was more in the Apache type. You know, there's kind of like two families of licenses. We call it the Elastic License V2. It's actually a very, very simple license.
And we allow users to choose between them because some were concerned about the SSPL, someone concerned about the Elastic License V2. We kept all of our code open. We kept all of our free stuff free. We just didn't call it open source. Nothing changed except for the license, if that makes sense.
Right, right, right. Yes, that makes total sense. And so in so doing, because SSPL and I assume Elastic License V2, neither of these are open source initiative approved.
According to the open source definition, which we are, Adam and I both think that that's an important definition, and they do hold a line in the sand, which is important for the brand of open source itself to continue to mean what it's meant for so long.
Because those don't live up to that, literally the thing that you lost, even though they are very permissive licenses and allow a lot of different uses, They are not that. And so you could no longer call Elasticsearch open source. What did that do to you, the brand, to the brand of Elastic, to you personally, to the company? Like what was the knock on effects of that change?
First of all, I was very sad and it was painful. And, you know, as someone that loves open source and believes in it, that was a sad thing not to be able to call it open source. And I agree, by the way. I think if I understand things correctly, we could have called ourselves open source because there's nothing illegal by calling ourselves open source.
But I believe in the social contract of open source and OSI. And we stood by it and we changed our name and we, you know, search and replace all open source with free and open and other stuff. And that was not great. Our usage, interestingly, you know, we live in our own like bubble of interest and, you know, and things like that. Our usage didn't change that much to be completely honest.
So the usage of Elasticsearch continued to grow. People just like downloaded the Elasticsearch and used it and ran it and it was free and using it for search and all the other use cases that people use it for. But we were still not called open source. And I think open source matters a lot. And we always hope that we will be able to get back to open source.
When it comes to our brand, there's many people that I love in the open source community that were really upset with this change. And that hurt. Not the fact that they were upset with the change. That hurt because I made them feel like that, if that makes sense.
Hmm.
And that was sad for me. And there were certain companies that say that they can only use open source that stopped using us. But generally, we continue to grow as a company because the truth is that most users actually use open source software, but they don't engage with the community or contribute to...
issues or something on those lines, the portion that do I adore, and we do, we did lose some of them, sadly, because of that. And that's one of the reasons why we're back to being open source, because we want to, you know, we want to bring them back.
But on the whole, you would say in terms of elastic, the business, not a major detriment.
It wasn't a big detriment. I actually think that because now Amazon Elasticsearch got renamed to OpenSearch and Amazon OpenSearch, then it's much easier for us and for our users to know what do they use and then evaluate as one versus the other. You know what I mean? It's Elasticsearch versus OpenSearch. you know, figure this out.
Like we had with Solar, like we have with Splunk, like we have, you know, with other products, it doesn't matter. And I think that's totally fair. I do think also that open source is also great for when new markets get created. And you have the hush puppies users, you know, the leaders, the new ones that start to experiment with types of software.
And I've been thinking about open source, getting back to open source for more than a year now, personally. But certainly something that helped make that decision is the rise of vector databases in the Gen AI space. Because I thought that being able to say Elasticsearch and open source vector database is an important thing to say.
So that definitely helped in the decision to get back to open source.
So you didn't want to say a free and public, or did you say free and open? You can say free and open.
It's not as strong. There's, there's, you know, there's like so much in open source, you know, like there, there's so much beauty and romantic aspects and history and in just in these two words that they encapsulate so much, you know? And it's like, and I love it. It's like, that's that. Yeah. Yeah.
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I think your question is spot on, Jared, because, you know, there was that study from Red Monk in terms of, does it really help or hurt the company that does? And I don't want to say rug pull badly, but that's what it is, Shay. I'm sorry.
uh rug pull you know change license let's just say change license i will i won't be negative i'll be neutral at least to change this license you know to change the license of open source to non-open source or a non-osi approved open source permissive license you know because that we assume from the outside there might be a detriment to the business that we assume but the true detriment really was the the not so much the misuse but the muddying of the waters between
what truly is elastics elastic search versus amazon's elastic search there and even uh... warner was uh... had tweeted i think this is back in your original post to that it was done in partnership so there is no There was no blurred of lines available anymore. So the community could then choose to use the technology, whether it was licensed, open source or not.
They can choose the technology that best represented their problem set versus this other route, which was not there. The license didn't really impact that.
It's important to know that because a lot of companies struggle with this same struggle you have there, and we see rug pull after rug pull, whether it's because of an IPO company that wants to protect its moat or some other route that over years things change. There's always a reason to do a relicense, and regardless, the community feels the pull of the rug.
I think it's fair that there's more companies changing the license today because they're really worried about cloud vendors. And, you know, it's funny to me that there's not more of, hey, this is real pain that you're feeling. Startups, you know, I developed Elasticsearch in my free time in my living room. You know what I mean? It's like... And somehow, I don't know, maybe it's human nature.
I find it funny that people take the side of Amazon in this case. I found it hilarious. But I think there's real fear. And we need to acknowledge the fear. And if the outcome that we want is more open source in the world, why do these companies change it? It's not because they IPO'd.
I'm talking to tons of startups that go and say, I'll never open source my code that would have open sourced the code because they say, we don't want the cloud provider to come in and take all the stuff that we built and pulled something around it. I think there's a few companies that says we need to bring trademarks back and enforcement and things on those lines. All of these are good discussions.
Those are the discussions that we need to have. What I can say, at least with our change, and go back to what we spoke about in the beginning, I think that enough time has passed from the hectic days of early cloud that AGPL is potentially good enough protection. AGPL is the license that we chose to be open source, and it's potentially a good enough protection.
So when I talk to companies today, I say, go open source, build things in the open, choose AGPL, and it's probably good enough protection. Because we're choosing a GP, you know what I mean? Because we're showing that that's the case. So hopefully that changes their trajectory of choosing an open source license and which one ends up being chosen.
Yeah, I thought that was interesting that you did not go back to the previous license. You went to AGPL because it's going to provide you more protection than was it Apache 2? Is that what you said it was previously? Yes, yes. Yes. And, of course, AGPL, cool with OSI, or OSI cool with AGPL, so it is officially open source. What about...
Slightly modifying the definition of what open source means in order to account for the change in the world that we've seen. Because while I believe that open source definition needs to exist and there needs to be people that protect it and all that stuff, I'm not...
hard line on exactly that definition being written in stone tablets like you could slightly modify it in order to broaden the tent slightly is this something that you've approached osi with like hey here's a license like why isn't sspl good enough and can we change the definition slightly because the world has changed
Yeah, I think it's a good question. MongoDB that created the SSPL license. So MongoDB changed their license from AGPL to SSPL, being concerned that cloud providers will take AGPL software, will test AGPL basically, right? So they change it to SSPL.
So even from then, I think enough time has passed that I think when you put AGPL out there, it's a good sign for cloud providers that this is the contract that you expect to have with them. I think SSPL tries to solve it. MongoDB went through a whole process, and you can read the mailing list discussions and things like that around trying to get SSPL approved by OSI. It didn't happen.
I'm not pointing fingers at one side or another. There's a lot of emotions and the devil is in the details and what have you. I think there's a good question. I think there's a balance that OSI tries to put around what is open source and how do you define open source, which is very important to maintain. That social contract is important. There's a lot...
writing on the term of open source that we should cherish it and treat it very dreadfully, if that makes sense. And that's like rushing to adding like five licenses to it and it's fine. And then it becomes, you know, if we do it, it becomes meaningless. Right. So we tried to figure out if there's an option with OSI to maybe revisit the SSPL discussion.
They have a new leader and I think they're open for it. And they're trying to figure out what is the open source, how does open source live also in a world not only of cloud providers, but in a world of models and open weights versus open models and open data and things like that. And how does open source play in it? They have a lot on their hands.
I think they want and they really want to try to figure this out. But for the same reasons why we felt like we had to change the license because we don't have time, I actually think that we're in a position where I'm not worried that someone takes Elasticsearch and provides it as a service. So I can conceptually take the very, very minuscule risk of just going with AGPL.
And potentially with that, we're actually creating a fact. And it's like, that's it. AGPL is fine. That's how it works. And you don't have to go through the process of approving a different license.
Well, we did have Stefano Maffoli on the show. When was that? This year. And definitely their hands are full right now with trying to define open source AI. As you said, it's kind of hands on deck to figuring that out. So probably not much bandwidth for reconsidering the current open source definition.
Yeah, we even posed the question, and I'm curious if you agree with this, Shay, is that we question, Stefano, if OSI cannot properly land a plane on the open source AI definition, if that might... I can't recall how you word it.
Essentially, if they can't properly and in a well way define the open source AI license, if that might change the perception of OSI's hold on or arrangement of the OSI approved licensing ability. Like if that changes the trust and their ability to land the plane on open source at large, I suppose. It wasn't worded that way, but it was a version of that. It's in the transcript. You'll find it.
I'm doing a terrible job at it here in this moment.
So I think that sometimes we make the mistake of judging open source based on, you know, it's like we always like the songs when we were teenagers and they're stuck with us and it's like, it will never be better. So it's like some of us, remember open source licenses and usage like it was in 2004 and five or three and seven.
And it's like, how many hours did I spend around the differences between GPL and Apache? That was within open source, by the way. And it's like, oh, you can't choose one versus another. I think developers today, they pick an open source license and they're fine. They're fine. You know what I mean? It's like they care much less about the fidelity of difference between Apache, for example, and GPL.
I actually also think that big companies care much less about, like enterprises. We used to think like, we used to say Apache is much easier for enterprises to adopt, but But look at MongoDB. It's all over the place in large enterprises and it's AGPL. So it's like, obviously that's not hurting adoption or was AGPL. So it's not hurting a job adoption.
And I think a similar thing might happen in AI and that might be the missed opportunity. We see open models, we see open this, we're saying open source AI, open source models when they're not strictly matched the definition of open source.
Right.
I don't know about, it doesn't matter about OSI or not. I just don't want the term open source to get diluted.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that's the responsibility of OSI and us, by the way, to help, to try to figure out, because we obviously play a big role in Gen AI as well and building models and things like that, to figure out how do we build a system that allows for it? Because you just don't want it to be diluted to become a term that means everything.
Right. I actually think that what Meta is doing with Llama and its license, which is incredibly permissive,
borderline open source but not because of that one clause in there that if you are operating at however many million monthly active users then it's not for you like that one little thing which makes it not open source according to any open source definition it's similar to saying you just can't re-host it as a service right it's like similar to that kind of a clause and compete with us
But they're calling it open source. And because it's so sneaky and awesome, like what they're putting out is hugely valuable. I mean, just the raw cash value they put into training that thing over and over again. And it's great. I use it every day. And regular people now, non open source nerds like us. getting into this stuff and they're just, Mark Zuckerberg calls it open source.
It's open source.
It's pretty much open source. And so I think the OSI, maybe they're already missing the opportunity to define that sucker. Cause I think Mark Zuckerberg might be defining it for the next era.
Yeah. I almost wonder if we should have a, it's pretty much open source.com. Because... Pretty much open source, that's what people say, right?
It's like a princess bride. It's only slightly dead. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, good one. And that was kind of my sentiment when I asked Stefano that question was... It was exactly this, Jared. Like, if the OSI...
is not the governing body that gets to define open source ai does that change things in terms of not so much open source but it kind of puts it almost in the hands back at the community like what do we feel is right it's almost what was the dot-com it's almost truly open source what was it i don't know it was 30 seconds ago we already forgot gosh Open-ish is what I've been calling it.
It's pretty much open source.
Pretty much, yeah.
are they the value creator like Meta has been with this? To be able to essentially own what defines it because of the premise, the prowess of it.
I think there's a lot of urgency in being able to properly define it. So we as a society own the terms open source and it defines what we do. I will say this is not like an us versus OSI. That's not at least how I think about it. I think OSI is doing a lot of amazing work and it's our responsibility to help OSI to figure this out. Whether it's monetarily...
where we can contribute to OSI so they have more people and more money to help figure this out, or by working with them to try to figure this out together. I do think in such a new space that moves so fast, like Gen AI, like models, open source has been hijacked, the term, from OSI.
I think so.
And I think it's important to try to figure out how do we consolidate that fact that is happening as we speak.
Yeah, I mean, it's getting harder and harder. And perhaps at this point, it's impossible because there's no actual definition to hop in and say, well, actually, you know, like to actually point out this license is against the spirit of open source because they're doing arbitrary limitations on use, for instance.
And like, that's going to be an uphill battle and it might already be a battle lost because of the pervasiveness and the value put forth by those who are calling it open source and just don't care what OSI says, i.e. meta.
Yeah.
You know, it might have such a microphone or a megaphone, I should say. I'm sure they have microphones too over there that, you know, OSI and anybody who cares about open source definitions are going to be such a fringe group that that we're going to be able to call anything open source. Then you have to go read the license and realize it has all these arbitrary restrictions on it.
And now what are you going to do?
I think it's more than the megaphone that Meta has, right? Because Meta, for example, released quite a few open source projects over the years.
For sure.
And if they would have called one of them open source when it wasn't OSI approved, I'm pretty sure that we could have resisted it. I think the other factor that is at play is that's a model that they're putting, under a very permissive license that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
Seriously.
That's pretty crazy. In a very short amount of time, I didn't do the math of how many money did we spend Elastic as a company and personally on just building Elasticsearch. But in a very short amount of time, a lot of money was spent to build our product. And this is pretty remarkable. to be able to put it under such a permissive license.
So that's another reason why people go and say, okay, we want to use it.
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that it's so compelling of a piece of software slash data slash whatever it is that the value it brings is immense and almost incomprehensible to everybody except for those like seven companies that happened to happen to hit that one clause. And it's like, we don't care about those companies necessarily. It's like, okay, they're met as competitors.
It's like a handful of orgs everybody else have at it. It's so close to open source and so valuable that I think it can actually completely hijack the term and it won't mean what it used to mean. And that might just be something that we have to accept at some point.
Well, they were very forthcoming with the usage of the word open source. They used it in the hyphened version of it on llama.com. It says, in quotes, the open hyphen source AI model you can fine tune. So it's used there. And then in the announcement, which they link up, they say, see how llama is the leading open source. And in this case, they don't use the hyphen version.
They use just open space source model family. And it links off to a blog post that is titled, I won't title it. It's a long one. I'm not reading that. I'm not reading that. But then all throughout this linked up post, which is, you know, how Lama is used in this calendar year, 2024, is just open source all through it. Open source promotes. This is a leading open source.
It's again and again, the usage of the word open source. So it's pervasive, pervasive usage of the word open source, hyphened and not hyphened. And so it's not like there's any dispute. They're trying to say it's open source. That's the point.
Yeah, and I think the interesting part is that, for example, they made the license more permissive just recently, right, if I remember correctly.
And the newest version is even less restrictive than the last one.
And I think this is the important work that we need to do because open source within models might have a lot of fidelity. There's the weights that might be open or open source. There's the retraining opportunity that you might be allowed to do or not. There's the data sources that you use to train the model.
They don't have to be open source, but are you opening which data sources, like just listing them so you can go and certify them or not? So there's like... A lot of areas in these places that if we have a standard way to think about them like we do with other open source licenses, I think it will be good for the world.
I think there's a meta question around if we're going to have really like... It's a question also of how many models are we going to have, especially like LLMs, like large language models that are really expensive to build. If we're going to have five... then maybe it doesn't matter. And people go and say, oh, we know the Lama one. We know the challenge that way.
Yeah, they call it open source, but I know, you know, we know the restrictions. If there's 20 or 50 or more specialized models and things like that, that's when I think we really urgently need a common way to understand what is our freedoms and what do we get when we use a specific model. It's really important to understand it in a standardized way, if that makes sense.
Yeah, good point. Good point. And who wants to go to war with Zuck? Who wants to go on X or Twitter?
We don't need to go to war with Zuck. We need to just bring Zuck in. Exactly. Listen, Mark, if you're out there, just take that restriction off. It'll be fine. You'll still be rich. Meta will still succeed. Just take that one little restriction off.
It can do what we do. It can just AGPL it. And then it's like, if you end up using this LLM, then you need to open source the rest of your infrastructure as a source.
Yeah, exactly.
Reverse rug pull, Zuck. Do it. Yeah, man. Just pick an open source license and let it ride. Well, maybe his retort would be, well, there is no open source AI definition. How can I pick one?
Yeah. Ah.
What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more.
So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at assembly to even train large scale speech AI models.
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Yeah, so our Playground is a GUI experience over the API that's free. You can just go to it on our website, assemblyai.com slash Playground. You drop in an audio file, you can talk to the Playground. And it's a way to, in a no-code environment, interact with our models, interact with our API to see what our models and what our API can do without having to write any code.
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Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. And also by our friends over at Wix.
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Well, Shay, how did this news land? Four years later, you're back. You're fully open source. You have an AGPL license now. You feel great. Did the community welcome Elasticsearch AGPL with open arms? What was the response been?
Obviously, any change that you do is scary. And it's like, the easiest thing to do is not to fight inertia, right? And I won't lie, internally, people were saying, why do we need to change it? People got used to it. Why do we need to go and change to open source? So these decisions are not straightforward. But we really felt like we are an open source company.
We walk and behave like open source and this is who we are. And this goes all the way back to our value system as we were founded. And yeah, we announced it and it was an amazing experience. I was scared. I was obviously happy about being able to announce it. I was scared that people would twist it because you know how the whole social discussions might happen.
Oh, Elastic is in bad shape or they're choosing open source or something on those lines. And And sometimes people really liked it, but it was just pure joy. The vast majority was just like, this is amazing. Thank you for doing it. Welcome back to open source. Prominent open source people were engaging and appreciative of doing it like Adam and others. So it was great.
Obviously, there are still people that try to find the bug in something good, but I think there always are. I try to focus on the fact that this is just a net positive progress for Elastic in bringing back open source. And it's hopefully an even bigger net positive for open source world because hopefully it will convince more companies to do open source versus less.
Why? That's the question I have. Why open source again? I get it, but truly why?
I think there's a few reasons. The first one is we never stopped behaving like open source, right? All our code is still on GitHub. All of our issues are on GitHub issues, pull requests, reviews, people send us pull requests. You know, it's like never stopped.
And if you go back to ask yourself why you changed the license, we changed the license because of the trademark, but the trademark is no longer an issue because Amazon changed the license to open source.
So really, the only question is why not in that case, which because if we're not afraid of Amazon calling it back, Elasticsearch, which we are not because we work well together now and they went with OpenSearch and just totally fine. Then I think the question is sometimes like, why not? Sometimes the easy one is why not?
Mm-hmm.
I also totally believe in the value of open source. As I mentioned, there's so much encapsulated in these two words and so much of it encapsulates who Elastic is as a company with our contribution to open source. Our many open source projects from Logstash and Kibana. Kibana got forked into Grafana and created a whole other company. It's like...
There's so much that roots itself back to Elasticsearch. We invest so much in Apache Lucene, which is an amazing story in the open source world and an incredible one. There was always a hole left in our hearts when we took away open source and we just felt that we wanted to fill it, if that makes sense. I don't know. Yeah.
Well, it's cool it all worked out for you in the end. The fact that you were able to... I mean, the maneuver that you made, regardless how controversial, difficult, perhaps damaging to a small part of your community, all the things, it seemed like the series of events that came after it Amazon deciding to fork, right? OpenSearch becoming a thing, that being a clear delineation from Elasticsearch.
And then the changes that followed in the world that you're saying were like AGPL now is probably good enough. And I think if Elasticsearch can use it and can maintain it without problem with an AGPL from an Amazon or... Or others. Yeah, who else? Microsoft, Azure or something. Then that leads the way for other people to do it. It seems like it all worked out for the good in the end.
I think so.
Or is the story not over yet?
I still would like to take back the years that we were not open source. Yeah. It worked out, but not in the way that I would have loved it to work. You know what I mean? Right.
You would have loved it just not to do it in the first place. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, because all of this at the end of the day, when you're just trying to run a business, an open source project, this is all side stuff, right? Like this is all headache.
Yeah. I mean, we had a great story around how to get people on our cloud. We had a great story around like commercial features on prem, like the whole business model that around open source that we, I think we were a big part in building as a company and as a community, you know, with other open source projects like this work, like you don't want that headache.
To rewind back a little bit, the challenge was the trademark issue, right? Calling it Amazon Elasticsearch, which they kept doing. Did you really have a problem with the freedom of being open source that they would re-host or provide it as a service?
Was your only true concern or true issue that it was a trademark issue and not a... While it was free to do, and they were free to do what they did with your source code and to re-host or re-service or provide a service... Was that at all an issue? Because that's more like the freedoms of Microsoft provide that.
Under Apache 2, yeah. Under Apache 2, they're allowed to do it. And obviously, as long as we have Apache 2 license, I'm not going to go to Amazon and say it's illegal. Right, because it wasn't.
It wasn't cool to do that, but they were free to do it.
Yes. So some people say it's great, but it doesn't align with the norms of open source or something along those lines, which is fine. It's still legal to do it. Our case specifically was just around the trademark.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. In that case, I mean, it was a massive blip then, really. I mean, because we haven't really called out the blog post yet, Jerry, but I think this is a fantastically written blog post and it was written by Shea himself. I'm sure you probably had some feedback from other team members that said yes or no, or I don't know if you wrote this in isolation, but I love the way you wrote it.
You wrote DNA, love, not like some, you know, phrasing some of the things you sort of earmarked in here and The big part of this, the way you opened it, was the DNA. The DNA for Elastic was and has been and is to be open source and what a pure joy it was.
As I read that, and I'm sure, Jared, we've had conversations as you read it as well, you can hear the excitement, proverbially, in your written words. Also, can't you see, is this Kendrick Lamar?
You can see some other passion here.
Yes, yes. My son is a huge Kendrick Lamar fan. And as a result of it, I became a Kendrick Lamar fan. I mean, I introduced him to him, but I didn't know him as well as I do now. Gotcha.
All right.
So that was like running through my head when I wrote it. Yes.
So these little prefixes to the paragraphs, that's what Adam was reading. Love, DNA, not like us. These are all Kendrick Lamar references.
Yeah.
That I could just tell. We know that you wrote this yourself, Shay, and not like an LLM wouldn't come up with that.
No, definitely. I sat down and wrote that blog post I care about. You know, it's like, you know, maybe some people made fun on Twitter on this, like, why is he doing these references or whatever? But, you know, it's like one of the things that I love about open source is that we're quirky. And we're like adding some fun to the stuff that we're doing. And it gets interesting.
And it's like, that's the thing that I love doing in IRC or Slack or GitHub or doesn't matter. SourceForge, you know, it's like all of these things. We had fun building software. And, you know, it's like that's the thing that I cherish a lot. And this is part of it. At least that's how I read it.
No, I saw, I thought the same thing. I saw people making fun of you, I think on Reddit for those references. And I thought, you know what, this is how I know that he wrote it.
And it wasn't some like press release from some like suit, you know, like otherwise, especially with a company as large and successful as Elastic, which you all are a large company now, that seemed like something that Shea Bannon did and not somebody else. And so whether you like Kendrick Lamar or not, Or you think it's lame to put a bunch of references in a blog post. Too bad. It's not up to you.
It was Shay's call. Thank you. So Adam, did you get the Kendrick Lamar references or is that news coming in?
I really wish I was more of a hip-hop fan. I don't even know.
What is...
Kendrick Lamar in terms of music?
Yeah, he's a rapper.
Is it called rap? Is it called hip-hop? Both.
I mean, I listen to music, but I wasn't... They'll say hip-hop is a culture, rap is an art style. I don't know. People have different ways of thinking about these things. There's a hip-hop definition that's maintained by the OSI. No, just kidding. What's the true definition of hip-hop? It's almost harder than open source.
It went over my head, unfortunately, because I'm just not that steeped.
Yeah. It's okay.
Yeah. It's all right. Now you're on the inside. Yeah. You're with us. I didn't get it at first either. I am a fan of hip hop. I'm not a huge Kendrick Lamar fan. Don't dislike him. Just don't know his work very well. Yeah. And I wouldn't have picked up on it unless I saw people making fun of it. I think on Reddit, I'm like, chill out guys. Of course, that's what people do on Reddit.
They're the entire point of Reddit is to make fun of everybody else.
Totally. That's already interesting. And that's fun. That's why we're having like fun discussions. That's what we should be having. Not like heavy, depressing, accusational discussions. You know what I mean? It's like, that's the fun that we need to get back to having.
I'm excited to see Elasticsearch be open source again. I'm excited for you to... It's kind of a strange thing because you've kind of had to be something you weren't for a little bit. Yeah. If not as a product, as a team, as a company, but as little as a license change it is. It's such a core, as you've said, a DNA component to who you are. It's the beginning of what you've created and built.
to have to change that for this protection, which we have investigated, disseminated, discussed, etc., to its nth degree more than I think we probably should ever again. But it's good to know. It's good to know. I think the people of open source, and this would be transcribed at some point, so this would become part of the zeitgeist of what we consider as open source or not.
So when all the LLMs eventually... forged together and mine us for information, they'll have this conversation to look back on and say, this is the reason why they made the change and this is the reason why they came back. I'm just happy you did.
Yeah, I think details matter, as you said, and for people that are interested in it, it matters. I think the end result of having more open source in the world, it's much easier to just all agree on. And I think if we're all like,
the arc of it is where we're heading i think it's it's goodness right and to be honest like i actually think that like if you build enterprise software that's my recommendation you can pick agpl if you want to go open source and not worry about the cloud stuff as you we discussed i'm more worried about the large language models and ai area which we need to figure out and
That's an area that we also need to invest in. And hopefully this podcast also helps push it in the right direction, if that makes sense.
Right. Can we close with a technical topic? Talking about Elasticsearch? Sure. So I've been thinking about search products a lot because it seems like all search is kind of like up for grabs once again, isn't it? Because now all of a sudden there's this brand new vector, I guess pun not intended, but like...
there's a different way of like talking to a thing about finding stuff versus, you know, crafting a query. Now you're crafting a prompt, but it's more conversational. And probably I think what would happen from that is elastic searches, you know, the type senses, the, you know, Name your open source or non-search product, the Algolias of the world.
Of course, you're probably integrating some of the stuff into your product, but aren't people probably going to start questioning their search functionality across their applications more than they ever have before?
I think that people are going to see a significant value in their search applications by embracing semantic search and vector type use case. That's the opportunity. I always like to think positively around the opportunity. And I think the opportunity is huge. If I loved search as a way to liberate your data before, this is like 100x better. And when we...
Obviously, we at Elastic and we're a huge contributor to Apache Lucene, which we use. we added HSNW and vector capabilities to these systems years ago, right? Before this whole gen AI happened. But once it happened, obviously the weight of being a great vector databases has increased significantly because the improvements that you have in search capabilities is significant.
And we're saying internally at Elastic that we want to make Apache, Lucene and Elasticsearch the best vector database in the world. And then on top of it, the best hybrid search, because it's like it's not only vector search, right? It's like there's a lot of layers on top of it to make a great search system that we've been building for years.
And yeah, I mean, like any new type of capability, I think you end up having like new competition or other new vendors or products, open source or not, as you say. I think Elasticsearch is a... Great vector database today. In Apache, we contributed so much work into Apache Lucene.
We have some of our best developers working just on Apache Lucene on making it better and then integrating it into Elasticsearch. By the way, by making Apache Lucene better, we're making a lot of other systems better. So it's like, our focus is to put the right technology at the right place and then win based on value.
And yeah, and so far, by the way, that's the fastest growing market in the world, in our business. So that's definitely the fastest part for us in terms of usage and business. And people are seeing the value. I do think one of the things that I'm trying, working really hard to figure out is one of the things I think Elasticsearch did really well is that it made search approachable.
You could just dump a JSON document into it and start to search it, and you didn't have to understand vector space and ranking and BM25 and inverted indices and FSTs and all of these things. And then we progressively disclosed complexity if you wanted to or you wanted to tweak things, but it just worked.
And we've invested over the last year a lot of effort, not only in making us a great vector database and great in hybrid search and things like that, but also making it as easy as it was to index. We literally took the curl requests that I had in the first blog post when I released Elasticsearch around indexing tweets, and we're literally trying to make it this simple to do semantic text.
And I think if we go back to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers that know Elasticsearch and know Elasticsearch API, that's a huge opportunity because they don't have to become experts in vector databases and product quantization and HSNW and dimensions and embeddings models and things like that.
We can really simplify that layer to them and they can use Elasticsearch the way that they love.
And to me, like, that's a huge opportunity because if we make every single Elasticsearch developer out there, like someone that uses Elasticsearch, just use semantic search, even without, almost without noticing, because it's so simple, like that would be amazing for them because it's significantly better. And for us as a, as a, as a product in Elasticsearch and as a company.
And that future is here or that future is coming?
I think it's here. So we, I don't know, I'll get geeky for saying, but we have like a, when you define something in Elasticsearch, there's mappings for it, which is basically the schema. And then there's like text mapping, which basically does keyword-based like analyzer, BM25 type matching. If you do semantic underscore text and don't change anything else, it just becomes semantic.
And we pick the built-in embedding models for you and we run it and we do everything out of the box. But every single layer is open. So you can change the embeddings model that you use, you can change the way that the query is being generated, you can change the You can go all the way down to just providing the vectors yourself if you want to. But like the simplicity at the surface area is there.
And we worked really hard for the last year. That required significant investment for us. And by the way, all of this is free. So all of this is in the open source now. I can say open source and just go and start to use it. And if you know Elasticsearch and you know how to index data, let me tell you a secret. You know how to do semantic search now. Wow. So that's that's exciting.
That is very cool. Well, Shay, I'll just say welcome back, I guess, to the open source, the official open source community. And thanks so much for sharing your journey with us.
Yeah, happy to. Thanks for thanks for hosting me.
Well, that's a first, a reverse rug pull, a rug push. And I'm excited about that. I'm excited that Elasticsearch is back, back to being open source, not just open, but literally open source. And that's a very good thing. New frontiers ahead for search, all new interest, all new opportunity. And right now is the best time to go back to being open source for Elasticsearch. Good for you, Shay.
I'm excited for you. If you haven't been in a while, elastic.co, check it out. That is the home of Elasticsearch. Okay, we have a bonus for you. This bonus was going to be for our plus plus only subscribers, but there was such goodness in there. We thought, you know what? Let's give a treat to everyone. So the bonus is for all today. Stay tuned.
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The show's done. We'll see you next week. I'm not sure what to call this. I wanted to call it, I almost brought it up in the show. I was like, you know what? It's a deviation from the main task. And I was like, I don't want to call it a rug theft. Maybe it's a rug misappropriation. But then I think about
This conversation we had with JJ, Jared, you remember this and say you don't because you probably weren't there. You may have not listened to the show, but I asked JJ, what is his full name?
It's Joseph Jax, isn't it? Joseph Jax. Thank you, Jared. Do you know him of OSS Capital?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
He's pro-open source as well, but he's also pro-commercial open source. Open core. Open core. And we asked him, or at least I asked him on that podcast, I said, are you okay with open source companies literally cloning proprietary sourced companies?
Right.
Essentially, the easiest version would be to take a Calendly and to turn it into Cal.com. And maybe it's not literally a one-to-one in terms of technology because Cal.com seems to have gone a different route in terms of its product.
But this idea that there is a closed-source proprietary software company that does not have an open-source counterpart, are you okay with an open-source company cloning the essence of that company… making the software creation that comes from it fully open source and doing that.
And so I kind of feel like that's a, I'm not sure how to draw the line, but it kind of seems similar in nature to what Amazon did to you and elastic, which was to use the trademark of elastic search. And here's where I kind of like bring that back is that you have a super base out there that has said for a while, the open source alternative to Firebase is,
And so here they're leveraging the trademarked name Firebase in their value proposition to the world, which was by and large their claim to fame, which set Hacker News on fire. And so I just kind of wanted to conversate around with y'all. I don't have an opinion necessarily.
I'm just like, I see this happening, like a appropriation or a usage of a trademark term like Firebase and saying, hey, Supabase is the open source Firebase alternative. So I'll leave that out there for y'all. What do you think about that?
I mean, I can say, sadly, I know more about trademarks than I want to. There you go. School us. So that's totally a legal usage of trademarks.
Mm-hmm.
That's totally illegal. If you're allowed to say, I'm a shop that service Toyota cars, you're not allowed to say, I'm a Toyota service shop. That's the difference, right? And as long as the name is Superbase, they're totally fine to say, it's an open source version of Firebase. That doesn't create confusion in the market between Superbase and Firebase. And that's totally allowed. It's fine.
I actually encourage that type of marketing for any open source projects that there is. Go for it. That's cool.
I'm cool with it too. It's the leveraging part of it. It's the trademark side of it that I'm cool with. But if there's a lot of folks who would say, hey, Amazon, please don't, while you can and you have the freedom to, please don't because it's not cool to re-host Elastic as a service.
That's the cool part, I guess, or that's the okay part, but it isn't like socially or societally, like that's not kind of cool. Just don't name it Amazon Elasticsearch. You call it Amazon OpenSearch, which they've done.
I just saw some corollaries, and I wasn't really – I couldn't articulate it in the show, so it didn't make sense, but I wanted to bring it up here in this zone where it's a little bit more free to examine the thought process.
Well, I guess – let me hop in real quick, Shay, and say that I think I fundamentally misunderstood your beef because I thought it was – hey, it's not cool to take Apache License Elasticsearch and offer it as a service. You're gonna take all of our business. But you're saying that that's cool, that's fine.
I mean, you said it's legal, so it doesn't mean you think it's cool, but it's not something that you're going to try to stop them from doing. It was for you is all about trademark. That's basically what Matt Mullenweg is saying right now as well with WP Engine is that it's about the trademark. Now, he's not taking the route you guys took.
He's taking a different route that nobody can understand at this point, the route that he's taking. But and even when we talk with Adam Jacob about this, like he was trying to explain why it wasn't wise for Elastic to do that because of. Amazon's, you know, bringing funnel more customers into the funnel and all this kind of stuff that but that was more about them rehosting.
But for you, it's not about the rehosting. It's like about the trademark. It was all about the trademark. It's about the the market confusion.
Yes.
I didn't understand that before today.
I would say I agree with that, Jared. I didn't understand that either. I thought it was about the re-hosting and competing dispute, not the trademark-only dispute.
Right. And maybe that was our failure to understand the circumstance four years ago, or maybe it got lost in the minutia and the arguing. Because a lot of the arguing is about... Is it okay for Amazon to re-host other people's open source projects? Or is it cool or not cool?
When you get caught in that, that's hard. And sadly, it's easy to bucket things. I don't blame. I tried to explain it in our not okay blog post and be very blunt and explicit about it. We actually made a mistake of... Our first blog post around the license change was bad because we were like, we just don't want to make a lot of noise about it or something like that.
And we made a mistake of not being explicit around why we're changing it. And the day afterward, I wrote this not okay blog post. I think the social streams, just like simple messages and bucketing, and then it kind of took a life of its own. And it's very, very hard to change once it's happened. I don't blame any individual. You know what I mean?
It's like I get caught by it every once in a while.
Sure.
But that's okay. I think that's life and you have to figure out how to work through it, if that makes sense.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, in light of all of this, I wish there was a faster way to mitigate or to adjudicate trademark disputes. Like it shouldn't take... three or four years of them to continue to muddy your trademark to get the trademark dispute adjudicated, right? I mean, obviously that's like, now I'm going to Utopia and stuff. Like that's not the real world.
But wouldn't that have fixed everything if you could have just said, stop using our trademark, rename it, and then they say no, and then you sue them and it takes three months and it's adjudicated, wouldn't that have fixed it? You would never had to relicense?
I think so. I think it would have helped. Yeah. But I also think that getting to a point where you sue someone is never helped. You know what I mean? And I think truly, I think Amazon, where they landed in a gold mine called Cloud, and they were like running very, very fast for the first few years. And you just took Elasticsearch, provided a service and called it Amazon Elasticsearch.
And then I think it was very hard for them to decide to change it. And they wanted to get, I don't know, it's hard for me to explain why they refused to do it. But you can see that they learned and they evolved and they didn't do that level of naming afterwards for other services that they took and provided as a service. And to be honest, like now we work really well with them. It's funny.
It's like... It was very hard for us to work with Amazon on the marketplace, for example, because when we would go to the marketplace and we would say, like, please promote, let's work together to promote our Elasticsearch hosting service. And they'll say, but there is already one. It's called Amazon Elasticsearch.
So it's like even trying to work with them was hard because of the confusion, because the confusion was internal because Amazon is so big. So once the name thing got cleared up, it just unleashed also the opportunity to even start to work together properly as, as two companies.
So do you think if they would have come out with a hosted version of elastic search, just like they did, and they had called it Amazon open search, and then the subtitles like elastic search and AWS or something like that. So they could at least then none of this would have happened.
I think that would have been fine. I don't know. Maybe it's kind of like hard to know. Maybe we would have ended up doing something similar to what Grafana did and change the license from Apache 2 to AGPL. So still remain within open source, but try to be more restrictive around whether Amazon really wants to take the software and provide it as a service.
I'll get back to, I do think that there is an imbalance in building open source and hosting open source. between the large cloud vendors and open source companies. And if we want more open source in the world, I think we need to figure out how to fix that imbalance. And that's a valid concern that companies have. And sometimes the way that I think people...
talk about it, it's very, it creates tensions like, oh, all of these like big IPO companies, they IPO, they were successful and now they're like changing their license because they have shareholders or something along those lines. But to be honest, I was never worried about this. I was worried about the
five startups with two people that I'm talking every week that don't choose open source, you know? Or just like people that live there and go like, we'll never open source our software. We don't want to happen to us what happened to Elastic, you know?
So it's like- But you think AGPL will help strike that balance?
I hope so. Because being very empathetic to OSI, they have to deal with the AI stuff and that's tough. And, you know, we donated money to OSI and we're trying to help, but that stuff, and I think it's more urgent to figure out than, you know, approving SSPL or something along those lines. So I do see a path where AGPL is good enough as a solution, if that makes sense.
Have you looked at the stuff that come after, that came after SSPL, like Sentry's new fair source licensing? Are these interesting to you?
I think they're very interesting. They're very similar to like Elastic License V2, and we're talking to all of them. It's still the... OSI will never approve these licenses, right? Because of the restrictions. Yeah, exactly. I think what MongoDB tried to do with SSPL is to actually create a very valid license that had a chance to get approved by OSI.
And I think that's the path that I would want to take. Not like expand open source to allow for like 50 things get into it, But more around, let's figure out how do we still keep the high value open source term definition and apply it to AI, apply it to enterprise software.
Cool. Adam, any other thoughts?
No, I was just drawing that thought. I was cool with it, too. I was cool with the open source alternative to X, whatever that is.
Well, I think anytime you call yourself an alternative, then it's pretty clearly no market confusion that you are that thing. Yes. Because you're not. You're an alternative to that thing.
The part I was drawing the line to was less about the usage of the trademark, but more so... This not-coolness, I suppose, of, hey, Amazon, don't re-host our thing, which you and I both had a misunderstanding about. But I think there's been other examples where XYZ Open Source says, hey, don't re-host my thing and compete with me.
And that's almost the same where you just simply clone a proprietary closed-source company and say, to quote JJ, totally cool with it, 100% cool with it.
Well, cloning the product, meaning you look at how it works and you make something that works that way. I could clone Riverside right now, which is proprietary and open source. It would take a lot of effort for me to do that. They still had to put in all the work to build the Cal, to make the Calendly clone. And you've got to reverse engineer the whole thing, basically.
I get it. It's not a direct corollary, but it was a fun experiment.
Yeah. So you take the end product and you build it versus just re-hosting what was already out there. Like that's the easy button, right? Just taking Elasticsearch and offering it hosted requires very little effort, but cloning something, at least for now, still requires a big lift.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, cloning closed source and trying to replicate and reimplement. Well, at least until we can go and chat GPT prompt something that says, create me an open source version of X. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I think that that's true.
By the way, the same is true, you know, it's like when people say rock pool, and by the way, I totally understand where it's coming from because this is like, this is how it feels. And you never argue with what someone feels. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not fair because it's like, that's the first impact reaction and that's how they feel. Then it's your responsibility to figure this out.
But I think one of the beautiful things about open source is the ability to fork a project. And the ability to change it and the ability for it to grow and become something else. And when you change the license, then someone can go and fork the project and suddenly like a whole other project comes up and you remember, I don't know, what was it like? The best example from my old days was Jenkins.
You remember? There was like Hudson and then Jenkins came along, got forked, and Jenkins became the thing and it worked. And we're seeing some examples of it today. And I think one of the points of reference on why when we changed the license, we still behaved as open source is that no fork got successful, including open search. Because we still behaved like open source.
We didn't suddenly put everything behind closed source. We didn't suddenly make everything commercial. And I think most users were fine with it the same way that most users are fine with Lama as an open source model. You know what I mean? And I think that's why it never happened to us. But yeah, maybe for other companies it might happen and it will be amazing if we can solve it.
Well, we saw a lot of support behind OpenTofu in light of the HashiCorp relicense of Terraform. I'm not sure if that support has continued. You know, we don't really swim in that pool very often. And so is OpenTofu actually getting a foothold where it's going to become the new Terraform or is it not?
we'll probably find out at this year's KubeCon or something, but that's one where there was a community fork that came out immediately, right? Versus what happened with Elasticsearch, which was Amazon created the fork, right? OpenSearch.
Yeah. And I think Valky for Redis.
Yeah, Valky.
That's another good example. But this is where I think most users saw how we behaved in the next few days and they were like, nothing changed. And they were less worried. Obviously, a lot of the people that are in the details and go back and have opinions about open source were hurt, justifyingly. I was hurt. But most users were like, it's fine. It's Elasticsearch. We know the team.
We're talking to all the developers all the time. It's like nothing really changed.
Gotcha. Cool. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks for sticking around. Plus, plus people. Thanks for supporting our work.
Yes.
And thanks for sticking around, Shay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Happy to.