Actions speak louder than words. Amazon's words [1] were backed up by action- specifically, the public release of Open Distro for Elasticsearch and several useful, advanced features under an Apache 2.0 license.
This post from Elastic consists of vague claims of 'FUD' and of their commercial code being 'bluntly copied', without any further clarifying details or responsive action to back them up. (E.g., if you have real evidence of Amazon copying proprietary code, which I doubt, then announce the copyright infringement lawsuit you have just filed, don't weakly allude to your grievances in a blog post.)
Conspicuously, the post did not contain any defense or even mention of Amazon's key accusations of "significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base", or its claim that "the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular." The only response offered is a vague, generic "we believe in open source" - again with no concrete action backing up those empty words.
If this is the best and only response Elastic is able to offer, I fully expect Amazon to keep the high ground in this controversy.
actions? I think this is speaking for itself: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss
What has Amazon contributed to yet? Repackage other open source projects that was already existing? I don't call it a contribution.
"Repackage other open source projects that was already existing?"
Most people don't realize this yet. They are taking other, existing projects which anyone could install themselves for a long time now and framing it like they built these things for their new fork. So much of their "distribution" is just a collection of other open source projects.
In the case of the security functionality, that is backed by a company named Search Guard who have an Enterprise Version in addition to the Community Version included in the AWS fork. They forked another project, renamed it and now call it their own.
Isn't "a collection of other open source projects" pretty much exactly what a "distribution" usually implies? What you get is the curation/selection of what's included and some reassurance that all the pieces really do work together and other people are using them that way.
> actions? I think this is speaking for itself: [link]
The link is to a packaged, binary distribution of the 'OSS only' features, the assertion was regarding 'significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base'. The two are not the same.
Also, from the release notes linked to from that page, Amazon's assertion that 'neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary' does appear to be valid.
This post from Elastic consists of vague claims of 'FUD' and of their commercial code being 'bluntly copied', without any further clarifying details or responsive action to back them up. (E.g., if you have real evidence of Amazon copying proprietary code, which I doubt, then announce the copyright infringement lawsuit you have just filed, don't weakly allude to your grievances in a blog post.)
Conspicuously, the post did not contain any defense or even mention of Amazon's key accusations of "significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base", or its claim that "the innovation focus has shifted from furthering the open source distribution to making the proprietary distribution popular." The only response offered is a vague, generic "we believe in open source" - again with no concrete action backing up those empty words.
If this is the best and only response Elastic is able to offer, I fully expect Amazon to keep the high ground in this controversy.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...