The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)

Episode Date: October 24, 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.

What's up this week on The Change Lab? We're talking about something that's unprecedented. Elasticsearch is open source again. Yes, we're joined by Shea Bannon, 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 about the magic of the cloud. You have thoughts on this, right? Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind a 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's 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's not black boxy. You can't 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 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 kind of pause and resume and free up 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 have expected. 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 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 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 as primitive as 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 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 was 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, 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 in with other companies and and cause for having more open source in the world versus less. Yeah.

Well, we are 100% in alignment on that, Shea. 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'll start with 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. 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. And 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 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. That was not there. I wish that we didn't have to do it.

I wish that there would have didn't have to do it. You know, 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. But I can tell you that as someone that, that was one of the hardest decisions, if not the hardest decision that I've ever made, like 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 actually two, 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 Elasticsearch 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 a different, from that point on, it's a different project.

I think cloud changed the game. And I think because Elastris was so popular and Elastris 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, provide it as a service, and that's the name. 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 you 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 attention.

And it just, it never felt right to me. I want to be focused on building great products, 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 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. 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. But 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 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. You know, it's like, that's, 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 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.

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 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. And instead of that pushing them towards your Elasticsearch, it actually just sullies your Elasticsearch. They think it's you. They think it's, 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, you know, why relicense this? It was Amazon not okay okay why we had to change yeah elastic licensing right and what you're saying shay is in retrospect things were different then maybe a license change was not the right potential way which obviously we get to reverse rug pull so we're back here again discussing this we're trying to understand why it happened in the first place you know could have could 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. Yeah.

That's why I didn't want to use the word simply either. Yeah. 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 have just then continued to you know you use the word sully sully the waters or muddy the waters of the brand elastic search and really put it out the after the word amazon amazon elastic search it would

have been owned in ways because they had it's 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 a 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 on 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 to to actually to two licenses that you could choose from the sspl one that mongodb changed 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, some were 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, 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 downloaded 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. 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. 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, they 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 us one versus the other. You know what I mean? It's Elasticsearch versus open source, open search. 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, the leaders, the new ones that start to experiment

with types of software. I've been thinking about 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, you know, there's like so much in open source, you know, like 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, yeah. Well, our friends over at Speakeasy have the complete platform for API developer experience. They can generate SDKs, Terraform providers, API testing, docs, and more. And they just released a new version of their Python SDK generation that's optimized for anyone building an AI API. Every Python SDK comes with Pydantic models for request and response objects, an HTTPX client for async and synchronous method calls calls and support for server-sent events as well. Speakeasy is everything you need to give your Python users

an amazing experience integrating with your API. Learn more at speakeasy.com slash Python. Again, speakeasy.com slash Python. I think it's important to dig into that. 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. You said it a bunch of times already. That's what it is, Shay. I'm sorry.

Rug pull. You know, change license. Let's just say change license. 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, not so much the misuse, but the muddying of the water between what truly is Elasticsearch versus Amazon's Elasticsearch. And even Werner had tweeted, I think this is back in your original post too,

that it was done in partnership, so 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, you know, 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 it's funny to me that there's not more of, hey, this is real pain that you're feeling. Startups, 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 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 we want, 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 pull something around it. I think there's a few companies that say 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 in, you know, build things in the open, choose a GPL.

And it's probably good enough protection because we're choosing a GPL. You know what I mean? Because, because we're, we're, we're showing that that's, that that's the case. So hopefully that changes their trajectory of 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. 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 well 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 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 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 riding 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 what we felt like we had to change elastics because we don't have time i actually think that we're in a position where i'm not worried that someone takes elastic search and provide 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. Like 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 like all 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 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 look at MongoDB. It's all over the place in large enterprises

and it's AGPL, you know? So it's like, obviously that's not hurting adoption or was AGPL. So it's not hurting 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. 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. 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 Lama 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,. Like that one little thing, which makes it not open source, according to any open source definition, is similar to saying you just can't rehost 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 because I think Mark Zuckerberg might be defining it

for the next era I almost wonder if we should have a it's pretty much open source dot com because pretty much open source that's what people say 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 stephano that question was it was exactly this year like if 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 of the community. Like, what do we feel is, it's almost, what was the.com? It's almost truly open source. What was it? I don't know.

It was 30 seconds ago. We already forgot it. Gosh. Open-ish is what I've been calling it. It's pretty much open source. Pretty much, yeah. It's pretty much opensource.com. Which I think is actually pretty cool, honestly.

I mean, that's my fear for the OSI is that if they can't act swiftly enough and the conversation gets lost in the minutiae enough, which they've welcomed, they've done the process the right way, but 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 own the term, like we as a society own the terms open source and it's like 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 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. Meta has such a microphone, or megaphone, I should say. I'm sure they have microphones too over there. That OSI and anybody who cares about open source definitions are going to be such a fringe group

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 costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Seriously.

That's like pretty crazy. You know, it's like in a very short amount of time, I don't know, probably, I didn't do the math of how many like 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, of, 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 announcements, 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. I'm not reading that. But then all throughout this linked up post, which is 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 is 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. So it's a 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 had 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 we have. 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 you know like who wants to go on on x or twitter or we don't need to go to war with zuck we need to just bring zuck in you know 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 you know just take that one little restriction off it can do it can do what we do it's like it can just agpl it and then it's like you know if just take that one little restriction off. Well, it can do what we do. It can just AGPL it, and then

it's like, you know, 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. Just pick, 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. 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. It was trained on about 12.5 million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's a super robust model. it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Very cool. So Dylan, one thing I love is this playground you have. You can go there, assemblyai.com slash playground, and you can just play around with all the things that is assembly. Is this the recommended path?

Is this the try before you buy experience? What can people do? 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. Then once you see what the models can do and you're ready to start building with the API, you can quickly transition to the API docs, start writing code, start integrating our SDKs into your code to start leveraging our models and all our tech via our SDKs instead. 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. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. And also by our friends over at Wix, I've got just 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less on Studio.

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Like the four years later, you know, you're back. You're fully open source. you have an agpl license now you feel great was the community welcome elastic search agpl with open arms like what was the response been obviously any change that you do is scary and it's like the the easiest thing to do is not to fight inertia right and you know i you know, I won't lie, like internally, people were saying, why do we need to change it? People got used to it. Like, why do we need to go and change to open source?

So like 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 is like, it goes all the way back to our value system as we were founded. And yeah, we announced it and it was an amazing... 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 sometimes people really like to twist, but it was just pure joy. It's like most, 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 search. So really, the only question is why not in that case, 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 open search and just totally fine, then i think the question is sometimes like why not sometimes the easy one is why not i i also totally believe in the value of open source as i mentioned

like there's so much encapsulated in these two words that and so much of it encapsulate 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. You know, 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. I just, there was always like a hole left in, in our hearts when we took away open source and we just like 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. Like 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? Open search 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. Yeah, who else? Microsoft Azure or something. Then that leads the way for other people to do it. Like, 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? It's like, it's still in there.

Right, you would have loved it just not to do it in the first place. Just a... Yeah yeah. Cause all of this at the end of the day, when you're just trying to run a business and 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 worked, 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 like because that's more like um the freedoms of them sort of provide that under apache 2 yeah under apache 2 they're allowed to do it right and obviously as long as we have apache 2 license i'm not going to go to amazon and say it's illegal you know so yes right because it wasn't it was 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 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, because we haven't really called out the blog post yet, Jared, 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. Like 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. We can hear. Also, can't you see, is this Kendrick Lamar? You can see some other passion here. 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,

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 it's a, some people made fun on twitter on on 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 right 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. Source, SourceForge, you know, it's like all of these things.

We had fun building software. And, you know, it's like, that's, 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 press release from some suit. 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. 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, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So Adam, did you get the Kendrick Lamar references or is that news? 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. I mean, is it called rap? Is it called hip hop? like what's the both okay i mean i listen to music but i wasn't they'll say hip-hop is a culture you know raps an art style i don't know okay people have different ways of thinking about these things there's there's a hip-hop definition that's maintained by the osi no just kidding yeah what's the true definition of hip-hop you know it's almost harder than open source yeah it 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 but i'm not a huge kenrick 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. And I was like, chill out, guys. Of course, that's what people do on Reddit. 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 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, you know? Yeah. If not, you know, not as a product, as a team, as a company, but as little as a license change it is. Like, 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. I think the people of open source and this is, you know, this would be transcribed at some point. So this would become the part of the zeitgeist of what we consider as open source or not. So when all the LLMs eventually

forge 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 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 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 there's a different way of talking to a thing about finding stuff versus crafting a query. Now you're crafting a prompt, but it's more conversational. And probably I think what would happen from that is Elasticsearches, the type senses,

the 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 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 not only vector search. 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, like any new type of capability, I think you end up having new competition or other new vendors or products, open source or not, as you say, I think Elasticsearch is a great vector database today. You know, 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. You know, so it's like there's, we're just, 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 to users. You could just like dump a JSON document into it and start to search it. And you didn't have to understand like 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.

Like the first, like we literally took the curl requests that I had in the first, you know, blog post when I released Elasticsearch around like 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, 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 almost without noticing because it's so simple,

that will be amazing for them because it's significantly better. And for us 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 I'll get geeky for a second, but when you define something in Elasticsearch, there's mappings for it, which is basically the schema.

And then there's 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 go all the way down to just providing the vectors yourself if you want to. But 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 an asset search and you know how to index data, let me tell you a secret. You know how to do semantic search now. So 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 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. In just a minute, we go for another session with Shay. And if you can't wait, there's a chapter. So do that. By the way, if you want to become a subscriber, a supporter, a ChangeLog++ member, you can do so at changelog.com slash plus plus. It's better. You know what? It's better because it's better.

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Fly.io. Speakeasy.com, assemblyai.com, and our friends over at Wix and Wix Studio. Check it out, wix.com slash studio. And those beats, those banging beats from Break Mastah Zylinder, we love them. Thank you, BMC. You're the best. And one more thing, we're going to be at All Things Open next week. So if you're there, say hello. We'll be at Booth 66 near the ballrooms.

Come say hi. And if you're getting a last-minute ticket to the conference, use our code MEDIACHANGELOG20 and get 20% off registration. That's it. 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 in the show I was like you know what it's a deviation from the 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 Shay, 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. 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, you know, take 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 like its product. But this idea that there is a closed source proprietary software company that does not have a open source counterpart are you okay with an open source company cloning that 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 uh 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 Elasticsearch. 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. 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 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 lay 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. So that's totally a legal usage of trademarks. That's totally illegal usage of trademarks. That's totally illegal. If you say 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. Like that's the difference, right? It's like, and as long as the name is Superbase, they're totally fine to say it's an open source version of Firebase. It's like, that's total, 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. Like, that's, go for it. That's cool. I'm cool with it too. Yeah. It's the leveraging part of it. It trademark side of it that uh that i'm cool with but if there's a lot of folks who are 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 elastic search you call it amazon open search which they've done i just saw some corollaries and i wasn't really i couldn't articulate in the show so it didn't make sense but i wanted to bring it up here in this right 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 going to take all of our business. But you're saying that that's cool. That's fine. You said it's legal. That doesn't mean you think it's cool. But it's not something that you're going to try to stop them from doing. For you, it was 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. Nobody can understand at this point the route that he's about the trademark. Now, he's not taking the route you guys took. He's taking a different route. He scores the earth route. Nobody can understand at this point the route that he's taking. And even when we talk with Adam Jacob about this,

he was trying to explain why it wasn't wise for Elastic to do that because of Amazon's bringing more customers into the funnel and all this kind of stuff. But that was more about them re-hosting. But for you, it's not about the re-hosting. It's about the trademark. It was more about them re-hosting but for you it's not about the re-hosting it's like about the trademark it was all about the trademark it was 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 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 that, it got lost in the minutia and the arguing. Because a lot of the arguing is about, is it okay for Amazon to rehost other people's open source projects, you know? Or is to bucket things i don't blame you know i we try i try to explain it in our not okay blog post you know and and be very blunt and explicit about it and we actually made a mistake of like 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 like not being explicit around why we're changing it and a day 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? I get caught by it every once in a while. But that's okay. i think that's you know that's 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 this i wish there was a faster way to mitigate or to uh adjudicate trademark disputes like it shouldn't take three or four years of them to continue to

muddy that your trademark to get the trademark dispute adjudicated right i mean that's 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 then you sue them and it takes three months and it's adjudicated? Wouldn't that have fixed it? You would never have 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, they landed in a gold mine called Cloud, and they were 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. Right. But you can see that they learned and they evolved. And they didn't do that level of naming 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 two companies. So do you think if they would have come out with a hosted version of Elasticsearch, just like they did, and they had called it Amazon OpenSearch, and then the subtitles like Elasticsearch 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, 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 a GPL. 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 is very, it creates tensions like, oh, all of these big IPO companies, they IPO, they were successful, and now they're 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. 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. 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's tough. And I think it's more urgent to figure out than 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 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 Elastic License V 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 definition, 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 rehost 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 rehost 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. So you take the end product and you build it, versus

just re-hosting what was already out there. 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, 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. It's like when people say rock pool, and by the way, I totally understand where it's coming from

because this is how it feels. And you never argue with what someone feels. You know what I mean? 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 know you remember i don't know what was like the best example from my old days was jenkins you remember there was like uh hudson and then uh and then hudson and then jenkins came along got forked and jenkins became the thing and it worked right Right. And we're seeing some examples of it today. And I think one of the, I think 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 made everything commercial. 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?

So it's like, 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. 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 kubcon or something but um that's one where there was a community fork that came out immediately right versus what happened with elastic search which was amazon created the fork right open search yeah and i think valky for redis and yeah valky that's another good example but this is this is where i i think 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.