The New Stack Podcast

Context: Amazon's Elastic Distribution, The Business of Quantum Computing

Episode Summary

This week, we spoke with Sharone Revah Zitzman, developer relations at AppsFlyer and author of the contributed piece we ran last week titled “What the Fork, Amazon?” In the last episode, we talked about Amazon Web Services’ new distribution of the open source Elasticsearch which has stirred up much debate and angst in the open source community. The move was necessary, AWS’ Adrian Cockcroft argued in a blog post, in that elastic has intermingled proprietary code with the open source code that makes up the core of Elastic. He writes that with Elastic: Neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary. Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code. This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid). Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate. In particular, AWS releases open source components of Elastic providing functionalities that were previously only handled by Elastic’s proprietary code, namely security, event monitoring and alerting.

Episode Notes

This week, we spoke with Sharone Revah Zitzman, developer relations at AppsFlyer and author of the contributed piece we ran last week titled “What the Fork, Amazon?”

In the last episode, we talked about Amazon Web Services’ new distribution of the open source Elasticsearch which has stirred up much debate and angst in the open source community.

The move was necessary, AWS’ Adrian Cockcroft argued in a blog post, in that elastic has intermingled proprietary code with the open source code that makes up the core of Elastic. He writes that with Elastic:

Neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary. Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code. This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid). Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate.

In particular, AWS releases open source components of Elastic providing functionalities that were previously only handled by Elastic’s proprietary code, namely security, event monitoring and alerting.