Why I can understand the criticism on Open Distro for Elasticsearch

I love Amazon and it’s not a secret that AWS leading the cloud. Last week, when I was reading AWS blog post “New — Open Distro for Elasticsearch”, I felt uncomfortable and I even sent it immediately to several friends to see if it’s just me that feeling uncomfortable with that post. I was trying to understand why do we need such a “Distro”? isn’t Elasticsearch open source already? When I woke up in the morning, I was reading the buzz around these post in the social media. These are the posts I liked the most:

• On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company By Shay Bannon
• AWS intends for their new project to be an Elasticsearch fork By Paul Dix

The overall reaction of the open source community was very skeptic.

I know that AWS already contributed code to the Elasticsearch stack, so if they would like to add new features or fix bugs, why don’t just contribute as every open source contributor out there? Especially when its related to Elasticsearch which was invented by Shay Bannon that has a clear vision of what open source is and a true believer that open source is the heart of the company he formed — Elastic.

One thing I can understand — AWS as any business, looking for ways to increase revenues besides their aim to solve customers’ problems. They look at their customer-base, understand the great adoption of the Elasticsearch stack and as a result they see many business opportunities that can be leveraged by taking advantage of their existing platform.

What worries me the most is how these moves by large cloud providers are going to impact the open source community and how open source distributions will look like in the future. Elastic, MongoDB, Confluent and you name it;) are all started with open source before they formed a company around it. They don’t forget where it’s all started, continue to contribute back to keep the core projects strong, write in blogs and speak at conferences. What will happen to the community leaders when they know that cloud giants can just fork their projects easily for their own benefit and cannibalize the business they formed around that projects.

AWS explained clearly the reasons behind “Open Distro for Elasticsearch” in this article: Keeping Open Source Open — Open Distro for Elasticsearch. But still it seems like they want that Elasticsearch will have a new “home”, maybe thats why they created a dedicated website for it? They list several new features that are going to be included in this “Distro”: security, event monitoring & alerting , deep performance analysis and SQL support. They even state that the “SQL support” is “an improved version of the elasticsearch-sql plugin, and supports a rich set of statements”. I’m really not sure whats the real reason AWS didn’t just contribute that features to the existing Elasticsearch Github projects.

Another thing that can makes people skeptical on AWS contribution is that Amazon and AWS specifically aren’t that great open source contributors comparable to their competitors such as Google and Microsoft. I’m not even comparing other companies as Facebook. Just by looking at the “Open source at Amazon” page, you can easily get the idea how far they are from other companies at their size in the Silicon Valley when it’s related to open source. Even though Amazon invest in several foundations such as CNCF, released Correto, released Firecracker and more. I think Amazon shall take further responsibility, contribute more and only then I think the community will be less skeptical.

These are all assumptions. How is it going to impact? Time will tell…