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.
Full Episode
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.
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