There is No War in Open Source
Description
This meme uses a screenshot from the animated series 'Avatar: The Last Airbender.' The image features the character Joo Dee, a brainwashed guide in the city of Ba Sing Se, smiling widely and unnervingly. The top text, posted by Loris Cro (@croloris), sarcastically states, '"There is no war in Open Source"'. This references the famous line from the show, 'There is no war in Ba Sing Se,' used by characters to deny the ongoing conflict. The meme humorously draws a parallel between this denial and the often-contentious rivalries and forks within the open-source community. Adding another layer, the image shows a reply from Frank (@jedisct1) mentioning 'The Elasticsearch vs Opensearch war,' a real-world example of such a conflict where AWS forked Elasticsearch after a licensing dispute. The joke is particularly poignant for senior developers who have witnessed or participated in these community fractures, which are often masked by a veneer of collaborative harmony
Comments
14Comment deleted
Saying 'there is no war in Open Source' is like saying 'this is not a breaking change' in a pull request for a widely used library. Both statements are technically true until you check the GitHub issues
“There’s no war in open source,” whispers the PM, while Elasticsearch and OpenSearch lob lawyer-wrapped pull requests across GitHub like two shards in a permanent split-brain
AWS forking Elasticsearch is just them following the sacred open source tradition: if you can't acquire them, fork them, rebrand it, and pretend the original maintainers were the problem all along
When AWS forked Elasticsearch into OpenSearch after Elastic changed to SSPL, both sides insisted there was 'no conflict' - just like there's 'no war in Ba Sing Se.' Meanwhile, senior engineers everywhere had to architect around the schism, update dependencies, and explain to stakeholders why their search infrastructure roadmap just got complicated. The real war wasn't in the repos - it was in the Slack channels debating which fork to standardize on while maintaining backward compatibility with existing clusters
Elastic's SSPL pivot: the license change that forked more repos than it protected
There’s no war in open source - just sharded conflicts replicated cross-region; SSPL vs OpenSearch made our ELK stack fork harder than our Git history
“There is no war in Open Source” - just peaceful “forks”: Elastic switches to SSPL, AWS births OpenSearch, and you spend Q3 rewriting plugins while Legal rotates into on-call
Ubuntu and Debian Comment deleted
Same maintainers for the large parts Comment deleted
Elasticsearch isn't Open Source due to NDAs over plugins. Comment deleted
systemdick vs opensexrc. Comment deleted
react devs vs. normal people Comment deleted
can someone explain this to me? I haven't heard of elasticsearch nor opensearch. Comment deleted
Lol Comment deleted