Comment by 015a
4 years ago
One thing which surprised me: Elastic has a market capitalization of ~$11B.
I think that changes some of the more floaty ethical concerns. This is not a David vs Goliath situation. This is Goliath vs Super-Goliath.
At this point, I'm much less interested in the drama of which mega-corp is screwing over the other. I'm more interested in: how does it affect me? When the titans are done trampling over the rest of us, which side benefits me the most?
Its too early to tell, but it seems like it'll be Amazon. The product is more open. They have a demonstrated history of great support. Yeah, they gouge us on networking and everything else, but at least they're the devil we know, and buying into the OpenSearch ecosystem has a greater probability of being the more open solution into the next decade.
Uhmmm I’m pretty sure David vs Goliath is talking about scale between competition. Saying that $11B is Goliath just because you’re sitting at $1M doesn’t mean they’re not in a crazy mismatched fight against a $2T company. In the same way you could be in a David vs Goliath situation yourself if you with $1M in wealth tried to sue someone with $25K of wealth. Everything is relative. Doesn’t mean it’s not a crazy unfair mismatch that doesn’t deserve sympathy and regret.
It may be relative but it isn't proportionate. A 11B market cap company can field a similarly competent legal department as a 2T market cap company can. I, with 25k, absolutely could not afford the same lawyer someone with 1M.
Have you considered that guy with $1M won't be willing to drop like $50k (2x your net worth) on a lawyer just to squash you?
He must have possibility to earn $100k in process to do that. Well unless you really pissed him off.
If you earn $25k a year and he spends $50k in one year to take your cake. Well unless he really is your competitor that can make use of your defeat he still needs 2 years to get even. Then it probably is not easy money because there is always a risk he will not win. Maybe he can find better ways to earn more money than squashing some $25k guys.
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When there are two large entities (and I take this to mean way larger than you or your company) then you’re better off rooting for the one that at least releases code you can use.
If OpenSearch is truely open then in theory you can find another provider. But for ElasticSearch you’re stuck with them.
> But for ElasticSearch you’re stuck with them.
I am a bit at a loss about that statement, you can run Elasticsearch on your on infrastructure
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I don't root for David because he's smaller. I root for him because he's small.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!
Put another way, the $11B Goliath is .55% of Super Goliaths size.
To be realistic and fair I don't believe part of Amazon that is doing fork of Elasticsearch is $2T, they have other stuff to do.
Just like the guy that is $1M worth is not going to blow all of his money just to squash some guy. He probably has more powerful friends and maybe some connections but I don't see dumping $0.5m on lawyers just because he can take piece of cake from the other guy that will make him $10k a year.
Imagine head of the department storming into Jeff Bezos office telling that he needs 20% of all Amazon worth to squash Elastic, that would be funny. Quick calc with 20% I assume would be $20B which would be only x2 of Elastic, so I don't see something like that happening.
just a math correction: 20% of $2T is $400b - or about 40x of Elastic
This argument is part of Amazon's PR campaign to tell devs to not feel sorry for Elastic because it's now a big company and they make money in the market. So, if you built a successful OSS and start to make money then it's ethical to clone any OSS and pushes projects out of the market because now it is "Goliath vs Super-Goliath".
If Elastic's own SaaS isn't good enough to generate revenue that its keeps investors happy, and ii didn't survive, that'd be a shame. Making anti-OSS moves to salvage things though is a disgrace.
Quite a few companies have proprietary products but have learned to make money selling services. One of them even has a 200B market cap and is called Oracle.
Nobody needs to feel sorry for anyone.
Right. But the question here is not about companies value in the market. Why changing the subject? This should be about the ethics behind Amazon's aggressive actions against OSS and its effect on the OSS industry.
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I mean, Elastic was successful because of license arbitrage; to complain about said arbitrage when Amazon does it is ... well, it's hard to feel a lot of sympathy.
Exactly this. Elastic search took open source code and turned it into a service to profit from it while making improvements to the code. Amazon is doing the same thing, except they’re keeping their contributions truly open source.
Quick point,.., as yours is valid... these days $11Bn market cap doe not represent cash in bank for development and R&D. It just reflects what the market think its worth. R&D , of which there has been a lot, and it continues, is hugely expensive.
After a decade and a third of QE, 11 bil is not really serious money. These days the unit of power on the capital markets is a trillion.