Comment by jimmy2020
4 years ago
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.
4 years ago
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.
The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread. Anyways, like I said, Elastic could've made money with a proprietary product but they chose OSS instead (and used Apache Lucene to build on).
AWS is just offering customers what they want and there are many other companies doing the same thing (IBM's Compose, Aiven, Instaclustr, etc). How is this against OSS? This is the OSS industry operating as intended.
Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?
This can't happen because Lucene is controlled by the ASF, not a commercial entity.
Allowing one of various foundations to take control of an open source project, can be beneficial for the community as its licensing is unlikely to change in the future. However it does present challenges for any future commercialization.
A good example of this is Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Kafka. LinkedIn, where Kafka was originally developed, transferred control of Kafka to the ASF. As the original developers, the Confluent team still has a lot of influence and contributes a lot of code to Kafka, but they do not wield absolute control. While this has presented some challenges to build a Kafka-centric business, and even led to them creating their own Kafka fork ("Confluent Server") they have still been successful. The community also has long-term confidence in the Kafka's license.
They would have to triple-quintuple-backflip-down on "open." So, maybe? It depends on how much value is being created besides the code, in squishier parts of the business like service, support, pricing models, marketing, and so on.
But it's moot, since Apache Lucene is part of the Apache Software Foundation and has much stronger promises about its licensing and governance. Which is not a small reason why Lucene is the de facto standard for search technology.
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Elastic contributed to Lucene. (They have committers as PMCs.)
If Lucene had adopted SSPL they would have been forced to fork. But basically nothing really interesting happens at the Lucene level for ES anymore. (Sure, there's always a lot to speed up, optimize, etc. But anyone who buys ES needs the fancy stuff, security/audit/management, not a few percent more RAM efficiency.)
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Your comment is interpreting as ES was naive by choosing open-source which allows AWS to fork the code. I read this argument all the time about OSS. Where does this conversation lead? I'll tell you: to end any meaningful attempt to create open-source code with a business model aka the end of OSS.
No, I never said any that and it makes no sense.
OSS doesn't have anything to do with business models. Anyone can create open-source software and many do. The whole point is that it's free to create, see and modify. Some companies choose business models which include open-source software, and that comes with advantages (increased popularity and growth) and disadvantages (free usage, forks of codebase).
The reality though is that tech has changed and customers don't want to buy software, they want services now. ES has been slow to offer this, and they still offer it poorly, which is why AWS and other companies have filled in the gap. This is how business competition works.
Please answer these questions: Do you have a problem with the other companies (which are smaller than Elastic) that offer managed elasticsearch? Do you have a problem with multiple companies offering hosted Wordpress? Do you have a problem with any company that sells software or services that use open-source components?
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> The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread.
As I said, it's a tactic to change the subject. Instead of focusing on actions with bad faith, change the subject by saying they have a lot of money so Amazon is allowed to be competitive and fork the code.
> AWS is just offering customers what they want.
No. it's not AWS improving some services. It's about a multi-billion dollar company launching a campaign against OSS. They did it with MongoDB and it continues. Some see these actions as justifiable. Because OSS should be MIT and maintainers should live with donations. Others, however, disagree. It can be OSS and profitable (without Amazon actions).
Forking OSS isn't bad faith. If you want to make people pay you, make your software proprietary. In that case, however, you wouldn't get the free ride into the market that being OSS gives you.
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> "Amazon is allowed to be competitive"
Of course it is. Why wouldn't this be allowed?
> "fork the code"
That's the entire premise of OSS. Would it make a difference if they did it years ago? If not then what's the problem?
Again, the value AWS adds is in operational services because that's what customers want. Are you taking issue with all the other companies offering managed elasticsearch too?