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On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

elastic.co

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Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#71

Post by geofft »

throwaway12iii wrote: post #53
CharlesW wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember that AWS takes from developers, but doesn't give back anywhere near what they have made from the communities work. For a "bunch of jerks" they sure do a lot of open source stuff. https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

For the amount they make off community work, they contribute a tiny amount. Right near the top of their list (in your link) they brag about contributing to Linux. Let's see how well their brag stacks up? Looking at the contribution reports on Linux, are AWS in the top 10? AWS are not even on the list. https://twitter.com/ibrahimatlinux/status/768631239683158016...

Most of the companies on that list are hardware developers adding drivers for their own hardware, which generally benefits nobody other than their own customers. A five-line fix to scheduler performance is way more valuable to the community at large than ten thousand lines of code to support a 25GbE network card. (The 25GbE driver is hugely valuable to Amazon, though! And, depending on how you look at it, may well have been sponsored by Amazon by being a big customer of Linux in the datacenter.)

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#72

Post by zaat »

pauldix wrote: post #29
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #4

I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit. If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro. Anyone have a different take?

I don't think open core is being called into question. By that rationale, anything that is closed source that gets too popular is also called into question. Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API, features or anything else regardless of if your product is open, closed, or some combination in between. I think if anything is called into question, it's the development of infrastructure software in…

> Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API

The API of a closed source, propriety and patented software can't just be copied. See Oracle vs Google.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#73

Post by dragonwriter »

zaat wrote: post #72
pauldix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think open core is being called into question. By that rationale, anything that is closed source that gets too popular is also called into question. Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API, features or anything else regardless of if your product is open, closed, or some combination in between. I think if anything is called into question, it's the development of infrastructure software in…

> Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API The API of a closed source, propriety and patented software can't just be copied. See Oracle vs Google.

> See Oracle vs Google.

That’ll (maybe) be a more compelling argument for one side or the other of this argument when it is finally done.

Especially if the Supreme Court rules, and it's not just the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of what the Ninth Circuit would say, which is not binding on lower courts (or other circuit courts, including the actual Ninth Circuit, in other cases.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#74

Post by geofft »

car12 wrote: post #64

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS. At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care. Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resourc…

Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. Open source developers do not need to be able to put food on the table while being employed by Elasticsearch.

Frankly, yesterday's announcement made me seriously consider whether I wanted to apply for a job working at AWS, since I expect they have many positions where you're spending most of the time working on open source code like Elasticsearch.

The argument you're making is equivalent to the old argument against open-source software itself: if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? Sure, it's great that some bored Finnish guy wrote an OS that's competitive with Solaris, but if he drives Sun out of business what's the guarantee anyone else will want to work on his OS? Don't we need proprietary software companies to ensure that quality software gets developed?

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#75

Post by newaccoutnas »

cheald wrote: post #67
newaccoutnas wrote: post #55

I'm sure Shay et al have good intentions, but to have any degree of usability with elastic.co you need to buy x-packs which goes against the grain a little. I'd still like to have auth (not just basic-http) on personal projects.

Searchguard is a plugin for ES which gives you TLS + auth. They offer a paid version with more features (ActiveDirectory integration, HIPAA-compliant auditing, etc - actual enterprise features), but if you just need auth/ACLs/transport TLS, it's a great product.

Oh, thanks, I'll take a look

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#76

Post by jalaziz »

This letter is clearly not written by someone who interacts with customers. As someone who has tried to work with Elastic, their pricing is atrocious even for the most basic of features.

You can't get alerting without paying a king's ransom for features you'll likely never use.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#77

Post by car12 »

geofft wrote: post #74
car12 wrote: post #64

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS. At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care. Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resourc…

Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. Open source developers do not need to be able to put food on the table while being employed by Elasticsearch . Frankly, yesterday's announcement made me seriously consider whether I wanted to apply for a job working at AWS, since I expect they have many positions where you're spending most of the time working on open source code like Elasticsearch. The…

> if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer?

And that did happen, we don't have a single decent affordable personal computing ecosystem at this point. The only good personal computing ecosystem is with Apple, which makes its money by selling proprietary software mostly but is not affordable to ordinary joe.

What an ordinary person can buy, is an ad-riddled machine like a windows desktop or a chromebook, where although the software is not proprietary, they're basically selling you ads(directly or indirectly through your data).

To tie it back in, in fact open source software did rise up and proprietary software did go down, but we lost the pure software aspect that came with proprietary software. Basically, open source software is being used to sell you ads and if the ads based business goes down/stops so does open source ecosystem.

If you haven't realized, the biggest parts of the open source economy are propped by FAANG and Microsoft. If these big whales go away, open source's vibrancy will vanish in a poof.

In fact open source software creation is hugely concentrated to North America and by extension FAANG. So if FAANG were to stop sponsoring open source, we'll be back to proprietary software age soon. So, I'm not convinced of your argument that "open source" has won conclusively.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#78

Post by ldubost »

amirathi wrote: post #20

Why write emotionally charged letter instead of one backed with facts? Amazon is claiming [1][2] that Elastic has been intentionally unclear about what part of Elastic stack is open source vs proprietary. It would best serve Elastic if they respond to that with facts. If the claims are true, and done intentionally, it's a really bad move on part of Elastic. The ambiguity around licensing hurts all their users and not…

While as an open source software and company creator I highly connect to the emotional content of his response and feel the pain for Elastic when it comes to the competition by Amazon, I do agree that he does not address the factual issues at hand and uses badly the word "open" for stuff that is "shared source".

One aspect Elastic is also not directly attacked on and therefore not addressing is the choice of features that are not free and the price point. Elastic's business model is quite smart. You can easily develop on top of elastic, however once you have done it and want to go to production some key features are missing and they are not cheap. Particularly securing your cluster data is one of the features in xpack which is problematic not to have. I'm pretty sure you can search for open ports 9200 over the internet or company intranets and find unwanted unprotected data. And it's not cheap as you need to go for Gold subscription if I'm correct. I would be surprised nobody has proposed a pull request with competing code.

Elastic has and is investing a lot as open source and they do need a good business model that allows investment in the core open source code. The thing is I'm not sure it's missing here. Elastic.co is quite healthy. It's hard to know if it would be without this business model, but anyway there is little chance they would do differently given Elastic.co is VC backed. In the end the real fight is between the big money players, not about whether Elastic the software is sustainable. The reality is that given the community, it would very probably be even without the "xpack" package. Now it's not sure Elastic.co would be able to aggressively invest in both oss and non oss as much and therefore compete with Amazon.

OSS is tough. When you go for it, you should go in it for OSS, not for the company, because keeping the company at the level of the OSS success is hard both for small and big OSS projects.

Ludovic Dubost (XWiki)

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#79

Post by geofft »

car12 wrote: post #77
geofft wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. Open source developers do not need to be able to put food on the table while being employed by Elasticsearch . Frankly, yesterday's announcement made me seriously consider whether I wanted to apply for a job working at AWS, since I expect they have many positions where you're spending most of the time working on open source code like Elasticsearch. The…

> if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? And that did happen, we don't have a single decent affordable personal computing ecosystem at this point. The only good personal computing ecosystem is with Apple, which makes its money by selling proprietary software mostly but is not affordable to ordinary joe. What an ordinary person can buy, is an ad-r…

I think my argument is that open source has in fact won, it just hasn't brought the benefits some people expected it to bring. (And it's totally fine to say, "Having seen the results, I'm no longer a supporter of open source," if you want.) The open-source-is-viable argument was that people will find a business model other than selling the software itself, and the software industry won't collapse when proprietary software becomes unviable - and that's exactly what happened. It turned out the most profitable business model wasn't support contracts or custom development, it was largely software as a service and advertising. It also turned out that this business model was so profitable that there are tons of free-as-in-beer but non-open-source software products out there, including the vast majority of what Facebook, Google, etc. offer.

Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

#80

Post by hawski »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #30

It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party. When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961 ) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing. When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either. It may be that the collectiv…

I hear you, but aren't both of them faceless corporations?
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