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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

#81

Post by Drdrdrq »

andreareina wrote: post #33
pauldix wrote: post #10

This is a really great response and I'm curious how AWS will respond. It's particularly damning because AWS was arguing from a position of moral authority on the move, which I think was disingenuous. They wanted to create a fork and act like they weren't. Shay just called them out on it. I also wrote up my own thoughts, but it's obviously not as relevant as this. I'm a little more blunt about what AWS is doing. I eve…

Elastic doesn't have much moral authority either when they keep using the word "open" in reference to code that isn't open source. But they never say "open source" so technically correct. EDIT: you've remarked elsewhere on the thread about commercial and economic realities, so I want to take the opportunity to qualify my statement: they're free to license and monetize their code however they want. It's what I see as…

Iiuc, they are basically using open core model, with core app being free/open/libre under Apache license, and extensions proprietary with code available non-free/non-open/non-libre Elastic license. At least to me the situation seems pretty clear, and Amazon complaining that they can't take all of the code to create a competing service seems pretty disingenious to me. OP's post is thus in line with what I would expect - but it seems to irk you in some way. What is it that I'm missing?

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

#82

Post by StreamBright »

hawski wrote: post #80
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?

I guess by definition corporations are faceless.

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

#83

Post by raiyu »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #66
spudlyo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject the notion that Elastic is in this situation because they need rent money. In my view, they're in this situation because they accepted over 100M in venture capital, and now those investors want to see a return. I believe that "open core" was not a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living?" but rather "how do we leverage open source to make a billion dollar company?". I…

I find that a reasonable line of inquiry, but the obvious next question is: How would they have paid themselves salary without the venture capital? How would they have done open source and still earned a living without it? I am not sure there are obvious models/examples that are working. I think there's a reason that "open core" is an increasingly popular thing to try to do. I'm not sure if I can think of many earnin…

Vue.js as an example

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

#84

Post by prepend »

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…

There are lots of successful proprietary software companies. ElasticSearch is free to make non-OSS software if their model doesn’t make money as OSS.

But confusingly sort of being open source is only going to create pain in the long run.

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

#85

Post by Drdrdrq »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #66
spudlyo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject the notion that Elastic is in this situation because they need rent money. In my view, they're in this situation because they accepted over 100M in venture capital, and now those investors want to see a return. I believe that "open core" was not a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living?" but rather "how do we leverage open source to make a billion dollar company?". I…

I find that a reasonable line of inquiry, but the obvious next question is: How would they have paid themselves salary without the venture capital? How would they have done open source and still earned a living without it? I am not sure there are obvious models/examples that are working. I think there's a reason that "open core" is an increasingly popular thing to try to do. I'm not sure if I can think of many earnin…

Well, there is an option of selling services which is even worse, both for developers and the product itself.

Or, there are Fair Source License / Commons Clause / Business Source License /... that allow developers to capture some of the value they generate, but this of course means they are not open/free/libre because they limit some of the freedom to accomplish that.

Pick your poison. :)

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

#86

Post by car12 »

prepend wrote: post #84
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…

There are lots of successful proprietary software companies. ElasticSearch is free to make non-OSS software if their model doesn’t make money as OSS. But confusingly sort of being open source is only going to create pain in the long run.

Yeah sure, if I'm a huge enterprise and I want to run something like elasticsearch in house, I have 2 choices:

1. Get elasticsearch delivered as an inscrutable binary blob

2. Get elasticsearch delivered as binary blob but with its source as well so that I can see what ES is doing underneath the hood.

In most cases of proprietary software, the big clients eventually in case #1, do end up getting the source of the proprietary software as well. Just that the source is for viewing only not for modification.

What ES did was better than that, they made source available to anyone (including the small fish). This doesn't weaken the need for ES to make money through selling their sofware, just that the purpose of releasing the source is more towards "viewing" it and less towards making modifications and reselling it.

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

#87

Post by bragh »

ldubost wrote: post #78
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…

You can put a reverse proxy in front of it to provide at least basic authentication measures and force HTTPS. Better than nothing at least.

But the main problem is that unsecured clusters by default have caused a lot of reputation loss to the brand. When every few months news hit about yet another unsecured Elasticsearch cluster that leaked huge amounts of data, it is getting harder and harder to explain to the less informed how that is the fault of those people who did not even bother running a reverse proxy, not the fault of Elasticsearch itself.

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

#88

Post by softwaredoug »

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.

“Any degree of usability” Really? I have used ES for years and the majority of folks have gotten by with simple nginx proxies... most don’t need document level security

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

#89

Post by raiyu »

While the original movement behind open source was one of benevolence that isn't to say that the economic model of open source at scale actually works as a competitive advantage.

There are costs associated with running a business and one of the largest is marketing. What open source allows you to do is defer these costs by charging nothing for adoption. This allows you to acquire users, build up an ecosystem, and create a moat against competitors to your business. Competitors not in the sense of AWS which is adjacent, but competitors in the sense of another replacement for Elastic Search itself.

At the beginning you are losing 100% of your revenue opportunity, but you have to remember that you are either modeling yourself as a consumer company or business company. Simply put, consumers companies make more money from consumers while businesses make more money from businesses.

AWS is a business company so the majority of their revenue is from businesses. With most open source projects you are also a business, which means if you find 10 years of success 90% of your revenue will eventually come from businesses.

Those early adopters are usually smaller entities so they aren't really a large opportunity loss and the big businesses want to see massive adoption before they really consider switching. So effectively you are cutting out 20% of your revenue opportunity to build up an ecosystem moat as well as marketing budget. It isn't money directly out of your pocket, but instead is paid purely in head count, which by the way is much cheaper and more effective than trying to market your software to hundreds of thousands of people across the world.

The "free" component isn't just one of benevolence but actually an attack on any future competitor because why would those early adopters pay $5 for something that they can get for free. Most early businesses rely on these smaller customers and open source actually cuts that out of the equation, reducing competition.

So it's a very interesting dynamic in the sense that something that was started for a "good" purpose can accidentally actually stifle future competition, when you would assume otherwise.

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

#90

Post by zokier »

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…

> But those days are gone

I have to strongly disagree here. Stuff like Kafka from LinkedIn, Envoy from Lyft, Prometheus from Soundcloud are just the tip of the iceberg of people writing tools because they need them, not because they are in the business of making infrastructure software.

I believe that selling software, be it foss, open core, or fully proprietary is not good business model, neither from business nor from ethics point of view. Sell your expertise or use the software yourself to generate value, but trying to sell it is just futile.

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