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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

#91

Post by prepend »

shareinnovation wrote: post #19

Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. Elastic, mongo, Kafka, redis, all are being preyed upon.

It’s by design of the Apache license that aws can canopy and earn billions. That’s the whole point. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If a creator thinks that it is wrong to take without giving, there are lots of other licenses for different philosophies.

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

#92

Post by jrochkind1 »

raiyu wrote: post #83
jrochkind1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you know how the people who work on vue.js get paid? Do they have fulltime jobs as employees? Do they get paid to work on vue.js?

I find in general it's easier to get free labor on something the newer it is. Both because it's more exciting, and because the more 'mature' something gets the _more work it is_ for _less gain_, there's more time dealing with backwards compat and filing off rough edges and keeping the existing code just working, which is all less interesting to do for free. Plus, the more mature something is, the _more work_ it _takes_ to keep it going.

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

#93

Post by Phrodo_00 »

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

Aren't APIs under copyright now, thanks to Oracle vs Google?

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

#94

Post by linuxdude314 »

The claim that Amazon says they work with Elastic for their service is bogus. I've asked many times, and its been made clear to me that they have some additional services they run, but aside from those run upstream Elasticsearch. (Same with Kubernetes).

Elastic's licensing is very hard to navigate, and the per node nature of it often makes it more cost prohibitive than Splunk.

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to Elastic to start delivering value that can't simply be added by third party contributions. If thats the case, what purpose is Elastic (corporation) actually fulfilling?

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

#95

Post by hodgesrm »

timdorr wrote: post #6

For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961

Clicking through to the AWS blog article [1] we find this:

> At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. This was part of the promise the maintainer made when they gained developers’ trust to adopt the software.

I have enormous respect for Adrian's work on cloud systems but the quote above seems very self-serving for Amazon.

Open source is bound by licenses that define the terms of open source code use. There's nothing whatsoever in the licenses that binds the project developers to continue to work on the project, to maintain similar license terms in later releases, or to take (or not take) any other action in their lives. To argue otherwise seems contrary to the notions of freedom that are the foundation of open source software.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

Edit: typo corrected

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

#96

Post by sciurus »

scriptkiddy wrote: post #52

I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations. That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead. Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason t…

The fact that the company behind rethinkdb went out of business and the community has been unable to keep it alive?

https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/

https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/next

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

#97

Post by sciurus »

ignoramous wrote: post #50

> When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. I think this may have been the crux of the friction between the companies. Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP [0][1], if not other enterprises. > Our answer has always been a constant: send a…

"Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP"

AFAICT that partnership just resulted in Elastic Cloud running on GCP in addition to AWS. If I had to guess, I'd say that Elastic didn't think it was worth their time to support GCP, but Google provided some resources to encourage them to add it as an option. That way Google gets to tell prospective GCP customers that they have an option for hosted Elasticsearch without having to build it themselves.

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

#98

Post by username223 »

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…

Many of the most successful open source projects I can think of were funded by universities (Linux and Gnu) or natural monopolies (Unix). Their creators didn't become billionaires, but the sources of money were willing to pay them a comfortable living. Maybe it's the expectation that open source should be a massive fountain of wealth that is the real problem.

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

#99

Post by andreareina »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #81
andreareina wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I said more here[1] but basically the use of "open" around their gratis/proprietary code. Never "open source" so it's not an untruth but it's still misleading especially in a context where they're also talking about their contributions to open source, a commitment to being open, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19369774

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