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Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

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Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#21

Post by staticassertion »

eanzenberg wrote: post #17
capkutay wrote: post #10

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

So how do you bootstrap your company?

You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it.

You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you.

You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no one will ever use your software.

How do you see this working?

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#22

Post by snarfy »

zelon88 wrote: post #18
product50 wrote: post #3

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong? This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangem…

My problem is Elastic acts like the employees of that company are the only people that ever contributed code to their project. Being open source that's simply not true.

What about all of the contributors to Elastic that are not employees. Why does Elastic own the monetization of other people's work?

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#23

Post by zknz »

zelon88 wrote: post #18
product50 wrote: post #3

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong? This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangem…

Elastic.co the n'th most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's n'th most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project, Lucene, made it easier to operate, and then sold access to it.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#24

Post by kristianc »

staticassertion wrote: post #21
eanzenberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

> So how do you bootstrap your company?

Services

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#25

Post by paedubucher »

capkutay wrote: post #10

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

I'm reading Pieter Hintjens "Social Architecture" at the moment, and there he warns exactly about what just happened to Elasticsearch.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#26

Post by moreira »

staticassertion wrote: post #21
eanzenberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK.

Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder.

If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#27

Post by dralley »

zelon88 wrote: post #18
product50 wrote: post #3

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong? This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangem…

>> This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

Not true. Even GPL code is able to have proprietary modifications so long as the code stays in-house. As a cloud provider, Amazon can do an end run around the license by simply providing access to your code (with their proprietary modifications) via Web APIs.

That was the root of the whole MongoDB debacle, and several minor skermishes with Redis Labs.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#28

Post by busterarm »

staticassertion wrote: post #21
eanzenberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering.

It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform.

The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host.

If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#29

Post by busterarm »

epa wrote: post #5

When AWS launched, they cut the price of a typical VPN service by 80% or more. They were cutthroat from the start. Amazon did not price for the existing market, they priced for a theoretical market they knew could exist when prices were that low.

To the benefit of our entire industry.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#30

Post by [deleted] »

staticassertion wrote: post #21
eanzenberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

[deleted]
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