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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

#41

Post by jimrhods23 »

"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free"

I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.

"It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive"

So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.

This article has some good info on this fight: https://www.datanami.com/2019/03/12/search-war-unfolding-for...

It sounds like Amazon wants to add new features to Elasticsearch, which just so happen to be proprietary features that requires a license from Elasticsearch.

This is always the risk when basing your entire business on an open source project. A much larger company with more resources could build the same features and release them under the same open source license, for free...which is what's going to happen here...and it's actually exactly the spirit of the open source community.

This is why I would never create a business based on open source software and attempt to have a dual licensing model. In the end, the only real way to make money is by having better support (because any big company can come along and eat your lunch)...which is much less scalable and requires many more employees.

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

#42

Post by WalterSear »

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, recognize that people who won't pay weren't your target market anyway, and accrete the reputation for your product that wins people on the fence over to your paid product/service.

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

#43

Post by ravenstine »

burtonator wrote: post #36
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…

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…

> people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?

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

#44

Post by brunoqc »

IshKebab wrote: post #32
staticassertion wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal. Gitlab is a good example.

I'm not sure about open core. Why should we contribute to an open core project? What if I want to add a feature that is locked away in the enterprise version? I can't fork for one feature and they won't add it to the main product.

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

#45

Post by kansface »

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…

> Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using Elasticsearch in the long term.

Surely, more competition is actually good for consumers, not bad?

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

#46

Post by pieterh_estc »

kemitchell wrote: post #35
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…

> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise. When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, an…

OSI is asleep at the wheel on this one IMHO https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensin...

I wonder why aren't they standardizing an open source license that prevents hyperscale cloud monetization by someone other than the originators? Don't OSS communities hold the cards here? it's just a change to license.txt, broad OSS adoption and it's a very different type of cloud (picture nuclear mushroom cloud)

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

#47

Post by awakeasleep »

busterarm wrote: post #29
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.

The long term effects of this remain to be seen.

All our cloud providers are currently in growth mode.

What will happen when they're in 'mature industry with trapped customers mode'?

We know how Oracle handles that situation.

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

#48

Post by EpicEng »

pkaye wrote: post #6
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.

If Amazon takes too much of the revenue stream from those companies that produce the software might not be able to fund development.

Well... tough? Elastic has created a business heavily based on the work of others. They made a concious decision to license the code in the way that they did. Now they're moaning that Amazon is eating their lunch when Amazon is doing exactly what thousands of open source projects have done before them (provide a free service to replace a premium service.)

I don't feel sorry for them.

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

#49

Post by yardie »

jimrhods23 wrote: post #41

"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free" I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. "It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive" So offering a fr…

> Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.

No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price.

You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify the product you sold them and that they own. If I wanted to strip out analytics services from a browser I can do that in Chromium and Webkit. I can't do that with Chrome or Edge.

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

#50

Post by chongli »

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…

Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.
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