Don't like people using your open-source and not contributing back? DON'T USE A NON-COPYLEFT LICENSE.
Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
111–120 of 226 posts
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.
Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their fork, than to pay royalties forever.
That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has no importance?
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! The…
>It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them!
I don't think that's what op wrote.
It doesn't make sense that folks use open source code from these companies but then there's shock and outrage that these companies are also using open source code written by others.
>because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product
It's hard to take you seriously when you blanketly dismiss companies as being "evil" (whatever that means). By what metric are these companies "evil"? Wow.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#114When 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.
Did you mean VPS (like Linode), or VPN specifically?
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> yet happily use their Open Source code It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on. The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.
Many of the folks who wrote the systems or languages you use every day work at these big companies. Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point?
>Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.
Who are the parasites?
These bad-faith posts that are really just unconstructive rants are turning this site into Reddit.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#116Earlier 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…
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…
people that manage elastisearch configurations are not the same people managing hardware, purchasing, hardware admins. obviously you can save some $ reducing your people while moving to the cloud. I agree that for any complex application (and elastic is one when volume is there) there are still pros of the cloud you cant leverage i.e for search on demand infra is pretty much useless if you cant make it happens in microseconds.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is what I thought too. If you have a hit product Amazon will roll their own version and drink your milkshake.
First, they'll demand you tell them where you're getting your (white-labeled) product, as a condition of continuing to sell. That's the truly shady part.
Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this before.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! The…
>just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them!
It's the other way around, if you hate them and criticize them so much, you need to stop using their products.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of those people are Elastic and LucidWorks employees who are monetizing their contributions to Lucene through their companies' respective products. I'm sure there are others there, too, but those were the obvious ones.
LucidWorks is not Elastic. So Elastic is benefiting from the work done by another company, without paying anything to it. Or am I missing something?
My point is that many of the contributors to Lucene are motivated by the benefit it provides to their own companies and are paid to make those contributions as part of their job. Their contributions also benefit anyone else who chooses to use Lucene including large corporate entities such as Apple, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Akamai even those companies contribute little or nothing to Lucene. In other words, on the spectrum of people who are "monetizing" Lucene, Elastic and LucidWorks contribute far more than others and are called out about it only because their products are externally distributed and visibly leverage Lucene.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?
You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry. Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible. Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big…
> I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.
I think you'll find that very few people are willing to engage in any degree of per article mental gymnastics to read a news article, and will instead be very very selective about what they read, with ruinous effects for local news.
If Spotify was not $9.99 flat fee you would likely not happily leave it on all night or use it as background music for fear of what it was costing. The difference between the way people used metered and unmetered internet was huge. Charging any kind of fee on a per article basis would have profound impacts on the way people consume media.