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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

#111

Post by scriptkiddy »

brylie wrote: post #59
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…

From what I gather, RethinkDB hasn't seen a release since July 2017: https://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2.3.6-release/ The project may be transitioning to new governance.

Yeah, it was taken over by the Linux Foundation.

I can't really say that RethinkDb NEEDS a new release.It's feature complete in my eyes. All it really needs at this point is maintenance.

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

#112

Post by skywhopper »

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 is not in the right here, Amazon is, and that should shame Elastic more than any snarky HN comment could. Yet it’s clear either they don’t understand the critique being lodged, or they believe it’s in their interests to willfully distribute sloppily licensed code and implicitly market it as open source (whether or not they use that exact phrase).

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

#113

Post by skywhopper »

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…

The critical thoughts are the ones that generate comments. How good is a comment that says “yeah this is good, I agree”? If you are angry or unhappy, that’s when you feel inclined to comment.

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

#114

Post by mythz »

OSS is a great business model if you're one of the 3 multi-billion dollar major cloud vendors co's who are collectively the primary beneficiaries of everyone else's OSS investments since relatively no-one pays to acquire/use free OSS software, only to host it, so it's of course in their best interest to keep everything OSS so they can collect rent at the point where people pay to utilize its value - for hosting their production systems.

It's easy for AWS, Azure or GCP to be altruistic and suggests everything should be OSS for the betterment of humanity, since they've become the primary beneficiaries of the wealth created by OSS which benefits them more than anything else. Then use the profits to develop billion dollar cloud infrastructure moats to ensure a barrier to entry that prohibits anyone else from partaking in.

This is ultimately the core issue between companies behind developers of OSS software like Redis Labs, Confluent, Elastic.co, etc. They've put in the investment to build and support their OSS products but it's the cloud vendors end up reaping most of the revenue derived from it given they're the only entity Customers pay to host their production systems. This is what the extended OSS licenses are designed to target which are typically free for everyone else but prohibits the cloud vendors from absorbing all the rewards from hosting their software without revenue sharing anything back.

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

#115

Post by hodgesrm »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #109
bigiain wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit. Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None. Same as they owe me nothing. By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in tha…

Maintainers are certainly free to adopt a "take it or leave it" attitude if they want. But most maintainers (including Elastic) don't want that. They proudly declare that their developers and users are a community, and they're steering the community to produce a great and open project on an ongoing basis. The maintainers certainly have a responsibility to follow through on such promises - or at least, if Amazon is co…

Amazon is welcome to fork and welcome to point out that they might be better for users than Elastic. But the issue here is that Amazon--like many others before them--are asserting a 'right' that simply does not exist.

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

#116

Post by hyperpallium »

bigiain wrote: post #106
hodgesrm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit. Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None. Same as they owe me nothing. By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in tha…

You are 100% right. I'm not Amazon's unpaid lifetime indentured slave.

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

#117

Post by prabhatjha »

I think that AWS are the "bad guy" here. I am happy to be proven wrong but they don’t have a track record of contributing code to the OSS projects they provide as a service. Whenever they are forced like it was the case with Mongo and now with Elastic they are using their power to have a competing OSS project. There is nothing wrong with this business wise but it's totally against spirit of OSS.

If you look at Red Hat on other hand when they decided that Kubernetes was the way to go for their OpenShift project they put lots of engineering resources for upstream k8s.

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

#118

Post by hyperpallium »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #109
bigiain wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon can believe whatever they want, but when they say "maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure ... " - I call bullshit. Those maintainers owe Amazon nothing. The have no responsibility to Amazon. None. Same as they owe me nothing. By definition (if you use any of the more-that-two-or-so-year-old definitions of "open source"), the project is defined by "remaining free and open", in tha…

Maintainers are certainly free to adopt a "take it or leave it" attitude if they want. But most maintainers (including Elastic) don't want that. They proudly declare that their developers and users are a community, and they're steering the community to produce a great and open project on an ongoing basis. The maintainers certainly have a responsibility to follow through on such promises - or at least, if Amazon is co…

Promises without consideration (e.g. unpaid) aren't enforceable.

I help out by sweeping Amazon's yard everyday, for free. "Thanks!" they say, "Any time!" I reply. But years later, I decide to stop. Amazon cries out in anguish "But you have a Responsibility!", and threatens me that if I don't clean their yard... well, they'll do it themselves.

Free maintained software suits Amazon, and some organizations / foundations provide it. Seems to work as consulting services advertising (BTW which incentivizes hard-to-use software, lots of complicated features, jumbled together... ever seen a large foundation's open source project like that?)

Some businesses fund these foundations directly, but minimally, and there's a certain... reluctance. Perhaps an unmet need there...?

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

#119

Post by throwaway12iii »

geofft wrote: post #71
throwaway12iii wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the amount they make off community work, they contribute a tiny amount. Right near the top of their list (in your link) they brag about contributing to Linux. Let's see how well their brag stacks up? Looking at the contribution reports on Linux, are AWS in the top 10? AWS are not even on the list. https://twitter.com/ibrahimatlinux/status/768631239683158016...

Most of the companies on that list are hardware developers adding drivers for their own hardware, which generally benefits nobody other than their own customers. A five-line fix to scheduler performance is way more valuable to the community at large than ten thousand lines of code to support a 25GbE network card. (The 25GbE driver is hugely valuable to Amazon, though! And, depending on how you look at it, may well ha…

That is a bunch of bullshit and you know it. AWS have made a tiny contribution to Linux.

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

#120

Post by elcomet »

zokier wrote: post #90
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 f…

I think a lot of successful companies, Microsoft for instance, would disagree with you.
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