Elastic hoped to monetize someone else's work, but someone monetized their own work. Ironic.
Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
131–140 of 226 posts
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#132Earlier 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 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 ev…
The "evil" characterization is from the comment you're defending. The comment you're replying to just appears to be using the same terminology to discuss the same concept.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#133Step 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…
I think you're conflating two different things.
The people at Google who contribute too, and champion open source are probably not the ones who are making the decisions that we see as "evil."
Google is competing for top talent engineering, and Googles commitment to open source boils down to a company perk meant to attract and retain top engineers.
Google is a advertising company. Everything else they do is in service of that.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
This is said a lot, very confidently, yet I wonder. Water, gas, and power are basically microtransactions on this model, for many people. Most people don't worry about mental accounting when they turn the tap. How sure are we really that this isn't just something that hasn't worked on a large scale for information yet?
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud services adoption rate is 19% and AWS has been around since 2006. The vast majority of companies in that 19% penetration are still in-transition. OpenStack and container orchestration platforms are now a thing. Not only do we have a long time to figure things out but it's never been easier to be on prem if you need to be.
Have you been a part of many successful cross-cloud migrations? Or migrations from the cloud to on-prem?
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Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#136Step 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. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.
You could GPL it...
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#137Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone. Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me. He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to u…
If that Unix workstation vendor was Sun, at one point, everyone got a bundled K&R C compiler (possibly bundled for building custom kernels), and optionally paid extra for the ANSI C compiler, and then C++ compiler.
Which worked for a while. You either didn't need the extra tools (portable code was a subset of K&R anyway), or you had ample money to pay for extra tools. (Research&education appreciated that the majority of GNU and other open source software favored Sun's bundled compiler, over other workstation platforms. Though there was some brief upset when a competing workstation line would leapfrog performance briefly (e.g., HP 9000/7xx, IBM RS/6000). And the commercial workstation independent software vendors sold such high-ticket software (e.g., 5 figures per seat, plus support contracts and training), and were already dropping huge money on engineers and hardware, so paying for software tools was a relatively small additional expense. The ISV might also go pay others for seats of third-party tools for developers, like Saber-C, Purify, FrameMaker, Interleaf, and niche developer software like EDA or CASE.)
Meanwhile, GCC was starting to get as credible on some hosts/targets as the workstation vendor compilers (vendor C++ compilers sometimes had bugs). Before that finished playing out, I moved from workstations (I worked on almost all of them, plus the Cray S-MP) and sometimes Windows NT, to move fully to GNU/Linux on mostly PC hardware.
(Edit: I got access to these toys as a super-nerdy kid. I'm well aware that HR screeners shred the resume of anyone who was paying attention when the Web boom started. :)
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 in…
This is said a lot, very confidently, yet I wonder. Water, gas, and power are basically microtransactions on this model, for many people. Most people don't worry about mental accounting when they turn the tap. How sure are we really that this isn't just something that hasn't worked on a large scale for information yet ?
Such a model could even have a cap: It's $0.001/article up to $20/month. Like... cell phone data use? But without having to sign contracts or pre-payment.
If only a few of the paywall newspapers would implement a direct per article fee, even at $0.10-0.50 I would pay for many articles because I'm too lazy and don't want to pull up a javascript disabled google cache version of the page or fire up a VM... or any of the other techniques SWIM would use to get around paywalls.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#139Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone. Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me. He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to u…
Can you give more info on the shared success model thing? I’ve never heard of it. What kinds of differences in licensing are there?
Oracle closing up “Open” Solaris was a real eye opener for me and I find the licensing / business politics of open source to be fairly interesting.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#140Mongo and Elastic built all of their technology on top of open source tech. Elasticsearch is built on Lucene. Its written in Java, and I'd bet a penny that they're not paying Oracle for that. Let's just take a quick look at Mongo and Oh look at that they're using dozens of open source libraries, such as zstandard [1] When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source…
Yeah - damn these businesses for using open source rather than building common tools from scratch. Cleary they are just as bad as a company with about a trillion dollar market cap that deliberately cannibalizes fledgling companies once said companies have bled themselves dry exploring a new market. When will the corporate shilling on HN end?
Damn these businesses for trying to profit from others' open source, and then condemning the other businesses that do the same to them.
The only difference -- as you pointed out -- is size.
"Might makes right" is just as untrue as its opposite.