I always kept hearing that elastic search was a great product, helped to solve some difficult problems and was open source. However, when I wanted to use it I quickly found out that some important features are paid only. And the licenses cost a ton. It felt very disingenuous for it to be called open source when there are things I cannot use for personal or commercial use. Amazon enabled me to use this stack the way I wanted and now again I think elastic search is a great product. Reputation wise I think Amazon's move will only help them. Not sure business wise
Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
221–226 of 226 posts
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model. more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support. a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days. in all cases, you're…
I think people overestimate the number of customers that need "support". Especially given that the users of projects like these are technically extremely skilled.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a gross mischaracterization of open source. > The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime. > The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. No, releasing open source code doesn't imply signing away copyright or ownership. For…
> Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime. Companies are not people. It is nonsensical to say that someone is being grateful or ungrateful to some abstract legal construct. If the executives of some company decide to let their employees work on open source projects, it's because they think this will improve profitability in some way: advertisement, attracting talent, benefiting from free work, facilita…
Ever heard of win win relationship? You can benefit from a company open sourcing a project and the company could benefit a lot more from it at the same time. It’s nonsensical to forbid other people from feeling grateful when they benefit from someone else’s (or should I say some company else’s) non-altruistic actions, even if you don’t.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't just make money from you by directly showing your ads, so don't make zero $ if you as an individual manage to block all their ads. They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to that earning potential. You might not be seeing…
I expect any model where fb allowed payment for an ad-free experience would still involve them doing all that targeting for others with my data anyway. That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.
But where would be the benefit for them? How many people would pay to block adverts but not tracking & data linking forensics when they can already do that for free? Probably some would, but I suspect not enough to offset the extra development & maintenance time and potential sense of bad faith from the advertisers. Further more, as mentioned in my previous post, making an official ad-free route is likely to make unofficial blocking easier.
Who the advertisers might want to reach is relevant because FB can currently promise to do whatever is practically possible to block ad blocking. This doesn't amount to much (tricks like the extra divs littered through the word "sponsored" and so forth, to obfuscate the advert related code & markup from blocking scripts, for instance) but is better from the advertisers point of view than them admitting it is going to happen and they've given up stopping it. And again, the official ad blocking method is likely to make unofficial blocking easier - they would have to defend that to their advertising customers.
The other issue that could come up is effectively creating a two tier system, with those that can afford to pay and those that can't. Equality and privacy defenders might be all over that, and however right or wrong people think each side would be there FB are not going to want that on top of all the public scrutiny they are already getting.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime. Companies are not people. It is nonsensical to say that someone is being grateful or ungrateful to some abstract legal construct. If the executives of some company decide to let their employees work on open source projects, it's because they think this will improve profitability in some way: advertisement, attracting talent, benefiting from free work, facilita…
Ever heard of win win relationship? You can benefit from a company open sourcing a project and the company could benefit a lot more from it at the same time. It’s nonsensical to forbid other people from feeling grateful when they benefit from someone else’s (or should I say some company else’s) non-altruistic actions, even if you don’t.
> Ever heard of win win relationship?
How could I not? It's one of the most repeated clichés in the history of clichés.
In any case, I am not denying mutual benefit or trying to forbid anyone from anything. I am just saying that if you are shouting "you ungrateful bastard" and the target of gratitude is a legal entity, you are just being silly.
Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look up mongodb licensing
OK, I can understand what MongoDB are thinking with SSPL: make the open source license so onerous (using this software requires you to open source your entire stack) that any ASP has to come to them for a commercial license. That makes sense for them, and probably for several other firms. However MongoDB were previously using AGPL, which specifically does not allow AWS to close their modifications. It's probably an o…
Disclosure: I work at AWS, but I do not directly work on DocumentDB, and I have no personal experience with MongoDB's server code. But I am familiar with the facts regarding how AWS provides services that include open source code.
AWS has never used the AGPL licensed MongoDB code as part of a service, therefore the license change from AGPL to SSPL has nothing to do with AWS. There is no "Mongo fork" as you stated above.
See more in MongoDB's FAQ about the triggers for changing the license, in particular "international cloud vendors". https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...