On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

rooam-dev wrote: post #24

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What pattern are you seeing in those examples? Most Linux distros today ship with LibreOffice and have MariaDB in-repo. From where I sit, the open forks won.

Yes, the fork timeline/direction is different, but imho, the pattern is, big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork. I only can imagine the amount of resources put into keeping up. Will Amazon "rebase" their version with Elastic's? I doubt that for long time. Features advantaging AWS will be pushed, for better integration with 3rd party, which basically AWS' solutions. I hope that people will be a…

> big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork.

MariaDB is a community fork away from a controlling company. Libreoffice is run by its own foundation, again after forking away from a company-controlled version.

> I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS.

I mean, worst case just run it on EC2/ECS, which lets you run anything you want. They're not going to break that.

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

#62

Post by spudlyo » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #60

spudlyo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source. I believe you're conflating "open core" with with "open source". I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish. While this may be a blow to the open core FOSS business model, there are a number of other models that continue to exist that do not involve proprietary enterprise extensions. While these models may not b…

> I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish. The question is, who is going to write open source projects at a complexity/polish level similar to ElasticSearch. And how are they going to pay their rent? People working on it need to pay the rent somehow. I am suggesting that the way people paid the rent while working on open source historically in the "first phase" of internet open so…

I reject the notion that Elastic is in this situation because they need rent money. In my view, they're in this situation because they accepted over 100M in venture capital, and now those investors want to see a return.

I believe that "open core" was not a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living?" but rather "how do we leverage open source to make a billion dollar company?". I think the distinction, however minor, is important.

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

#63

Post by pm215 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #42

hypto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actions? I think this is speaking for itself: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-oss What has Amazon contributed to yet? Repackage other open source projects that was already existing? I don't call it a contribution.

"Repackage other open source projects that was already existing?" Most people don't realize this yet. They are taking other, existing projects which anyone could install themselves for a long time now and framing it like they built these things for their new fork. So much of their "distribution" is just a collection of other open source projects. In the case of the security functionality, that is backed by a company…

Isn't "a collection of other open source projects" pretty much exactly what a "distribution" usually implies? What you get is the curation/selection of what's included and some reassurance that all the pieces really do work together and other people are using them that way.

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

#64

Post by car12 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS.

At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care.

Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist.

But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?

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

#65

Post by throwawaymath » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #46

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…

Perhaps the thing just is that "programming open source stuff" is a shitty business model? Build a database, not a database engine. > Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product. Take e.g. tensorflow by google. The software itself, is per se worthless, so they can release it as OSS as some kind of calling card or recruiting tool. The crown jew…

> Take e.g. tensorflow by google. The software itself, is per se worthless, so they can release it as OSS as some kind of calling card or recruiting tool. The crown jewels they are guarding closely and are never letting any outsider access directly is their data.

No, I think it's a little more complicated than that. I don't think this is a good comparison.

Tensorflow is only "worthless per se" because it was completely open sourced. It's quite a sophisticated library and a substantial product could have been built using it if it was kept proprietary.

However, Google got to the space first and Google is fundamentally a software service company. The reason they open sourced Tensorflow is because they have data and recognized the data would be more valuable; hence, they decided to commoditize the complement. By open sourcing Tensorflow they made their data even more valuable (likewise for their services which can be used to build and manage a data pipeline).

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

#66

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

spudlyo wrote: post #62

jrochkind1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish. The question is, who is going to write open source projects at a complexity/polish level similar to ElasticSearch. And how are they going to pay their rent? People working on it need to pay the rent somehow. I am suggesting that the way people paid the rent while working on open source historically in the "first phase" of internet open so…

I reject the notion that Elastic is in this situation because they need rent money. In my view, they're in this situation because they accepted over 100M in venture capital, and now those investors want to see a return. I believe that "open core" was not a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living?" but rather "how do we leverage open source to make a billion dollar company?". I…

I find that a reasonable line of inquiry, but the obvious next question is: How would they have paid themselves salary without the venture capital? How would they have done open source and still earned a living without it?

I am not sure there are obvious models/examples that are working. I think there's a reason that "open core" is an increasingly popular thing to try to do. I'm not sure if I can think of many earning a living while producing high-complexity high-quality open source software _except_ "open core".

(And I still think "open core" is problematic for the continued viability of actual open source).

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

#67

Post by cheald » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

newaccoutnas wrote: post #55

I'm sure Shay et al have good intentions, but to have any degree of usability with elastic.co you need to buy x-packs which goes against the grain a little. I'd still like to have auth (not just basic-http) on personal projects.

Searchguard is a plugin for ES which gives you TLS + auth. They offer a paid version with more features (ActiveDirectory integration, HIPAA-compliant auditing, etc - actual enterprise features), but if you just need auth/ACLs/transport TLS, it's a great product.

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

#68

Post by Jedd » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

andreareina wrote: post #32

Clicking through to the other blog posts, it becomes apparent the the author plays fast and loose with the word "open", to their benefit. They "opened up" by providing gratis licenses to some of their software. They don't call it "open source", but the phrase "open source" is also scattered around the articles, so that "open" benefits by proximal association. They're free to license their software however they want;…

I came away with a similar impression.

OP uses the word free twice, in both cases meaning $-free.

"We [...] open sourced most of it, and made all of it free."

From an enterprise licensing perspective, 'open source' as a subset of 'free' just means I shall have to spend more time with lawyers and accountants.

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

#69

Post by marcinzm » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

car12 wrote: post #64

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS. At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care. Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resourc…

Protecting Elastic Search the company and Elastic Search the open source project is not the same thing.

AWS is releasing their changes as open source software to the public and maintaining their release. As long as ES the project keeps getting released who cares if it's Amazon, Netflix, Google or whomever that pays for the work behind it?

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

#70

Post by geofft » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

throwaway12iii wrote: post #58

geofft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the "Open Source Institute"? If you mean the Open Source Initiative, then yes, I have posted on open-source related topics here, yes, I am a member of the OSI (I joined... two weeks ago? mostly so I could vote for OSI board members who are committed to opposing corporate influence over the open source definition), and no, I do not have a conflict of interest. I paid the OSI $40 to join. I receive no money fro…

An Open Source advocacy group with cloud providers on their board, and cloud providers who pay them hundreds of thousands per year. Their mission is to be evangelists for their definition of Open Source. The one that benefits cloud providers. Of course a lobby group like this should be transparent. But I don't expect a group like that with closed mailing lists to actually be Open.

I'm still not sure what group you're talking about. If you're talking about the Open Source Initiative, the description you're giving doesn't quite make sense: the board members of the Open Source Initiative are individuals, not organizations. Some of the individuals happen to be employed by Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc., but they don't seem to work in the cloud organizations and they're not representing their companies, anyway.

The total budget of the OSI is in the couple hundred thousand range, i.e., comparable to a single full-time software engineer. So the fact that a few companies are each giving five-digit donations that add up to a six-digit budget doesn't seem like it's a huge priority for any of these companies. Take a look at the sponsorship levels on https://opensource.org/sponsors .

In any case, I agree that the Open Source Initiative should be transparent, and my individual membership in the OSI is not an endorsement of everything the OSI does any more than having a PyCon ticket is endorsement of everything the Python Software Foundation or their corporate sponsors do. (One specific thing they haven't done is post form 990s more recently than 2016, and I do intend to ask them to post these. But if you look at the 2016 one https://opensource.org/files/2016990EZ.pdf you can see that these aren't vast sums of money, and Craigslist donated more money to the OSI than any cloud provider.)