661–670 of 708 posts
open source founders should have some monetisation opportunities. if big companies take everything away it’s not cool
I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living. Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public. It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for…
Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…
No, many SaaS providers have discovered that it’s the back door in the GPL, Google were the leaders in this field. AWS is egregious but they didn’t invent doing this.
Thank you for writing this up. It kind of hit home for me because I recently had an issue with an unrelated company that has gotten 100 million+ in funding take advantage of my work by removing my name from the content, openly discredit my work under false claims and attempted to steal money from me multiple times while I've done nothing but help grow their business and ask for nothing in return other than our agreed…
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I apologize. I'm simply trying to understand and explain, if only to myself, to better calibrate expectations. I do not criticize or defend Amazon's parasitic relationship with FOSS. Frankly, I don't yet see how it can be any other way. I just merely acknowledge the plain truth. And that Amazon is better at this than the other belligerents. While I'm a very happy Amazon Prime customer, I'd never be an employee or oth…
Here is my advice, other professions pay for the tools they use for their job.
Actually outside of the webdev bubble most companies are willing to pay for software too. SolarWinds in the news for all the wrong reasons now but their bread-and-butter was selling things to big corporations that webdevs would demand for free.
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I don't think there's "right" and "wrong", but bizarre (entitled?) expectations. A natural part of Open Source is that someone may come in and make way more money off of something than you do. In fact, Amazon makes way more money off of Linux than Linus ever did. But you don't even have to go that far, many completely unrelated YC companies made way more money off of Linux than Linus did, and could arguably have not…
I don’t see these as comparable. If Microsoft packaged up Linux and started selling Linux licenses, maybe? Elastic search being used in a product seems different from elastic search being the product. It’s not black and white, but there are real differences.
Perhaps you mean when comparing to the “all Silicon Valley companies” I mentioned, but that still leaves AWS, GCP, Azure, Heroku, and every serverless provider out there as direct comparisons to this situation.
I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It al…
> The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I kind of disagree here, the main reason it outcompetes is based on the network of linked self serve services in the ecosystem. We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I would not tout thier consul…
> it outcompetes is based on the network of linked self serve services in the ecosystem
You have to differentiate between business concerns.
First, the concern of those who are willing to buy an IP license because they think the product is useful to them (akin to buying a Windows license key).
ES doesn't make any revenue here. They don't sell IP licenses. That's a direct consequence of putting an open source license on your product. Anyone can just get a copy of the code and spin up their own instance, no strings attached.
Second, the market of those who are looking towards assistance in using the product (consultancy, support, servicing, hosting,...). You can spin up your own instance and do all the work yourself independently. But for organizations, operating software is an expense: often it's cheaper to outsource those costs towards specialists... such as ES offering consultancy services.
The product license and the type of support you want/need are different business concerns. You can choose to an open source product and host everything yourself, you can choose a closed source product and host it yourself, or you can outsource hosting and support to a partner like ES or AWS.
> We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I would not tout thier consultancy as being anything but ok if not underwhelming.
Don't get me wrong here... But the moment you open up your wallet for AWS, you've already contributed to AWS' market position against ES.
Sure, your experience with AWS might be underwhelming, and that's totally valid. But that doesn't matter if you still go ahead and choose to pay for their services.
A market position isn't tied to the quality of service. It's tied to how much potential customers a business can sweep up and convert into hard revenue. The quality of the service is tangential to that.
You can create an absolutely shoddy user experience, and still dominate a market if you happen to position yourself at the right time, with the right product to the right people.
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The real problem that Elastic doesn't like is that amazon reimplements features as part of their core offering that ES tries to charge for. I'm sure they would have no problem contributing back but Elastic doesn't want these features to become part of the core offering.
> I'm sure they would have no problem contributing back Why the heck would you feel sure of that? What evidence makes you think anything in Amazon's DNA would go in that direction? Amazon is blatantly missing from every open source conversation or ecosystem I've ever encountered. They give essentially NOTHING back except cheap infra as a service, and we pay dearly for it with the losses we get from their predatory be…
The existence and usage of “Open Distro for Elasticsearch” is not debatable. Whether it infringes trademarks is in court and whether a third party infringed elastic’s copyrights is also in court.
Some other thoughts Where do you draw the line between "cloud", consulting, and just hiring your own engineers to run it. One is fully outsourced and one insourced but the result is the same (someone is managing an Elasticsearch cluster and making money doing it)
It's in Amazon's interest to contribute some of their changes back or they end up with an incompatible product that becomes a less attractive "Elasticsearch" alternative.
Now an industry behemoth has decided to directly compete with one of their products. That's tough, especially that it's done in a typically heavy handed way, but... Elastic's reaction seems highly disingenuous, basically a PR dance around "we love open source but we didn't realise it allows competition to eat into our revenue stream".
Elasticsearch is great precisely because it's an open source project, not a product. Otherwise it would be a yet another proprietary black box thingy, with a hefty price tag and a bunch of corporate users. As a project, it thrives, enjoys trust, dedicated community, contributions, enthusiast adoption effect, and so on.
I'm sure they could still make plenty of money from their other products, introduce new ones, maybe even get a huge new stream of support contracts from AWS customers. Instead they decided to cannibalise the main source of their success: their brilliant open source project.