961–969 of 969 posts
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If you’re simply thinking of size, consider Amazon is a 500x more diversified business. I doubt they pull anywhere near as much revenue as Elastic does (half a billion/year) from their Elasticsearch hosting alone. Apples and oranges.
I was thinking in terms of AWS, which while more diversified has lock-in, and someone who's already using AWS is probably never going to use ES own cloud hosting
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Precisely why GPL is the way it is. If a company released Apache or BSD code they must understand that the code can be used and extended for commercial purposes and they don't have to offer those extensions back to the community. If you want to ensure those who derive benefits from it also contribute back, you choose GPL.
GPL doesn't require you to give back to the community, only to your users. That's a huge difference and that's why GPL is generally ok for internal projects.
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IANAL and I am pretty sure they will need to be involved in a serious way to iron all this out. I have my understanding of the intent, which I would not invest money in at this point trying to prove, and that's as much as I can offer. It seems that you can have users search your data in your Elastic+Kibana instance. What they're precluding is you offering an Elastic instance for your customers to load their data into…
I understand the intent, but elastic has proven to create legal confusion despite being warned against it and then sue over it in the past when they mixed the APL source and the x-pack source under two different licenses in the same repo and then sued floragunn over copyright violations. They might be technically correct on that lawsuit, but IMHO they knowingly created that situation.
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Amazon's behavior may feel exploitative, but it isn't. That would be like saying Red Hat is exploitative. Part of the whole concept of free software is that you have freedom of choice with vendors (this is derived from "freedom 0"). Amazon is providing the software and its support as part of the Elasticsearch offering as a managed service. Elastic is a competing vendor, both as a managed service and in a traditional…
I don't think it's fair to say that Elastic wants to be the exclusive vendor of Elasticsearch. They have registered and own the trademark, I believe it is fair to say that they want to be the only vendor who can use that trademark. I don't think this is uncommon or unreasonable. Other companies have built products on Elasticsearch (I worked one one myself at one time) and they haven't been sued by Elastic. In my expe…
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Not much value at all, from my experience. Having given Elastic's support two tries at different companies, it doesn't surprise me that their business model is failing. Their support was _terrible_ both times; at no point were we ever in touch with anyone who seemed like they understood the product, cared about our issues, or were in any hurry to fix them. We were locked in year long, 6-figure support contracts in bo…
> We got better answers out of random Google searches and a 20 minute conversation with a friend of a friend. On the other hand, if you were asking support to train you on "how to do A, B, C" while you didn't even check the documentation nor made a basic google search, I can understand why you were disappointed. Paying more for support doesn't change the nature of it, it doesn't magically become a google bot for you.…
In the most recent example, we were occasionally hitting Java heap OutOfMemory under our workloads and wanted tuning or even architectural advice. It turns out that ElasticSearch didn't limit ingestion rate to control memory pressure and was happy to accept writes under load until it exploded. Heavy users of ElasticSearch commonly have to watch ES memory pressure and throttle their own writes client-side.
I would've loved to hear these limitations from elastic.co, be offered some tips on appropriate techniques for throttling, or have them accept a feature request to better handle this server side. We never got anywhere near that level of depth of understanding our problem, after months of trying. It felt like we were talking to first-level support who didn't understand the product much better than we did.
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I understand the intent, but elastic has proven to create legal confusion despite being warned against it and then sue over it in the past when they mixed the APL source and the x-pack source under two different licenses in the same repo and then sued floragunn over copyright violations. They might be technically correct on that lawsuit, but IMHO they knowingly created that situation.
If they are intentionally causing confusion it seems their right to recover would be seriously limited by their failure to mitigate damages.
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I'm not quite sure I agree with your words here; generally speaking, net income is profit (accounting profit, to be precise -- there are other profits but we normally talk about accounting profit). Secondly, revenue is super not meaningless! It's the capacity for you to be profitable! Amazon had 0 net income but were able to spend money on growth because they had revenue, and were able to classify their R&D as an exp…
I wrote profitability exactly for this reason. Revenue in itself is just as meaningless as profitability, I agree. (That's what aggregates like NPV [net present value] and other indicators are for.) RedHat is big, it has a lot of revenue, but it also has a looot of expenses too. Hence it's profitability is low. Whereas Amazon is a lot more profitable (even if it had no accounting profit), and that's exactly how it gr…
I judge by your statements of RedHat's expenses/revenue/profitability that you're defining it as operating profit? That's not a great measure to look at things: certain sectors can expense things and make a mess of it - like depreciation & R&D.
That's also a measure of the core operating portion of the business alone, it. doesn't include non-core portions, nor spending on investments/divestitures (although the latter should show in pro formas or future reports. Also to be fair that would never be counted in a profit definition, but judging from what you find important, I suspect you would prefer to include it? ).
NPVs are calculated by Free Cash Flow streams discounted at whatever your discount rate.
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But is that dynamic being driven by open source or does it just exist naturally? Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years or write a brand new implementation of a web server. Code reuse is encourages by open source but it happens a lot with out it as well. And I'd argue it makes technology a lot more valuable because we have a suit of existing well built software that's been tunn…
> Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years No but it does make sense for us to pay for using an OS given that it's fundamental to what we do. The free as in free beer model means that the entities that produce operating systems do not extract any significant fraction of the value they are responsible for generating. It also perpetuates this idea that we shouldn't pay for software…
It's not like a widget, that there's a value intrinsic to each widget - the value is all in the creating the initial copy of the software and in any ongoing changes people want.
And while for a singular person, perhaps writing FLOSS is charity, but for companies it might well be more payment in kind - i.e. cooperation on making it do things each company wants makes it more valuable for everyone.
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OpenBSD did not initially make OpenSSL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL , https://paulyang.cn/2017/01/10/openssl-chapter-01-en.html )
And Google did not initially made Blink.