On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
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Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#2Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#3With the rise of cloud computing, the effort by cloud providers to commoditize their complements, i.e., software, inevitably leads to this particular kind of conflict between companies backing OSS software who wish to deploy their own SaaS offerings and cloud providers with their own SaaS offerings. A common response is that OSS backers can build businesses based on support and consulting but I believe that's overly restrictive. Those kinds of businesses don't scale nearly as well as managed services and it will definitely have a chilling effect on OSS development if the kinds of companies that are permitted to be built on them are simply support and consulting. I don't believe that companies backing OSS have an exclusive right to offer managed services for their software, but the current situation with cloud providers offering managed services with only token engagement with the OSS community (and then only when forced into it by licensing restrictions) is not beneficial to OSS, either.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#4I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit.
If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro.
Anyone have a different take?
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#5so, any license changes?
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#6For context, this is in response to Amazon's release of "Open Distro for Elasticsearch": https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/
Related discussions:
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#7It would be interesting if someone pushed a PR that contains more or less all the "secret sauce" of X-Pack, and see what reasons they'd use for rejecting it.
Clarification: Not push X-Pack itself, but features comparable. Like they suggested people do in the post.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#8"When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. This happened numerous times over the years, and only recently again, this time with Amazon. Some have aligned and became wonderful partners to us and the community. Others, sadly, didn't follow through. We have a commitment that we will treat a single developer contributing to our products the same as others. There is no preference, and we will reject any ask to have one. Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself."
The way this is written, it seems like there was a difference of opinion in terms of the product architecture, and not a purely commercial decision by Amazon. I would think it would make commercial sense for the team at Elastic to align with Amazon than the other way round. On the other hand Amazon claims that Elastic was moving away towards proprietary code [1].
Overall, being in open source for a decade, I am against this trend in dual licensing (which I fear is pushed by Venture Capitalists). People forget that the fact that you have freedom and zero friction, is what makes open source awesome. There are other ways to make money, like building a kick-ass consulting practice around the open source offering.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#9Lot of bitterness about people forking and bundling ES. If it was so painful for Elastic maybe they should have gone for a more suitable model - you get everything open source and pay for support and priority /early access to security updates. Unlike the current model where you get basic features as open source and have to pay for and use different license if you want to use essential features like monitoring and performance analysis.
Someone else with a business model that benefits from providing these features for free and making them open source to reduce their development/maintenance burden - cloud providers like Amazon - are going to do just that. And they're well within their right to do so.
Re: On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
#10This is a really great response and I'm curious how AWS will respond. It's particularly damning because AWS was arguing from a position of moral authority on the move, which I think was disingenuous. They wanted to create a fork and act like they weren't. Shay just called them out on it.
I also wrote up my own thoughts, but it's obviously not as relevant as this. I'm a little more blunt about what AWS is doing. I even throw in a comparison to Microsoft abusing their monopoly power in the 90's by distributing Explorer for free to kill off Netscape: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-pr...
Longer term, the real question is how Elastic will respond to this commercially. Will they create more closed source? Go higher up the stack into specific applications? It's going to be an interesting and tumultuous couple of years in open source infrastructure software.