Gonna go tell those freeloading kids who take my candy on Halloween that they're exploiting me unless they contribute to next year's candy bowl.
- ElasticSearch was open-source
- Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service
- ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license
- Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch
- (Few years pass)
- Amazon and ElasticSearch are now buddies
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-dif...
AWS just offered a convenience layer over ElasticSearch
The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that.
Now, there can be a lot of opinions on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the open source community, but it should be pretty obvious why elastic didn’t like it. They were a company who had a product they were selling, and then the biggest competitor in the world starts selling THE EXACT same thing with the EXACT same name. They needed to do something to compete.
So they did, and forced Amazon to change the name of their offering to opensearch instead of Elasticsearch. Once they achieved that, they reverted the change.
https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
1) Amazon is powerful, thus bad
2) we’re discussing Amazon
3) find something potentially bad
4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1
It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.
Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.
It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that.
But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time.
If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. It’s quite simple.
But it’s ridiculous, I think, to claim Amazon is doing anything wrong by abiding by the license.
Elastic shouldn’t feel that Amazon is eating their pie because they chose to put their pie out with a “free pie for everyone” under ASL. If they feel bad, that may be so, but their feelings aren’t as important as what their intellect should set up.
But maybe we shouldn’t fund open source development via companies whose entire revenue is selling support for that product? I feel like my favorite OSS projects are ones that are created and maintained by developers working for companies whose business model is based on something entirely separate from the OSS project, but who need the OSS project to support that business. They, and many other companies who have the same need, pay developers to work on the project so they can get what they need from it, but they keep it open source because it isn’t core to their business and being OSS makes it easier and cheaper to maintain.
In this way, there is no conflict of interest between the open source needs and the companies business model.
I recognize that "open source" is ok with that second way of "using" the code, but I do think it's meaningfully different.