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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting new "threat" to the "open core" business model. ES makes proprietary extensions to support their FOSS core product - then a tech behemoth clones these features for their own hosted service, but makes them Free as well. Good for the consumer, but bad for the company that originally created the core FOSS technology and best for Amazon.

Have there been any examples of this happening before?

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I mean, this is basically what happened to commercial UNIXes, is it not? Tech behemoths decided it was more in their interests to fund the development of a free-software UNIX clone (the GNU/Linux ecosystem) than to keep paying Sun et al. The UNIX wars were, I'm sure, very meaningful for the participants, but ten years later it turned out there was more money to be made in building things on top of the OS than building the OS.

Hell, even before Linux was popular, gcc took off in the commercial Unix space because a) it didn't cost anything, while the official Sun compiler was ludicrously expensive, and b) it was more performant than the official Sun compiler.

The whole MongoDB thing recently.

And it doesn't appear that AWS is hosting these right now, just distributing so they must be paying some kind of licensing for ES. But I'm sure that will change.

The blog post says that some of these features now appear in ESS (AWS hosted ES), and that the rest will arrive soon.

Did AWS do the same thing with Mongo?

They created a compatible hosted database.

I believe in response to some licensing changes MongoDB made, so the AWS service targets the last permitted license release by Mongo.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-documentdb-with-...

*I forgot to mention, they did not release the code for this as you may have been looking for apple-to-apple comparison with the ES situation.

Hi, I work at AWS on Compute services, but not directly on database services. I also work on broader open source topics at Amazon.

Amazon DocumentDB was in development for a long time, and development started well before any of the license changes that MongoDB (the company) made to MongoDB (the database).

Re MongoDB, I don't think their pretending to be opensource anymore, just source visible, see

https://lukasatkinson.de/2019/mongodb-no-longer-seeks-osi-ap...

Re OpenES, its an apache licensed distro without proprietary commercial bits.

One of the concerns I have had with the recent trending of some opensource companies (elastic, timescaledb, and others), is that those who mix in proprietary code into their opensource repos, effectively taint contributors who can't even look at git history on a project without viewing stuff thats not opensource.

> Good for the consumer, but bad for the company that originally created the core FOSS technology and best for Amazon.

I don't know if this is a bad pattern in general for the company that originally created the core FOSS technology. If your business model is support/consultancy this may work to your advantage.

There's a huge legal precedence loophole in the GPL, where one can essentially white label a piece of software and resell it as their own product.

For example, I could build a multi-site WordPress instance, white label it, and resell it as a custom blogging platform.

That's not a loophole, that's pretty much a design choice in the license.

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