Hacker News Reader

Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, we are seeing other examples where open source maintainers are muddying the waters between the open source community and the proprietary code they create to monetize the open source.

As I understand it, Amazon took ElasticSearch and monetized it, therefore competing directly with Elastic (the company that develops ElasticSearch). Elastic felt Amazon was taking advantage of Elastic's commitment to open source, and started developing new features under a proprietary license, but releasing them for free. The idea was to prevent their work from benefiting a competitor.

Basically in this blog post, Amazon is trying to make the case that they're a Good Tech Company and Elastic are the Bad Guys or something. Generally I'm all for nuance and "the truth is probably somewhere in the middle", but Elastic is the rare company that truly is committed to open source (at least at the current moment in history) and Amazon is, well, Amazon.

View on HN

You don't understand at all. Elastic starting monetizing it, not Amazon. They raised over $100M in venture capital. [1] They had a $2.5B valuation IPO. They made many features available through subscription only for over 5 years. [2] This is in contrast to the Apache Solr project, where the updates to the engine are made to the open source project and it is released in concert with Lucene.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/05/elasticsearch-scores-70m-i...

[2] https://www.elastic.co/blog/shield-know-security-coming-soon

> Elastic [...] started developing new features under a proprietary license [...]. The idea was to prevent their work from benefiting a competitor. [...] Elastic is the rare company that truly is committed to open source (at least at the current moment in history) and Amazon is, well, Amazon.

I know there's more context here, and I'm sympathetic to Elastic's position, but "Elastic loves open source so much they made proprietary features to hurt their competitors!" is a bit....Orwellian as far as defenses.

I don't think this comes across as pro-Elastic as you think it does. :)

> Elastic loves open source so much they made proprietary features to hurt their competitors!

I don't think that's a fair interpretation. They're not going on the attack, after all. Amazon's capitalization on ElasticSearch constitutes an existential threat to Elastic, not the other way around. Elastic is very much defending its existence, which, by the way, is the primary sponsor for the open source project. Moreover, the interpretation ignores that the "proprietary features" in question (including their source code) are available for free to the public.

I'm open to the idea that there were better (i.e., friendlier to open source) recourses available, but I'm not pursuaded by purist arguments that don't address the existential threat to Elastic and the ElasticSearch project.

The challenge here is that there is an implied expectation that if you started or are the primary sponsor of the project, you should be the primary recipient of revenue resulting from same. Often this expectation is paired with a belief that the project and the product are the same thing (lack of competitive differentiation).

The first is not a given at all, and the second is what leads to it being a foregone conclusion with the question being not if but when someone will eat your lunch whether its Amazon or users choosing to DIY.

I don't think it's a challenge at all. It's not my position, nor does my position hinge on it. Elastic is merely an important contributor to ElasticSearch, but they should not be regarded as "hostile toward open source" (esp not moreso than Amazon) because--in existential self-defense--they began writing nominally proprietary features (which they give away for free to everyone except their competitors).

Most of Elastic's critics in this thread seem to believe that, as the primary sponsor of the project, everything Elastic does must be open source (apparently) at all costs or they are somehow anti-open-source or otherwise "worse for open source" than Amazon.

releasing "new features under a proprietary license" might be a smart business move, but let's not pretend that it's pro open source.

Afaict, Elastic views Amazon's competition as an existential threat, and is releasing under a proprietary license as a last resort. Mind you, the source code is open and they're not charging for it. I'm not sure what you expect a company to do? Fall on their sword out of a dogmatic sense of Open Source Honor?

I expect neither party to do anything different than they did.

Exactly, they can both be right. In Elastic's case though being right still doesn't mean they exist in 5 years. This doesn't reflect that what they did here was wrong but that by the time this started unfolding they were already in a bad position.

I don't know if both or either of them are "right". Maybe neither one is "right", they can both be "wrong" too. I'm not sure how we determine what is "right" or "wrong" here. But you asked what we expected them to do.

If by "what do you expect a company to do" you mean what is _ethical_, then what's good for their business seems like an entirely orthogonal concern to me.

If the question is: What is good for the continued viability of open source -- I honestly do not know.

I didn't pose the original question, but in my mind "right" here is simply, made the best decision available to them at the point in time.

Best decision for what desired outcomes? Their own profit? Sure.

While I might hope for more I don't expect a company to make decision any other way.

Sure, but ya don't got to it call it "right"!

That's a straw man though- just because the action makes sense doesn't mean it supports open source software.

No, that's a straw man :). My claim was not "just because the action makes sense means it supports open source software", it was "Elastic on balance is one of the most pro-open-source companies, and recent events should be interpreted in the context of the existential threat posed by Amazon using Elastic's open source contributions to compete with Elastic".

Given that and the fact that Elastic is the primary sponsor of the ElasticSearch open source project, it is obvious that this action actually is in the best interest of open source, as it allows Elastic to continue sponsoring ElasticSearch.

Most of the criticism of Elastic in this thread seems to be predicated on the purist notion that proprietary software is the antithesis of open source software. That's obviously untrue, and we really need to disillusion ourselves of this.

It is not obvious that this action is actually in the best interest of open source. It's obvious that it's in the best interest of Elastic, but there is nothing intrinsically special about them that means they are the best stewards for the code until the end of time itself versus Amazon or anyone else for that matter.

The ability to fork in open source is a feature not a bug and ultimately the community of users and developers of these projects will decide what works best for them. In this case it isn't even a fork, it's new plugins that the community can consume under a FOSS license.

Elastic's business model is entirely predicated on a symbiotic relationship with the open source project. Amazon doesn't have any business incentive to be the primary sponsor of the open source project; certainly not in the long term. Seems pretty obvious to me.

At that point it becomes about the nuance of defining what is really best for open source. Is it long term maintenance of ElasticSearch as it exists today, in which case I agree Elastic has the best incentive to keep it going, or is it net new open source code in which case Amazon is bringing new plugins to the table. I suspect in practice this is more of a spectrum than an obvious either/or.

> [Elastic] started developing new features under a proprietary license

> Elastic is the rare company that truly is committed to open source

On their face, those two statements seem mutually exclusive. What context am I missing that would make them not so?

> seem mutually exclusive Open source doesn't necessarily mean free to use. You can view entire elastic search code on github, nothing is hidden from the users. This way of licensing might be the only way an open source company can be truly profitable.

They still make it available to most everyone free to use, as I understand it. They just don't want to do the legwork for their competitors.

As I understand it, they've released all of their code for a long time under an open source license and continue to release their source code and allow non-competitors to use it for free. All contributions from the community are also available under open source licenses? (this is my understanding, anyway)

In your mind, how should a "committed to open source" company respond to an existential threat (not only to the business, but to the project given the business is the primary sponsor of the project)? Are there better open source licenses that allow them to meet the same ends? Or should they just cease to exist, lay off their staff, and abandon the project out of a Stallmanic dream of open source?

I think they could go with a copyleft license. Or they should just announce that they are no longer committed to open source.

> Or they should just announce that they are no longer committed to open source.

Why? Because < 100% of their code is open source? This seems infeasibly idealistic, and a false dichotomy. You can be a proprietary software company that is still very committed to open source. Anyway, if < 100% is the standard, surely Amazon is worse yet, no?

Agreed. The parent's comment's last line contradicts most of the argument.

Releasing it for 'free' is the not the same as an equitable Open Source license.

It's open source meets the real world. We aren't all hippies who can sit around at MIT.

> It's open source meets the real world

It's nothing like open source; it's proprietary software that attempts to leverage the goodwill of the “open source” label without adhering to what that label means.

> We aren't all hippies who can sit around at MIT.

Look, if open source doesn't work for your business situation, that's fine, just don't lie about being committed to open source where you are truly only committed to your own profits, all while making disparaging portrayals of the people who actually are committed to open source.

Elastic, it seems to me, is the not-at-all rare company who is truly committed to using “open source” as a marketing gimmick and tool to recruit free labor, and like most such companies resents being reduced to itself playing the role it envisions for FOSS community members by a bigger fish.

Not so much for free labor but to drive adoption. Lots of people use ES for free. When that use starts to scale, most folks end up needing to pay ES for enterprise critical features or support.

It’s a strategy that isn’t working out for a bunch of companies.

> Elastic, it seems to me, is the not-at-all rare company who is truly committed to using “open source” as a marketing gimmick

Don't think it was that nefarious. More likely that the original developers were committed to open source, and then took lots of venture capital money to keep coding and making cool things. Now those VCs want a return on their investment, and effectively have control over the product.

and you know what? Elastic's cloud offering is shit. It's really expensive, it falls over every other week and their support is terrible.

AWS ElasticSearch is not great, but it's way better than Elastic.

If they wanted to monetize it, why not patent the new features, demand royalties from AWS, set royalty rates of $0 for small to mid size businesses, and keep it open source? Or customize the patent so that it's only enforceable against AWS.

I realize "patent" is a dirty word around here, but aside from that, what are the issues with the above strategy and is there truly no possible way around those issues?

I realize our patent system is totally fucked up, but hopefully not so fucked up that things like "user authentication" can be patented.

Amazon patented 1 click checkout.

> I realize our patent system is totally fucked up, but hopefully not so fucked up that things like "user authentication" can be patented.

You kidding? You have no idea how many user authentication patent battles have been fought.

Have a look at patents for rodent traps. Over 4000 and counting IIRC. Get inspired.

Or not. I'm no fan of software patents.

meh, amazon sues over the patents and gets them tossed out then introduces a compatible API anyway.

You can't beat Amazon. You can't beat google. You can't beat Microsoft.

Ironically, Elastic's cloud offering I believe runs on AWS...

So not in the middle then. Amazon the bad guy here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com