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Comment by patrickthebold | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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