Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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