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Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t see much done to address Amazon’s claims (intermingling of proprietary/open code in same conmit, etc). Mainly they just claimed FUD and reminisced a bit.

If I were Elastic I’d be quaking in my boots right now - their entire business model is under assault. Hell, the whole open core model is being called into question. Personally I’m glad to see Amazon’s distro.

Anyone have a different take?

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I don't think open core is being called into question. By that rationale, anything that is closed source that gets too popular is also called into question. Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API, features or anything else regardless of if your product is open, closed, or some combination in between.

I think if anything is called into question, it's the development of infrastructure software in a startup. Does it make economic sense anymore? As in, is it possible to profit directly off it at this point? Right now it obviously is, but it seems to be trending away from that.

> Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API

The API of a closed source, propriety and patented software can't just be copied. See Oracle vs Google.

> See Oracle vs Google.

That’ll (maybe) be a more compelling argument for one side or the other of this argument when it is finally done.

Especially if the Supreme Court rules, and it's not just the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of what the Ninth Circuit would say, which is not binding on lower courts (or other circuit courts, including the actual Ninth Circuit, in other cases.

> Nothing is stopping AWS or anyone else from copying your API

Aren't APIs under copyright now, thanks to Oracle vs Google?

Just my 2 cents. I don't care about Amazon's distro, I think it won't work. Others have tried, e.g. MariaDB vs MySQL, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Time will show though...

Edit: The thought was about big companies with their own agenda behind open source initiatives. Sorry about confusion.

What pattern are you seeing in those examples? Most Linux distros today ship with LibreOffice and have MariaDB in-repo. From where I sit, the open forks won.

Yes, the fork timeline/direction is different, but imho, the pattern is, big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork. I only can imagine the amount of resources put into keeping up. Will Amazon "rebase" their version with Elastic's? I doubt that for long time. Features advantaging AWS will be pushed, for better integration with 3rd party, which basically AWS' solutions.

I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS.

> big companies with their own agenda, hiding behind "open" fork.

MariaDB is a community fork away from a controlling company. Libreoffice is run by its own foundation, again after forking away from a company-controlled version.

> I hope that people will be able to use "vanilla" ES too on AWS.

I mean, worst case just run it on EC2/ECS, which lets you run anything you want. They're not going to break that.

Won in terms of user base, maybe. But in terms of money made and commercial adoption? Mysql beats Mariadb, though I can' t say for openoffice/libreoffice.

Is that a fair metric to judge on? The entire point of forking MariaDB was that the developers expected Oracle to make compromises for the sake of money.

Thanks. Grateful to hear your opinion.

I guess a big driver for me is a lot of the proprietary features (example: encryption in transit, RBAC, audit logging) seem absolutely basic to me. Not basic as in easy to implement, but basic as in as an operator I’ll need them for every type of logging/monitoring infra I’d ever spin up.

Worth noting I consider Elastic’s managed offering to be superior to AWS’ in a lot of ways. But personally I’ve always chosen to build my own setup off EC2

The difference is who is using them. In this case it's a trillion-dollar company that's also going to resell the fork as a service to their already locked-in customers. You betcha it's a threat to Elastic.

Eh.. OpenOffice is (practically) dead, LibreOffice is the de-facto open source office suite [1].

MySQL is still big but MariaDB is big too and definitely favored as a default by most distributions[2].

[1] https://github.com/apache/openoffice/pulse vs https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/pulse

[2] https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/distributions-which-includ...

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