Comment by pauldix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pauldix | Hacker News Reader

This is a really great response and I'm curious how AWS will respond. It's particularly damning because AWS was arguing from a position of moral authority on the move, which I think was disingenuous. They wanted to create a fork and act like they weren't. Shay just called them out on it.

I also wrote up my own thoughts, but it's obviously not as relevant as this. I'm a little more blunt about what AWS is doing. I even throw in a comparison to Microsoft abusing their monopoly power in the 90's by distributing Explorer for free to kill off Netscape: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/aws-intends-for-their-new-pr...

Longer term, the real question is how Elastic will respond to this commercially. Will they create more closed source? Go higher up the stack into specific applications? It's going to be an interesting and tumultuous couple of years in open source infrastructure software.

Elastic doesn't have much moral authority either when they keep using the word "open" in reference to code that isn't open source. But they never say "open source" so technically correct.

EDIT: you've remarked elsewhere on the thread about commercial and economic realities, so I want to take the opportunity to qualify my statement: they're free to license and monetize their code however they want. It's what I see as deceptive intent that I'm having a (very strong) reaction to.

Iiuc, they are basically using open core model, with core app being free/open/libre under Apache license, and extensions proprietary with code available non-free/non-open/non-libre Elastic license. At least to me the situation seems pretty clear, and Amazon complaining that they can't take all of the code to create a competing service seems pretty disingenious to me. OP's post is thus in line with what I would expect - but it seems to irk you in some way. What is it that I'm missing?

I said more here[1] but basically the use of "open" around their gratis/proprietary code. Never "open source" so it's not an untruth but it's still misleading especially in a context where they're also talking about their contributions to open source, a commitment to being open, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19369774

Elastic is not in the right here, Amazon is, and that should shame Elastic more than any snarky HN comment could. Yet it’s clear either they don’t understand the critique being lodged, or they believe it’s in their interests to willfully distribute sloppily licensed code and implicitly market it as open source (whether or not they use that exact phrase).

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