Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

I am so surprised people here are taking Amazons side. Whilst technically yes open-source implies open, the movement was never about giving away free stuff to mutli-national conglomerates, who themselves do hardly any open-source. With Amazon, its all take. Take take take.

View on HN

The license they used was and is exactly about giving away free stuff to anyone who cares to take it. Including multi-national conglomerates.

Eh... rarely is a pretty harsh outlook. We forget that these companies tend to have their employees supplying patches and features to many open source projects that matter (like the Linux kernel), working on standards, etc.

Amazon's record with OSS contributions is notoriously poor. For example, see their refusal to allow their query routing extensions to pgbouncer to be used on anything other than AWS:

https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3

There's certainly room to criticize Elastic for their approach to OSS and/or their response to Amazon here, but Amazon's "open-sourcing" of a bundle of the OSS bits of Elasticsearch plus a few third-party OSS plugins is nothing other than self-serving, opportunistic PR.

Well if that’s what people want they have copyleft licenses. Open Source isn’t Free Software, even if they are close to each other.

I thought Amazon was open-sourcing their ElasticSearch fork? Did I misinterpret what's going on?

> the movement was never about giving away free stuff to ...

Then they chose the wrong license.

I'm taking Amazon's side because of Elastic's decision to keep security features (auth) behind a paywall. I will gladly support my company's use of Amazon's Open Distro if it means we can grant the right access to the right people at the right time without going from a lowish cost (we do pay for some features and support from Elastic) to an unsupportable high cost environment because of something as basic as authentication and authorization.

I'm glad someone open sourced such basic security concepts and I don't care that it was Amazon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com