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Comment by product50 | Hacker News Reader

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong?

This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

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Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using Elasticsearch in the long term. This kind of behavior reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish days of MS.

This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

My problem is Elastic acts like the employees of that company are the only people that ever contributed code to their project. Being open source that's simply not true.

What about all of the contributors to Elastic that are not employees. Why does Elastic own the monetization of other people's work?

Exactly, what's with all the work that is behind Apache Lucene that's running under the covers of ElasticSearch. All of these people [1] would also never see a dime from elastic.co either. So you can spin the wheel the other way around and say they are monetizing other peoples free work as well.

[1] http://lucene.apache.org/whoweare.html

A lot of those people are Elastic and LucidWorks employees who are monetizing their contributions to Lucene through their companies' respective products. I'm sure there are others there, too, but those were the obvious ones.

LucidWorks is not Elastic. So Elastic is benefiting from the work done by another company, without paying anything to it. Or am I missing something?

My point is that many of the contributors to Lucene are motivated by the benefit it provides to their own companies and are paid to make those contributions as part of their job. Their contributions also benefit anyone else who chooses to use Lucene including large corporate entities such as Apple, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Akamai even those companies contribute little or nothing to Lucene. In other words, on the spectrum of people who are "monetizing" Lucene, Elastic and LucidWorks contribute far more than others and are called out about it only because their products are externally distributed and visibly leverage Lucene.

The significant majority of contributors to Elasticsearch are Elastic employees. Nothing prevents outside contributors from attempting to monetize their work through selling, supporting, consulting on, or hosting Elasticsearch. They're just not likely to be nearly as well-positioned to monetize it as Elastic is.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/supporting-apache-so...

Many of our engineers, such as Robert Muir and Mike McCandless, were already contributors to ASF projects before they joined AWS. Robert worked with the Apache Lucene and Apache Solr projects as part of his role at AWS, which led to three more employees earning committer roles on these projects. Mike continues to be a very active contributor on behalf of Amazon to Apache Lucene, the storage engine that powers Solr and Elasticsearch.

Elastic.co the n'th most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's n'th most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project, Lucene, made it easier to operate, and then sold access to it.

This is disingenuous. Yes elastic cloned an open source project and improved it in some measure but also made the access free for a decent chunk of the features. Most of what is under the paid license in the elastic stack has less to do with lucene itself and more to do with quality of life improvements in deployment, security, analysis etc. There are enough improvements over and above the lucene project to make elastic worthwhile in itself.

OTOH, AWS pretty much xeroxed the elastic stack and added a paywall (at least after a year). Compared to that you still get immense value out of the elastic stack for free.

How has AWS added a paywall? They charged you for hosting ElasticSearch on their infrastructure and their management, yet there was no difference in the software.

When they decided to implement features that were only available in the proprietary version of ElasticSearch, they open sourced it.

Charging for infrastructure and management of said infrastructure is not the same as placing a paywall on software.

Valid for n as n -> oo.

You can't pretend that a monopoly plays by the same rules as everyone else. For capitalism to work no one can be allowed to control a market influencing chunk of it.

Do you think that someone with 1 million dollars has the same power and influence as someone with 1 billion dollars?

>> This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

Not true. Even GPL code is able to have proprietary modifications so long as the code stays in-house. As a cloud provider, Amazon can do an end run around the license by simply providing access to your code (with their proprietary modifications) via Web APIs.

That was the root of the whole MongoDB debacle, and several minor skermishes with Redis Labs.

That's the purpose of AGPLv3, the Affero variant that was written to close the "ASP loophole". This has been out a long time. Unfortunately the anti-copyleft zealots have discouraged creators from adopting it.

[EDIT:] I thought the "MongoDB debacle" was the wide-open default auth thing? I don't see how that connects...

Look up mongodb licensing

OK, I can understand what MongoDB are thinking with SSPL: make the open source license so onerous (using this software requires you to open source your entire stack) that any ASP has to come to them for a commercial license. That makes sense for them, and probably for several other firms. However MongoDB were previously using AGPL, which specifically does not allow AWS to close their modifications. It's probably an open question as to whether Amazon can purchase enough judges to make the point moot, but the license itself is at least trying to keep the software free. In the long run if AWS abides by the license and releases all updates to their Mongo fork it will strengthen AGPL. Admittedly, I've been unable to find the repo through which that's happening now, so maybe my hopes are already dashed...

Disclosure: I work at AWS, but I do not directly work on DocumentDB, and I have no personal experience with MongoDB's server code. But I am familiar with the facts regarding how AWS provides services that include open source code.

AWS has never used the AGPL licensed MongoDB code as part of a service, therefore the license change from AGPL to SSPL has nothing to do with AWS. There is no "Mongo fork" as you stated above.

See more in MongoDB's FAQ about the triggers for changing the license, in particular "international cloud vendors". https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License is probably what you're thinking of

> Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using Elasticsearch in the long term.

Surely, more competition is actually good for consumers, not bad?

> Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being,

All of this is irrelevant to your argument.

> and then sold access to it.

Are the purchasers of this free software foolhardy, or is Amazon providing them value in some way? I suspect it's the latter.

> I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming

That's ridiculous. Of course they were keenly aware that they could be competed with with the free software they put out.

They just hoped that no significant competitor would risk upsetting the balance of the open source community, or that they could at least make good money until someone did.

In the meantime, they selfishly avoided licensing with GPLv3 (which would have reinforced the things you care about) because it would have decreased their revenue (which is the thing they care about).

> Amazon...cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it.

This is almost completely wrong.

Amazon sold a managed service for the project long before they forked it. Elastic.co didn't like that Amazon was doing so successfully, so they tried to restrict access to the open source project.

Amazon, on the other had, offers complete access to their fork -- https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch

If Amazon takes too much of the revenue stream from those companies that produce the software might not be able to fund development.

Well... tough? Elastic has created a business heavily based on the work of others. They made a concious decision to license the code in the way that they did. Now they're moaning that Amazon is eating their lunch when Amazon is doing exactly what thousands of open source projects have done before them (provide a free service to replace a premium service.)

I don't feel sorry for them.

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