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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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