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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread. Anyways, like I said, Elastic could've made money with a proprietary product but they chose OSS instead (and used Apache Lucene to build on).

AWS is just offering customers what they want and there are many other companies doing the same thing (IBM's Compose, Aiven, Instaclustr, etc). How is this against OSS? This is the OSS industry operating as intended.

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Mentioning lucene raises an interesting question... what if lucene adopted the SSPL license that Elastic is for their own product... could Elastic's own business model actually survive that?

They would have to triple-quintuple-backflip-down on "open." So, maybe? It depends on how much value is being created besides the code, in squishier parts of the business like service, support, pricing models, marketing, and so on.

But it's moot, since Apache Lucene is part of the Apache Software Foundation and has much stronger promises about its licensing and governance. Which is not a small reason why Lucene is the de facto standard for search technology.

Yeah. It just seems to say something if the license they are insisting is the "spirit of open source" that everyone downstream of them should be okay with... they are counting on not having to deal with upstream...

Elastic contributed to Lucene. (They have committers as PMCs.)

If Lucene had adopted SSPL they would have been forced to fork. But basically nothing really interesting happens at the Lucene level for ES anymore. (Sure, there's always a lot to speed up, optimize, etc. But anyone who buys ES needs the fancy stuff, security/audit/management, not a few percent more RAM efficiency.)

Sorry, but this is not true at all.

Some of the biggest changes within ES come from Lucene, like _massive_ reduction in memory footprint, enabling ES to use cases not even possible before.

This can't happen because Lucene is controlled by the ASF, not a commercial entity.

Allowing one of various foundations to take control of an open source project, can be beneficial for the community as its licensing is unlikely to change in the future. However it does present challenges for any future commercialization.

A good example of this is Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Kafka. LinkedIn, where Kafka was originally developed, transferred control of Kafka to the ASF. As the original developers, the Confluent team still has a lot of influence and contributes a lot of code to Kafka, but they do not wield absolute control. While this has presented some challenges to build a Kafka-centric business, and even led to them creating their own Kafka fork ("Confluent Server") they have still been successful. The community also has long-term confidence in the Kafka's license.

Your comment is interpreting as ES was naive by choosing open-source which allows AWS to fork the code. I read this argument all the time about OSS. Where does this conversation lead? I'll tell you: to end any meaningful attempt to create open-source code with a business model aka the end of OSS.

No, I never said any that and it makes no sense.

OSS doesn't have anything to do with business models. Anyone can create open-source software and many do. The whole point is that it's free to create, see and modify. Some companies choose business models which include open-source software, and that comes with advantages (increased popularity and growth) and disadvantages (free usage, forks of codebase).

The reality though is that tech has changed and customers don't want to buy software, they want services now. ES has been slow to offer this, and they still offer it poorly, which is why AWS and other companies have filled in the gap. This is how business competition works.

Please answer these questions: Do you have a problem with the other companies (which are smaller than Elastic) that offer managed elasticsearch? Do you have a problem with multiple companies offering hosted Wordpress? Do you have a problem with any company that sells software or services that use open-source components?

I hear you. This is a valid argument. But I see it both ways. I will offer an open-source and get something else in return. My problem is, Amazon is a taker and it's getting greedy and not giving back. So do you think it is legal? Yes, it is. Is it ethical? No. You are rooting for the big guy, many people do. I simply care about the collective good of the industry and I am for the open-source. Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.

I find it perfectly ethical to offer a service to customers based on open-source software. Again, nothing prevented ES from doing this for years, or sticking to only making proprietary addons. And again, there are several other companies offering the same services and many startups have built massive businesses on various open-source components.

Forks are a celebrated part of OSS and we only have more choice as customers now. The industry is better than ever. You keep ignoring these facts so at this point it's clear that you just have a personal bias against Amazon rather than a cohesive argument regarding OSS.

> The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread.

As I said, it's a tactic to change the subject. Instead of focusing on actions with bad faith, change the subject by saying they have a lot of money so Amazon is allowed to be competitive and fork the code.

> AWS is just offering customers what they want.

No. it's not AWS improving some services. It's about a multi-billion dollar company launching a campaign against OSS. They did it with MongoDB and it continues. Some see these actions as justifiable. Because OSS should be MIT and maintainers should live with donations. Others, however, disagree. It can be OSS and profitable (without Amazon actions).

Forking OSS isn't bad faith. If you want to make people pay you, make your software proprietary. In that case, however, you wouldn't get the free ride into the market that being OSS gives you.

Yes. This is how you discourage people from doing OSS. "You can't stop me" argument leads to a slippery slope and if you care about the open-source you see it differently. Not because you can, but because of the consequences of your doing.

Why would open-source advocates want to stop people from doing the very thing that open-source exists to enable?

I get that this is inconvenient for Elastic, but it’s good for users.

By people you mean, the big tech who literally did zero effort to support OSS and do everything in their power to fully control the market even if this means pushing the open-source business model out of the market? Or abusing the OSS legal license?

I don’t see this as abuse, but rather an easily contemplated and straightforward use of the license.

What's straightforward about forking an open source project to get more money?

The license is not complex, but maybe the Wikipedia summary explanation of the license will help explain how it’s straightforward?

> The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation(ASF).[6] It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License

Well, I thought you are following the discussion here.

> "Amazon is allowed to be competitive"

Of course it is. Why wouldn't this be allowed?

> "fork the code"

That's the entire premise of OSS. Would it make a difference if they did it years ago? If not then what's the problem?

Again, the value AWS adds is in operational services because that's what customers want. Are you taking issue with all the other companies offering managed elasticsearch too?

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