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Comment by jimmy2020 | Hacker News Reader

jimmy2020

> 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).

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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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