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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

A lot of forks are created for similar reasons, it's not a fight between the great enlightened and the vile defilers. It's a for-profit (Elastic) wanting more control over their product (ElasticSearch) while also making ElasticSearch open-source under a permissive license that they used to kick-start their growth and another for-profit (Amazon) leveraging the open-source license to offer the product as a service to their customer base.

When they had a disagreement Amazon chose to fork it. You can frame Amazon as "cringe" and "throwing a tantrum" but ultimately this is hardly either of those.

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The cringeworthy part was Amazon self righteously declaring that they were acting as staunch defenders of open source when all they were really doing was trying to deny an open source company a well earned cut of the profits Amazon made from hosting the software they build.

Lots of companies do similar or worse, I do agree. For instance a certain company that has obviously paid a PR company to go on an open source charm offensive (the article has all the hallmarks of pg's submarine) in this thread has strict rules about when its workers can pee. That's probably worse.

What open source company? Not Elastic, surely.

> […] obviously paid a PR company to go on an open source charm offensive […]

Please don’t do this here. Consider that others can disagree with you, or that you may simply be wrong.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

>What open source company? Not Elastic, surely.

Why not? That's immediately who I thought of.

Company 1 develops an open-sources a product, and in order to make money from it, provides that product as a hosted service.

AWS uses their market dominance to provide a similar service and eats Company 1's lunch.

Company 1 changes their license so that any other company hosting the product as a service has to pay.

AWS forks it and acts like the good guy.

>Please don’t do this here. Consider that others can disagree with you, or that you may simply be wrong.

I was referring to the PR whitewashing piece submitted (written by an ex Amazon employee, no less), not to anybody on this site.

Please ask questions in future before accusing and refrain from assuming malintent.

That really depends on the reader. ElasticSearch is a company, and made its product open source as a growth strategy, it worked!

However , it is difficult in general for these open source companies to compete with Amazon's managed offering. The managed offering and its support staff eliminates the need for the tech service contracts that many of these companies to depend on.

ElasticSearch closed down the license and said "nope, no open source anymore because we have to make money". This was bad for the community, but not AWS fault

And if it wasn't AWS, it would've been Google. These sorts of open source development paid support contract based companies are having a hard time in general competing with the cloud.

I think it's fair for AWS to criticize Elastic for violating their ethos to make more money, but it's also pretty clear that the reason their OSS business model didn't work was managed cloud services like Aws.

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