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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

If Amazon's OpenSearch plateaus, and everyone wants to host ElasticSearch, but on their existing AWS infra/sales business inertia, this issue will fundamentally reoccur. Nothing actually changed except Elastic thinks Amazon will commit to their own fork. If Amazon doesn't, we're back to square one: Amazon hosts open source ElasticSearch, Elastic changes their license, another fork.

"Amazon is fully invested in their fork." Amazon is a cutthroat business that will change strategy if their investment isn't paying off.

That this scenario isn't addressed at the very top of your "addressing the trolls" doesn't bode well at all.

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I felt like that was implied by the usage of AGPL: if Amazon wanted to start using this and apply patches on top of it, the AGPL would require that they share those patches with their customers, which would allow Elastic to integrate them into main again.

I don't think that's their intention. Elastic wouldn't be able to integrate Amazon's patches back into their codebase without losing the ability to change the license in the future. Even more, since it's AGPL, they'd have to get rid of their other licenses immediately.

> Elastic wouldn't be able to integrate Amazon's patches back into their codebase without losing the ability to change the license in the future.

(I anal, even if I were a lawyer, I am definitely not YOUR lawyer, yada yada)

If I were Elastic, I would require Amazon dot com or anyone else who wants to contribute code to Elastic to sign a CLA. Depending on how the CLA is structured, this could allow Elastic to continue multi licensing?

In this scenario, Amazon doesn't want to contribute to Elastic, Elastic wants Amazon's changes from Amazon's fork (Opensearch). So they can't demand Amazon sign a CLA, because they can't offer Amazon anything for it. Amazon is fine just ... not signing and continuing on their open fork.

Elastic have lost the Schelling monopoly on what constitutes the "mainline".

But Elastic can already take the changes from Amazons fork - opensearch is permissively licensed. What they might want is that Amazon stops maintaining its fork and contributes directly to elastics mainline. I believe that ship has sailed, and it's not coming back to pick up stragglers.

Is that important, though?

Isn't the whole point that amazon doesn't care about source availability or openness, so long as they can extract profit from people running it?

I love https://resend.com/ as an example of a website that does a GREAT job explaining what they do. Lots of companies tell you that integrating their product is quick, but with their website I can look at it for 30 seconds and understand what the next steps would be.

thanks for the kind words, we spent a ton of time on the website ;)

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