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Comment by limagnolia | Hacker News Reader

Big tech didn't steal anything. Elastic used open source software as the foundation of their product (specifically, Apache Lucene), and released their product as open source. The license allowed Elastic to do so, and likewise, the license Elastic used allowed "big tech" to use Elastics product. If it wasn't for open source, Elastic wouldn't exist.

Then, Elastic whined about Amazon using Elastic under the open source license they used to build their product. They whined that Amazon wasn't contributing enough. So they switched the license to their product. So Amazon took over maintaining the open source software. Doing exactly what Elastic asked them to do.

Sorry, but everything about Elastic, and especially this most recent announcement of layoffs, scream "bad leadership".

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Don’t be a shill for big tech over elastic in this fight. AWS was using elastic’s trademark and aggressive advertising to push their managed elasticsearch. They left elastic with no economically logical choice. MongoDB and countless others also made similar choices.

AWS was super greedy and honestly I’m glad elastic even survived their aggressive tactics.

For the longest time, elastic didn't even have a cloud offering. And by the time they did it was far far too late.

In the early days AWS elastic offering was very weak. It had lots of foot guns and operational problems. We tried hard to use an more native elastic offering and would have preferred it, but it didn't exist.

The anti AWS rhetoric is exhausting.

The fact AWS crappy hosted ES gained any market share is more a testament to how bad ES sales practices were than anything else.

ES really missed the mark by not having a simple, self-serve sales model and instead going all in convoluted "contact a sales rep" enterprise model no one wanted to deal with.

ES Enterprise Sales for an on-prem license might have been the worst sales experience I ever was part of as a customer. We were already a very technically self-sufficient org just wanting to get under a support contract. They made it so impossible to give them money we simply gave up and went with the open source fork during all the Amazon kerfuffle.

Dozen of hours of useless phone calls, and just nonsensical numbers coming out weeks or months later. Only to go back to the well and try again with a new team of reps after the first team inevitably churned out before any real progress was made.

Yup. And I bet all that got reported internally within Elastic was how AWS was "undercutting them on deals".

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