Mongo and Elastic built all of their technology on top of open source tech. Elasticsearch is built on Lucene. Its written in Java, and I'd bet a penny that they're not paying Oracle for that. Let's just take a quick look at Mongo and Oh look at that they're using dozens of open source libraries, such as zstandard [1]
When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source addons to their "open source core". When its convenient for them, they'll point a finger at Amazon and say "look at how evil they are, they took all the hard work we put into this and want to sell it" (simultaneously, the hundreds of unpaid community contributors in the audience look perturbed, raise their hands to complain, and are immediately shushed, "just ignore them")
"Open Core" companies like Docker, Mongo, or Elastic want to have it both ways; they want the moral high-ground that comes with accepting free contributions from the community, alongside executive power when it comes to deciding what will and wont be open source and who can and cannot use it for what purposes. You shouldn't have it both ways. That doesn't mean you can't build a successful "open core" company (all three of these companies are successful), but lets drop the act of granting them moral superiority. The only reason they exist is because of the exact same licenses and policies which enabled Amazon to do this.
Yeah - damn these businesses for using open source rather than building common tools from scratch. Cleary they are just as bad as a company with about a trillion dollar market cap that deliberately cannibalizes fledgling companies once said companies have bled themselves dry exploring a new market.
This was a conscious decisions by the developers of these libraries, characterized by the cultural shift from GPLv1 to LGPL, explicitly to allow closed-source releases that build on open-source libraries.
"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free"
I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.
"It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive"
So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.
It sounds like Amazon wants to add new features to Elasticsearch, which just so happen to be proprietary features that requires a license from Elasticsearch.
This is always the risk when basing your entire business on an open source project. A much larger company with more resources could build the same features and release them under the same open source license, for free...which is what's going to happen here...and it's actually exactly the spirit of the open source community.
This is why I would never create a business based on open source software and attempt to have a dual licensing model. In the end, the only real way to make money is by having better support (because any big company can come along and eat your lunch)...which is much less scalable and requires many more employees.
> So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.
The logic behind complement commoditization [1] is to kill your fine-grained competition, when you can recoup the commoditization costs in the larger product. It is something every company above a certain size does. There is no fundamental problem with the practice.
The commoditization practice is problematic when your company is so large it distorts the market. Hence the antitrust perspective of the article.
From a monopoly prevention perspective, Amazon should not be allowed to commoditize complements.
> Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.
No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price.
You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify the product you sold them and that they own. If I wanted to strip out analytics services from a browser I can do that in Chromium and Webkit. I can't do that with Chrome or Edge.
Competitiveness isn't just about giving the customer something. Look at Microsoft in the 90s packaging their software. Users got more software but the anti competitive nature of Microsoft bundling was illegal.
Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO.
Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to
Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize.
Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.
What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.
It's really a tragedy of the commons.
Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money.
People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.
> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit.
That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise.
When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.
This may be taking it to an absurd exaggeration but the very cynical part of me thinks step 1 and 2 could well be phrased:
Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO.
Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project to get rich, only they also throw a bunch of expensive developer time at it to make it really shine.
Additionally, I think it's a bit rich when a company that is based 100% on another open source project under a permissive license (Apache Lucene here) cries that someone else uses a permissive license in the same way they do.
Exactly, every software solution creator has a choice: be like MongoDB - free, open source to gain traction and users, hoping to monetize this somehow or be like, say, Datomic - fully commercial, less popular, less users, but with viable business model from day 1.
Sometimes the "open" route works well for founders - see RedHat, but that's not easy. Prior to AWS there were also others who were trying to earn money on someone else free product. In the pre-cloud era those "unfair" competitors were easier to beat, AWS is indeed a game changer here.
You are right, but on the other hand, Amazon shouldn't be surprised when project maintainers then focus their efforts on the platforms (Azure in particular) that cut them in as partners on a shared success model.
I can see both sides of the argument here. On the one hand Amazon are just using open source literally as the license allows. But on the other hand it does feel a little underhanded that Amazon can incorporate these projects into their portfolio as their own and make large amounts of money from it while not giving anything back to the community.
Maybe there needs to be a new software license. One that allows for commercial use when the project is included as a module or infrastructure but excludes it from being billed separately. So you can use an open source component as a language library, shared object / DLL or even stand alone daemon / service installed as part of your web application (for example) but you cannot make that open source project a product in its own right. Obviously a lawyer would need to write the terms rather than an engineer like myself but I wonder if that kind of software license would offer a happy middle ground?
There's a busines model for high-fixed, zero-marginal cost economic public goods. It's taxes.
The alternatives have all been found wanting: "intellectual property" (copyright and patents), patronage, religious commissions, advertising.
Busking, performance, physical media sales, merch, loss-leaders, widget-frosting, service/support, and shingle-posting all bypass the HFZMC problem by monetising some alternative good, product, or service.
Several of those specifically tie network-effect, rent-generating monopolies with FCZMC goods. Taxes socialise this process.
What to tax is the next question. Adam Smith preferred wealth and land (means of production).
> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.
Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me.
He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to use the systems. I wanted dev environments to be free, and pay for support if you need it. Again, to increase usage.
You can see similar concepts in what companies decide has no value, by what they are willing to bundle for "free". Cell phone plans in the use are doing 2-for-1 deals of some sort. The carriers believe their services have value, and the phones are merely a means to deliver their value.
OTOH, the cell phone vendors believe their devices are the value, and try to give away software they think will make their devices look better.
Yeah, I know, you pay for it in the end. Costs are always borne by the customers.
Amazon is leveraging its market dominance in ways that are hard to view other than as anti-competitive. I do suspect that eventually, they will be held to task for that. But that they will likely keep operating in that manner for as long as possible.
Azure, with its shared success model, may actually manage to convince OSS projects to work more closely with them. It would not surprise me in the least to see licenses rewritten to be friendly to the shared success model, and hostile to the do whatever it is you want model.
If that Unix workstation vendor was Sun, at one point, everyone got a bundled K&R C compiler (possibly bundled for building custom kernels), and optionally paid extra for the ANSI C compiler, and then C++ compiler.
Which worked for a while. You either didn't need the extra tools (portable code was a subset of K&R anyway), or you had ample money to pay for extra tools. (Research&education appreciated that the majority of GNU and other open source software favored Sun's bundled compiler, over other workstation platforms. Though there was some brief upset when a competing workstation line would leapfrog performance briefly (e.g., HP 9000/7xx, IBM RS/6000). And the commercial workstation independent software vendors sold such high-ticket software (e.g., 5 figures per seat, plus support contracts and training), and were already dropping huge money on engineers and hardware, so paying for software tools was a relatively small additional expense. The ISV might also go pay others for seats of third-party tools for developers, like Saber-C, Purify, FrameMaker, Interleaf, and niche developer software like EDA or CASE.)
Meanwhile, GCC was starting to get as credible on some hosts/targets as the workstation vendor compilers (vendor C++ compilers sometimes had bugs). Before that finished playing out, I moved from workstations (I worked on almost all of them, plus the Cray S-MP) and sometimes Windows NT, to move fully to GNU/Linux on mostly PC hardware.
(Edit: I got access to these toys as a super-nerdy kid. I'm well aware that HR screeners shred the resume of anyone who was paying attention when the Web boom started. :)
Amazon is anti-competitive. Microsoft used the same pattern of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish- and MS was judged by a US court to have engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. Arguing that this is about "founders" or that "offering it to your customers for free" is okay just ignores the context of the situation. MS offered lots of things for free or at reduced prices because it could afford to. Amazon is exploiting the work of many people and using its dominance to interfere with healthy competition.
This is not to say that Elasticsearch is great or had the right response, but it is to say that the effects of Amazon will be and are harmful to the open source movement. I do not see easy answers to how fix this, but I think recognizing this as a threat is important.
Hmm. Kind of like explosive bombs are considered "normal weapons of war" but then somebody comes up with a nuclear bomb that's orders of magnitude more powerful and people start freaking out
To me Amazon feels far more predatory than the other tech giants. I read the arguments being made on HN about this all being fair game but it’s really not ok, none of it is.
1. Amazon takes from open source just as much if not more than any of the other tech giants, in fact the vast majority of managed services on AWS are open source projects with DevOps from amazon.. which by itself is fine but when you consider how much they give back? Fuck all. They haven’t contributed any major framework, system, project, or library that I use. I use things from Google every single day, from Kubernetes to Flutter, to Tensorflow the list goes on and on. I use things from Microsoft every single day in my development from Visual Studio Code, to .net core. I use things like react from Facebook every day. Maybe I’m living in a bubble but Man, this feels like theft these guys take everything to make Bezos richer and give us shit.
2. Although not directly related to Open Source, it reinforces the predatory tactics, Take a look at what they do to Brands on their market place. Any well selling product becomes an Amazon basics, generic, of which they make lots of money and shut you out using Sales data and other predatory practices.
3. You have a streaming service on AWS, an e-commerce shop, any other number of SaaS services? No problem as soon as it’s proven Amazon will launch its own product to compete with you. Everyone told Netflix it was a terrible idea to enrich Amazon but they did it anyway now they have original shows on Amazon video to contend with and I bet you they wish they didn’t.
The list just goes on and on and on. Not saying the other tech giants are angels but man these guys are egregious in the way they take. I don’t blame these companies for crying foul none of this behavior is Moral, it might be legal for now but even that time is coming.
Anyway I know I’m coming off as harsh and you don’t have to agree with me but this is just my two cents. I believe Amazon is the most predatory, largest, capitalist company in America today.
Personally I think Amazon is in the right here. Open source projects should not mix proprietary code into their code base period. Build a plugin architecture that supports any proprietary additions you wish to have, but mixing proprietary code with free/open source code should be widely opposed by the community.
And I'd echo the sentiment of others here - Elastic itself has benefited GREATLY by building their product on top of many other open source projects. Java, Lucene, Netty, etc.
So actually, they are talking about AWS. I clicked through expecting to read about FBA and the Amazon basics, but this is more technology/open source oriented.
When AWS launched, they cut the price of a typical VPN service by 80% or more. They were cutthroat from the start. Amazon did not price for the existing market, they priced for a theoretical market they knew could exist when prices were that low.
> On the campaign trail, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently called for the breakup of Amazon, declaring that “you can be an umpire, or you can own a team, but you can’t do both at the same time.” She was referring to Amazon’s role as both an e-commerce platform and a vendor — a scheme that lets the company observe market trends and undercut sellers with in-house products at opportune moments.
Why should Amazon not be allowed to sell its own products on its own site, but the grocery store is allowed to sell its own branded milk at its own stores, in competition with other milk sellers?
The fact that Amazon is rolling open source products into its own offerings isn't anti-competitive: it's a reflection of a key flaw in the open source philosophy. The moat of open source is that it is expensive to maintain and difficult to monetize, thereby disincentivizing unserious forks: but now that Amazon is monetizing it, it's a problem, because their resources are effectively unlimited and they are effectively monetizing it. The potential was always there for anyone to do this, but the difficulty of it meant that no one ever tried.
This issue here is with new "Open Source" software companies earning revenue through hosting as opposed to simply providing support / custom feature development / etc.
It creates a conflict of interest when others want to host it, since it takes their revenue away. However, in my opinion anyone should be able to compete on hosting/support.
This revenue goes back into funding development, but places restrictions on how the software can be used - making it "Open Sourced, Closed Service Based Hosting" or something like that. Inotherwords, we need a new name for this type of software.
My question is - if AWS simply made it easy to spin up an elastic search cluster, but didn't offer a specific API/Service - whats the difference here? Very little.
Providing support and custom development, such as integration, creates its own conflicts of interest. Support models create incentives to keep documentation sparse and the software esoteric. Integration models create incentives to keep integration difficult, and to withhold tooling for doing so efficiently.
It seems like the problem here is that these companies are voluntarily put out their code under terms that gives rise to use by competitors in a space they they want to be the sole vendors in. If they want people to be able to self-host these components for free but have no big competitors for managed services, they could easily set up the licensing terms to create that situation.
In the realm of physical products, it's already pretty annoying not being able to purchase Nest products on Amazon.
One of the main things Amazon has going for it is that one can usually expect to see the whole gamut of competitive products, read helpful reviews, etc.
But when products are missing from the results for competitive reasons, the trustworthiness of the platform goes out the window.
So this may be a short-term beneficial strategy for Amazon but will surely backfire in the future. I'll be reluctant to buy more stock until the impact of the strategy becomes more clear.
Forget about open source. AWS is eating the lunch of venture backed pure software (and hardware!) businesses everywhere. Go to re:Invent and look at what they release in terms of MVPs. Each product release that they present could be a huge headline for Sequoia, a16z, etc on TechCrunch 5 years ago. For example, in 2018 we had:
Ground Station
Robo Maker
DeepRacer
Bunch of storage features (many could be standalone startups)
Bunch of IoT stuff (same -- SiteWise, ThingsGraph, etc.)
Many launched with real customers, too.
It is NOT EASY to bring a software MVP to market and AWS does it massively, across many efforts, in parallel, EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
Being a developer right now and complaining about AWS cannibalizing open source is a lot like running a late 1400s monastery and complaining about how Gutenberg Bibles are displacing hand-written Bibles.
I always kept hearing that elastic search was a great product, helped to solve some difficult problems and was open source. However, when I wanted to use it I quickly found out that some important features are paid only. And the licenses cost a ton. It felt very disingenuous for it to be called open source when there are things I cannot use for personal or commercial use. Amazon enabled me to use this stack the way I wanted and now again I think elastic search is a great product. Reputation wise I think Amazon's move will only help them. Not sure business wise
This story is not about AWS contra Open Source - it is about cloud computing versus selling software licenses: https://hackernoon.com/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-efcdcfb... . I am waiting for AWS to publish their fork under an Open Source license (maybe even be more Open Source than Elastic), this would not change anything for them, and still kill Elastic.
> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money.
Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?
[+] [-] 013a|6 years ago|reply
When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source addons to their "open source core". When its convenient for them, they'll point a finger at Amazon and say "look at how evil they are, they took all the hard work we put into this and want to sell it" (simultaneously, the hundreds of unpaid community contributors in the audience look perturbed, raise their hands to complain, and are immediately shushed, "just ignore them")
"Open Core" companies like Docker, Mongo, or Elastic want to have it both ways; they want the moral high-ground that comes with accepting free contributions from the community, alongside executive power when it comes to deciding what will and wont be open source and who can and cannot use it for what purposes. You shouldn't have it both ways. That doesn't mean you can't build a successful "open core" company (all three of these companies are successful), but lets drop the act of granting them moral superiority. The only reason they exist is because of the exact same licenses and policies which enabled Amazon to do this.
[1] https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...
[+] [-] thatoneuser|6 years ago|reply
When will the corporate shilling on HN end?
[+] [-] sorryforthethro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimrhods23|6 years ago|reply
I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.
"It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive"
So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.
This article has some good info on this fight: https://www.datanami.com/2019/03/12/search-war-unfolding-for...
It sounds like Amazon wants to add new features to Elasticsearch, which just so happen to be proprietary features that requires a license from Elasticsearch.
This is always the risk when basing your entire business on an open source project. A much larger company with more resources could build the same features and release them under the same open source license, for free...which is what's going to happen here...and it's actually exactly the spirit of the open source community.
This is why I would never create a business based on open source software and attempt to have a dual licensing model. In the end, the only real way to make money is by having better support (because any big company can come along and eat your lunch)...which is much less scalable and requires many more employees.
[+] [-] sergiosgc|6 years ago|reply
The logic behind complement commoditization [1] is to kill your fine-grained competition, when you can recoup the commoditization costs in the larger product. It is something every company above a certain size does. There is no fundamental problem with the practice.
The commoditization practice is problematic when your company is so large it distorts the market. Hence the antitrust perspective of the article.
From a monopoly prevention perspective, Amazon should not be allowed to commoditize complements.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
[+] [-] yardie|6 years ago|reply
No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price.
You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify the product you sold them and that they own. If I wanted to strip out analytics services from a browser I can do that in Chromium and Webkit. I can't do that with Chrome or Edge.
[+] [-] thatoneuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capkutay|6 years ago|reply
Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to
Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize.
Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.
[+] [-] burtonator|6 years ago|reply
It's really a tragedy of the commons.
Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money.
People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.
[+] [-] kemitchell|6 years ago|reply
That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise.
When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.
[+] [-] eanzenberg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twirrim|6 years ago|reply
Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO.
Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project to get rich, only they also throw a bunch of expensive developer time at it to make it really shine.
[+] [-] sgift|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piokoch|6 years ago|reply
Sometimes the "open" route works well for founders - see RedHat, but that's not easy. Prior to AWS there were also others who were trying to earn money on someone else free product. In the pre-cloud era those "unfair" competitors were easier to beat, AWS is indeed a game changer here.
[+] [-] paedubucher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pushpop|6 years ago|reply
Maybe there needs to be a new software license. One that allows for commercial use when the project is included as a module or infrastructure but excludes it from being billed separately. So you can use an open source component as a language library, shared object / DLL or even stand alone daemon / service installed as part of your web application (for example) but you cannot make that open source project a product in its own right. Obviously a lawyer would need to write the terms rather than an engineer like myself but I wonder if that kind of software license would offer a happy middle ground?
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
The alternatives have all been found wanting: "intellectual property" (copyright and patents), patronage, religious commissions, advertising.
Busking, performance, physical media sales, merch, loss-leaders, widget-frosting, service/support, and shingle-posting all bypass the HFZMC problem by monetising some alternative good, product, or service.
Several of those specifically tie network-effect, rent-generating monopolies with FCZMC goods. Taxes socialise this process.
What to tax is the next question. Adam Smith preferred wealth and land (means of production).
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shard972|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vmchale|6 years ago|reply
You could GPL it...
[+] [-] hpcjoe|6 years ago|reply
Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me.
He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to use the systems. I wanted dev environments to be free, and pay for support if you need it. Again, to increase usage.
You can see similar concepts in what companies decide has no value, by what they are willing to bundle for "free". Cell phone plans in the use are doing 2-for-1 deals of some sort. The carriers believe their services have value, and the phones are merely a means to deliver their value.
OTOH, the cell phone vendors believe their devices are the value, and try to give away software they think will make their devices look better.
Yeah, I know, you pay for it in the end. Costs are always borne by the customers.
Amazon is leveraging its market dominance in ways that are hard to view other than as anti-competitive. I do suspect that eventually, they will be held to task for that. But that they will likely keep operating in that manner for as long as possible.
Azure, with its shared success model, may actually manage to convince OSS projects to work more closely with them. It would not surprise me in the least to see licenses rewritten to be friendly to the shared success model, and hostile to the do whatever it is you want model.
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
Which worked for a while. You either didn't need the extra tools (portable code was a subset of K&R anyway), or you had ample money to pay for extra tools. (Research&education appreciated that the majority of GNU and other open source software favored Sun's bundled compiler, over other workstation platforms. Though there was some brief upset when a competing workstation line would leapfrog performance briefly (e.g., HP 9000/7xx, IBM RS/6000). And the commercial workstation independent software vendors sold such high-ticket software (e.g., 5 figures per seat, plus support contracts and training), and were already dropping huge money on engineers and hardware, so paying for software tools was a relatively small additional expense. The ISV might also go pay others for seats of third-party tools for developers, like Saber-C, Purify, FrameMaker, Interleaf, and niche developer software like EDA or CASE.)
Meanwhile, GCC was starting to get as credible on some hosts/targets as the workstation vendor compilers (vendor C++ compilers sometimes had bugs). Before that finished playing out, I moved from workstations (I worked on almost all of them, plus the Cray S-MP) and sometimes Windows NT, to move fully to GNU/Linux on mostly PC hardware.
(Edit: I got access to these toys as a super-nerdy kid. I'm well aware that HR screeners shred the resume of anyone who was paying attention when the Web boom started. :)
[+] [-] donmcronald|6 years ago|reply
Oracle closing up “Open” Solaris was a real eye opener for me and I find the licensing / business politics of open source to be fairly interesting.
[+] [-] talkingtab|6 years ago|reply
This is not to say that Elasticsearch is great or had the right response, but it is to say that the effects of Amazon will be and are harmful to the open source movement. I do not see easy answers to how fix this, but I think recognizing this as a threat is important.
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbacaj|6 years ago|reply
1. Amazon takes from open source just as much if not more than any of the other tech giants, in fact the vast majority of managed services on AWS are open source projects with DevOps from amazon.. which by itself is fine but when you consider how much they give back? Fuck all. They haven’t contributed any major framework, system, project, or library that I use. I use things from Google every single day, from Kubernetes to Flutter, to Tensorflow the list goes on and on. I use things from Microsoft every single day in my development from Visual Studio Code, to .net core. I use things like react from Facebook every day. Maybe I’m living in a bubble but Man, this feels like theft these guys take everything to make Bezos richer and give us shit.
2. Although not directly related to Open Source, it reinforces the predatory tactics, Take a look at what they do to Brands on their market place. Any well selling product becomes an Amazon basics, generic, of which they make lots of money and shut you out using Sales data and other predatory practices.
3. You have a streaming service on AWS, an e-commerce shop, any other number of SaaS services? No problem as soon as it’s proven Amazon will launch its own product to compete with you. Everyone told Netflix it was a terrible idea to enrich Amazon but they did it anyway now they have original shows on Amazon video to contend with and I bet you they wish they didn’t.
The list just goes on and on and on. Not saying the other tech giants are angels but man these guys are egregious in the way they take. I don’t blame these companies for crying foul none of this behavior is Moral, it might be legal for now but even that time is coming.
Anyway I know I’m coming off as harsh and you don’t have to agree with me but this is just my two cents. I believe Amazon is the most predatory, largest, capitalist company in America today.
[+] [-] jeffnappi|6 years ago|reply
And I'd echo the sentiment of others here - Elastic itself has benefited GREATLY by building their product on top of many other open source projects. Java, Lucene, Netty, etc.
Here's a partial list of dependencies:
com.carrotsearch.randomizedtesting
com.fasterxml.jackson.core
com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat
com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs
com.fasterxml.jackson.module
com.github.spullara.mustache.java
commons-codec
commons-io
commons-lang
commons-logging
com.nimbusds
com.sun.jersey
com.sun.mail
io.dropwizard.metrics
io.netty
joda-time
junit
net.jcip
net.minidev
net.sf.supercsv
net.shibboleth.utilities
net.sourceforge.csvjdbc
org.antlr
org.apache.hadoop
org.apache.httpcomponents
org.apache.james
org.apache.logging.log4j
org.apache.lucene
org.apache.pdfbox
org.apache.poi
org.apache.santuario
org.apache.tika
org.bouncycastle
org.carrot2
org.cryptacular
org.hamcrest
org.jline
org.locationtech.jts
org.locationtech.spatial4j
org.openjdk.jmh
org.opensaml
org.ow2.asm
org.slf4j
org.yaml
ua.net.nlp
[+] [-] mooreds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edoo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smilekzs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Invictus0|6 years ago|reply
Why should Amazon not be allowed to sell its own products on its own site, but the grocery store is allowed to sell its own branded milk at its own stores, in competition with other milk sellers?
The fact that Amazon is rolling open source products into its own offerings isn't anti-competitive: it's a reflection of a key flaw in the open source philosophy. The moat of open source is that it is expensive to maintain and difficult to monetize, thereby disincentivizing unserious forks: but now that Amazon is monetizing it, it's a problem, because their resources are effectively unlimited and they are effectively monetizing it. The potential was always there for anyone to do this, but the difficulty of it meant that no one ever tried.
[+] [-] nartz|6 years ago|reply
It creates a conflict of interest when others want to host it, since it takes their revenue away. However, in my opinion anyone should be able to compete on hosting/support.
This revenue goes back into funding development, but places restrictions on how the software can be used - making it "Open Sourced, Closed Service Based Hosting" or something like that. Inotherwords, we need a new name for this type of software.
My question is - if AWS simply made it easy to spin up an elastic search cluster, but didn't offer a specific API/Service - whats the difference here? Very little.
[+] [-] kemitchell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcbadacd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clhodapp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resters|6 years ago|reply
One of the main things Amazon has going for it is that one can usually expect to see the whole gamut of competitive products, read helpful reviews, etc.
But when products are missing from the results for competitive reasons, the trustworthiness of the platform goes out the window.
So this may be a short-term beneficial strategy for Amazon but will surely backfire in the future. I'll be reluctant to buy more stock until the impact of the strategy becomes more clear.
[+] [-] _msw_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] point78|6 years ago|reply
Remember MS and IE? Something needs to be done asap.
[+] [-] nateburke|6 years ago|reply
Ground Station
Robo Maker
DeepRacer
Bunch of storage features (many could be standalone startups)
Bunch of IoT stuff (same -- SiteWise, ThingsGraph, etc.)
Many launched with real customers, too.
It is NOT EASY to bring a software MVP to market and AWS does it massively, across many efforts, in parallel, EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
Being a developer right now and complaining about AWS cannibalizing open source is a lot like running a late 1400s monastery and complaining about how Gutenberg Bibles are displacing hand-written Bibles.
[+] [-] dgudkov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zygimantasdev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?
[+] [-] thinkingkong|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yodon|6 years ago|reply