
Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs - howard941
https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-leaders-accuse-amazon-of-playing-a-rigged-game-with-aws-67177bc748b7?gi=356d74c0b36e
======
013a
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.

[1]
[https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...](https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party/zstandard-1.3.7/zstd)

~~~
thatoneuser
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.

When will the corporate shilling on HN end?

~~~
ctvo
Your moral position is based on market capitalization?

The core piece of ElasticSearch's technology is Lucene, an open soure project.
Elastic the company uses this open source work to become a 5 billion dollar
company.

The core piece of AWS's ES service is ElasticSearch, an open source project.
Amazon the company uses this open source work to further enrich themselves.

Amazon is bad because they're a 1 trillion dollar company. Elastic is OK
because they're a 5 billion dollar company.

~~~
mgoetzke
I get where you are coming from, but Lucene is a building block, a library and
cannot be immediately used as a valuable service. ES can be used by quite high
level developers to implement scalable solutions.

Building blocks and libraries offering convenience are not as valuable on its
own than solutions that offer some quite immediate value at a reasonably high
level. Even if from an abstract view both still require developers as users
the applicability is quite different. Amazon cannot 'host' lucene as a service
per se.

Services vs Libraries

~~~
geezerjay
> I get where you are coming from, but Lucene is a building block, a library
> and cannot be immediately used as a valuable service. ES can be used by
> quite high level developers to implement scalable solutions.

Your argument makes no sense. Even if we accept the thesis that building block
components are up for grabs because they cannot be immediately used as
valuable services... Well, neither can services. You need to design a system
architecture, figure out how and if a component plays a role, pick a
component, config the component, setup a deployment ans scaling strategy,
config and integrate metrics and health checks, ingest data, monitor the
service, etc etc etc.

And if we actually want to make an objective comparison between libraries and
services... Well, in the end they are all components of a larger system.

So, obviously there is no objective distinction. There's only intellectual
property and companies being hypocrite wanting to have their cake and eating
it too. They can't get it both ways.

------
jimrhods23
"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.

This article has some good info on this fight:
[https://www.datanami.com/2019/03/12/search-war-unfolding-
for...](https://www.datanami.com/2019/03/12/search-war-unfolding-for-control-
of-elasticsearch/)

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.

~~~
yardie
> 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.

~~~
ralph84
I don't think anything you wrote refutes what you quoted. Certainly many
contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay
for software. And many if not most of the users of open source software have
been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to
read or modify the source code. There are a lot more people who run apt-get
install than open up pull requests. It's why Stack Overflow has more MAUs than
GitHub. Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source
is a more scalable way of doing it.

~~~
yardie
That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects
I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model.

> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by
> not wanting to pay for software.

That hasn't been the case for most projects I see. Most developers can afford
to pay for proprietary software. Yet they choose to work on opensource, why is
that? I can purchase 1 month of Adobe CC with less than 15 minutes of work.
Why spend years, months and days developing and debugging an open source image
editor?

> most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting
> to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source
> code.

Most users would pirate the cracked version of the proprietary software (i.e.
Photoshop, Windows) rather than use something like GiMP or Ubuntu. If money is
the motivation there is a lot less friction in sticking to cracked Windows
than opensource ArchLinux.

> Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a
> more scalable way of doing it.

Not sure what this means. Freeware can be put on an FTP server or repo and and
downloaded quickly. What is the scaling issue?

------
capkutay
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.

~~~
burtonator
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.

~~~
fossuser
I wish they offered that option.

I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set
retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.

~~~
askafriend
Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018.

So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.

~~~
Marsymars
"So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now."

I block ads on Facebook web and don't have any of their mobile apps installed,
so I can't imagine they're making more money from me than if I paid them to
not have any ads.

~~~
dspillett
They don't just make money from you by directly showing your ads, so don't
make zero $ if you as an individual manage to block all their ads.

They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing
them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and
correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to
that earning potential.

You might not be seeing the resulting adverts, but can you say that about
_all_ your direct contacts, and _all_ the people in groups you are linked to,
and _all_ the other people who interact with posts & events you comment on or
otherwise interact with, and _all_ the people that...?

You are still very much part of their income model by being part of the data
graph - you are not breaking the system remotely as much as you think by
arranging not to see adverts.

Letting people pay to not see ads would require both initial and on-going
development & testing effort so you have to include that in any cost/benefit
analysis of the situation too. And that design & development could be pretty
complex: by making a legitimate ad skipping option available they risk
creating a hacking opportunity that makes it easier for people to skip them
without paying. It might also send a bad signal to the advertisers: people
with more disposable income are more likely to pay to skip the adverts,
because the cost will feel less to them, and people with more disposable
income are usually those that the advertisers usually most want to reach.

~~~
Marsymars
I expect any model where fb allowed payment for an ad-free experience would
still involve them doing all that targeting for others with my data anyway.

That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because
there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.

~~~
dspillett
But where would be the benefit for them? How many people would pay to block
adverts but not tracking & data linking forensics when they can already do
that for free? Probably some would, but I suspect not enough to offset the
extra development & maintenance time and potential sense of bad faith from the
advertisers. Further more, as mentioned in my previous post, making an
official ad-free route is likely to make unofficial blocking easier.

Who the advertisers might want to reach _is_ relevant because FB can currently
promise to do whatever is practically possible to block ad blocking. This
doesn't amount to much (tricks like the extra divs littered through the word
"sponsored" and so forth, to obfuscate the advert related code & markup from
blocking scripts, for instance) but is better from the advertisers point of
view than them admitting it is going to happen and they've given up stopping
it. And again, the official ad blocking method is likely to make unofficial
blocking easier - they would have to defend that to their advertising
customers.

The other issue that could come up is effectively creating a two tier system,
with those that can afford to pay and those that can't. Equality and privacy
defenders might be all over that, and however right or wrong people think each
side would be there FB are not going to want that on top of all the public
scrutiny they are already getting.

------
hpcjoe
Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone.

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
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. :)

------
talkingtab
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.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
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

~~~
leggomylibro
Or like how people shouting their opinions on street corners is considered
"normal life in the big city", but then somebody comes up with a social
network that's orders of magnitude louder and people start freaking out.

------
lbacaj
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.

------
jeffnappi
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.

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
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.

~~~
edoo
That is what I thought too. If you have a hit product Amazon will roll their
own version and drink your milkshake.

~~~
erichocean
First, they'll demand you tell them where you're getting your (white-labeled)
product, as a condition of continuing to sell. That's the truly shady part.

~~~
myroon5
Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this before.

~~~
peteretep
Going to guess this is for compliance and tax reasons, and people are (rightly
or wrongly) saying Amazon then use that to poach suppliers

------
epa
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.

~~~
busterarm
To the benefit of our entire industry.

~~~
awakeasleep
The long term effects of this remain to be seen.

All our cloud providers are currently in growth mode.

What will happen when they're in 'mature industry with trapped customers
mode'?

We know how Oracle handles that situation.

~~~
busterarm
Cloud services adoption rate is 19% and AWS has been around since 2006. The
vast majority of companies in that 19% penetration are still in-transition.
OpenStack and container orchestration platforms are now a thing.

Not only do we have a long time to figure things out but it's never been
easier to be on prem if you need to be.

~~~
awakeasleep
Have you been a part of many successful cross-cloud migrations? Or migrations
from the cloud to on-prem?

~~~
busterarm
I'd have to say only partially to both questions. Cloud agnosticism is
important enough to us that we're able to deploy the most critical bits of our
infrastructure on prem, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OpenStack. We operate all
of the above but some resources have a bit of a lock-in problem for now. Total
yearly infrastructure costs in the 10s of millions, US.

If there's any takeaways that I have from this journey it's that Azure's
platform is simply not competitive and is likely to continue to not be.

------
Invictus0
> 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.

------
nartz
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.

~~~
kemitchell
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.

------
dcbadacd
Don't like people using your open-source and not contributing back? DON'T USE
A NON-COPYLEFT LICENSE.

------
clhodapp
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.

------
resters
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.

~~~
_msw_
Find Nest products here:
[https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011](https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011)

------
point78
Amazon is blueprint monopoly. Selling their own brand products in the platform
they control.

Remember MS and IE? Something needs to be done asap.

------
nateburke
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.

------
dgudkov
Elastic hoped to monetize someone else's work, but someone monetized their own
work. Ironic.

------
zygimantasdev
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

------
zby
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...](https://hackernoon.com/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-
efcdcfb00514) . 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.

------
Reedx
_> 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?

~~~
thinkingkong
Because then AWS would fork from a version of redis with a more permissive
license and only support a subset of functionality moving forward.

~~~
Reedx
They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive
vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.

~~~
ecnahc515
Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their
fork, than to pay royalties forever.

~~~
silentsea90
That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon
would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has
devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has
no importance?

------
adamnemecek
Amazon was neutral?

------
rdiddly
I notice nobody even questions the cloud-style architecture itself anymore,
even though that's what gives Amazon the data to decide which service to ape
next. Who owns your data?

------
jbigelow76
Regardless of where you come down on the argument, that's a hell of an
evocative graphic at the top of the article.

------
petra
Article is pay-walled. any tricks ?

~~~
howard941
Does this help? [https://outline.com/XNLYLg](https://outline.com/XNLYLg)

------
product50
Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the
service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that
reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong?

This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely
decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

~~~
zelon88
Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's
most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access
to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic
never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely
Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using
Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using
Elasticsearch in the long term. This kind of behavior reminds me of the
embrace-extend-extinguish days of MS.

This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being
considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about
being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

~~~
zknz
Elastic.co the n'th most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's
n'th most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project, Lucene, made it
easier to operate, and then sold access to it.

~~~
inapis
This is disingenuous. Yes elastic cloned an open source project and improved
it in some measure but also made the access free for a decent chunk of the
features. Most of what is under the paid license in the elastic stack has less
to do with lucene itself and more to do with quality of life improvements in
deployment, security, analysis etc. There are enough improvements over and
above the lucene project to make elastic worthwhile in itself.

OTOH, AWS pretty much xeroxed the elastic stack and added a paywall (at least
after a year). Compared to that you still get immense value out of the elastic
stack for free.

~~~
cthalupa
How has AWS added a paywall? They charged you for hosting ElasticSearch on
their infrastructure and their management, yet there was no difference in the
software.

When they decided to implement features that were only available in the
proprietary version of ElasticSearch, they open sourced it.

Charging for infrastructure and management of said infrastructure is not the
same as placing a paywall on software.

------
mfatica
Amazon was ever considered a neutral platform?

