I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge.
It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose. This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it".
Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!" and now they are mad because... someone did X with their software?
If the Apache license allows morally unacceptable behavior... why did they choose that license?
Indeed. And it's not like an accident, I'd say it's totally part of the original intention of these open source licenses that anyone in the world has an equal right to profit off the software, nobody monopolizes that. That was part of the intent of open source licenses such as apache, consciously designed.
Fundamentally, these people do not believe in the core principles of capitalism, such as the notion that free trade makes both parties richer and that profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon. Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. They've also basically been brainwashed to think that the word "monopoly" means "any time a large company competes in the same market as a smaller one".
Which is ironic because, they also at the same time believe that Elastic is entitled to all the profits, and wax philosophical about "but how will any company be built around open source if we don't carry Elastic's water for them?"
> profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon
I'm actually going to disagree slightly here. Making profit is not necessarily healthy, generating value and capturing a fraction of that value as profit is though.
Our system is complex enough at this point where you definitely can and do have entities that are capturing more value than they are delivering, and that is immoral (imo). In that light, profit definitely can be evil.
However it is certainly not always evil, and I don't think AWS' actions qualify in this case. They are delivering value to their customers, and they are capturing a fraction thereof.
There's nothing unethical about "capturing more value than you deliver" (well, assuming I understand you right; I'm interpreting that to mean side A gets say +10EV and side B gets +100EV). In free trade, both sides benefit; that's why they freely chose to trade with each other. It is a myth that one side can unilaterally benefit at the expense of the other side. So if you actually meant "it's unethical if the consumer is coming out of the transaction worse than they came into it", that can't happen under a system of free enterprise. (To the extent that you think it's happening, you are making a value judgement that a certain side is irrational or stupid to perceive a trade to be valuable)
Now, there are absolutely cases where there is unethical profit, but (under my worldview, at least) those are all cases where the state gives a company a special advantage, or literally gives it money. So, the following is unethical:
- bailouts of corporations ("corporate welfare")
- government providing an exclusive monopoly to a given company
- government de-facto forcing someone to buy a product due to coercion
The following is not unethical:
- making a product, offering it freely for whatever price people are willing to pay
> It is a myth that one side can unilaterally benefit at the expense of the other side
While true in a simplistic sense, this is generally not true when you have a society / economy as complex as ours.
Partly this is due to perceived value vs "actual value", and to me a business is only moral (obviously businesses can't really be moral, so what I'm really saying is "the only businesses that should exist") if you actually believe that what you are delivering to the other party is more valuable than what you are costing them, so that it is actually a win-win. Generally this is hard to measure, but I can provide some examples of when this is pretty clearly not the case.
1. Get rich quick schemes. Things like online courses that tell you how to make boatloads of cash by doing X. Except they don't actually work, so the value to the purchaser is effectively $0, while what they paid for it is certainly not.
2. A larger scale example: the collapse of the housing market in 2008. This is a better example of effects from the complexity I mentioned earlier. A significant part of the crash can be attributed to CDOs/MBSes. Long story short, banks were doing some repackaging shenanigans to make something that was shit look less shit. Any honest accounting will realize that this provided zero real value. Yet the bank's were getting rich off it. That certainly sounds like capturing (>0) more value than you are delivering (0) to me.
They feel that Amazon's decision is unacceptable for whatever reasons, regardless that it is permitted by law.