4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1
It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.
This is not the argument at all. Software (open source or otherwise) is not created for free; devs gotta eat, pay rent, etc. The business model of Elastic and similar is to offer a SaaS. They feel that Amazon offering a SaaS is directly competing with their business model, and because half the world runs on AWS it's not too different from Windows shipping IE back in the day killing Netscape. Elastic feels Amazon is eating their pie.
Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.
Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation.
It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that.
But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time.
If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. It’s quite simple.
But it’s ridiculous, I think, to claim Amazon is doing anything wrong by abiding by the license.
Elastic shouldn’t feel that Amazon is eating their pie because they chose to put their pie out with a “free pie for everyone” under ASL. If they feel bad, that may be so, but their feelings aren’t as important as what their intellect should set up.
I'm not really interested in discussing the merits of the argument (or lack thereof); I've done this a dozen times over the last few years and I have no interest in repeating it.
I am just saying your post hugely misrepresented the argument.
That you think the argument is a load of bollocks changes nothing about that.
It’s unfortunate you don’t want to discuss the merits of my argument.
Not to give out advice, but if your aim isn’t to learn and debate and change minds and be changed, what’s your point? Do you just want to make noise or something?
I would like to properly characterize the argument to understand all sides. Because I want more great software to exist in the world. My belief is that the way to do this is to have people create and share, of their own free will. And I want to learn if there’s a better way.
Funny, you're doing exactly what you accused others of: defend Amazon with argument 1. Ah, argument 1 completely misses the point? Well, just defend Amazon with argument 2. Say no word about how you missed the point originally, because the only important thing is to defend Amazon.
This is kinda funny, because I am arguing both sides a bit here in my reply to different comments, mostly because I am not actually sure what my final belief on this topic is.
But maybe we shouldn’t fund open source development via companies whose entire revenue is selling support for that product? I feel like my favorite OSS projects are ones that are created and maintained by developers working for companies whose business model is based on something entirely separate from the OSS project, but who need the OSS project to support that business. They, and many other companies who have the same need, pay developers to work on the project so they can get what they need from it, but they keep it open source because it isn’t core to their business and being OSS makes it easier and cheaper to maintain.
In this way, there is no conflict of interest between the open source needs and the companies business model.
1) Amazon is powerful, thus bad
2) we’re discussing Amazon
3) find something potentially bad
4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1
It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.