Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS.
At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care.
Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist.
But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?
Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. Open source developers do not need to be able to put food on the table while being employed by Elasticsearch.
Frankly, yesterday's announcement made me seriously consider whether I wanted to apply for a job working at AWS, since I expect they have many positions where you're spending most of the time working on open source code like Elasticsearch.
The argument you're making is equivalent to the old argument against open-source software itself: if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer? Sure, it's great that some bored Finnish guy wrote an OS that's competitive with Solaris, but if he drives Sun out of business what's the guarantee anyone else will want to work on his OS? Don't we need proprietary software companies to ensure that quality software gets developed?
> if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer?
And that did happen, we don't have a single decent affordable personal computing ecosystem at this point. The only good personal computing ecosystem is with Apple, which makes its money by selling proprietary software mostly but is not affordable to ordinary joe.
What an ordinary person can buy, is an ad-riddled machine like a windows desktop or a chromebook, where although the software is not proprietary, they're basically selling you ads(directly or indirectly through your data).
To tie it back in, in fact open source software did rise up and proprietary software did go down, but we lost the pure software aspect that came with proprietary software. Basically, open source software is being used to sell you ads and if the ads based business goes down/stops so does open source ecosystem.
If you haven't realized, the biggest parts of the open source economy are propped by FAANG and Microsoft. If these big whales go away, open source's vibrancy will vanish in a poof.
In fact open source software creation is hugely concentrated to North America and by extension FAANG. So if FAANG were to stop sponsoring open source, we'll be back to proprietary software age soon. So, I'm not convinced of your argument that "open source" has won conclusively.
I think my argument is that open source has in fact won, it just hasn't brought the benefits some people expected it to bring. (And it's totally fine to say, "Having seen the results, I'm no longer a supporter of open source," if you want.) The open-source-is-viable argument was that people will find a business model other than selling the software itself, and the software industry won't collapse when proprietary software becomes unviable - and that's exactly what happened. It turned out the most profitable business model wasn't support contracts or custom development, it was largely software as a service and advertising. It also turned out that this business model was so profitable that there are tons of free-as-in-beer but non-open-source software products out there, including the vast majority of what Facebook, Google, etc. offer.
Yeah sure, if I'm a huge enterprise and I want to run something like elasticsearch in house, I have 2 choices:
1. Get elasticsearch delivered as an inscrutable binary blob
2. Get elasticsearch delivered as binary blob but with its source as well so that I can see what ES is doing underneath the hood.
In most cases of proprietary software, the big clients eventually in case #1, do end up getting the source of the proprietary software as well. Just that the source is for viewing only not for modification.
What ES did was better than that, they made source available to anyone (including the small fish). This doesn't weaken the need for ES to make money through selling their sofware, just that the purpose of releasing the source is more towards "viewing" it and less towards making modifications and reselling it.
Protecting Elastic Search the company and Elastic Search the open source project is not the same thing.
AWS is releasing their changes as open source software to the public and maintaining their release. As long as ES the project keeps getting released who cares if it's Amazon, Netflix, Google or whomever that pays for the work behind it?
At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care.
Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist.
But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?