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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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