Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with the other comments here saying that this is not a gap in open-source licensing. If Elastic wanted to force Amazon to contribute modifications back, they could have switched to the AGPL to do that. But they didn't — because, as the AWS blog points out, AWS was already contributing their changes back.

The problem wasn't that the spirit of open-source was violated. The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service. So Elastic switched the license to the non-open-source SSPL, which makes offering a hosting service essentially impossible (to satisfy the terms, Amazon would need to open-source effectively all of AWS).

This license switch is more antithetical to the spirit of open source — that is, user freedom — than what AWS was doing, which was offering a hosted version of open-source software that competed with Elastic's hosting business.

Ultimately I think selling hosting of a single piece of open-source software as a funding model for developing a single piece of open-source software (e.g. Mongo, Elastic) has proven to not be a very sustainable funding model; at least, not if you're hoping for VC-backed company sized returns. And... I can see why that doesn't feel great. At one point, hosting was believed to be the silver bullet model as compared to consulting. But ultimately I think it's just not worked out: hosting as a model makes sense for proprietary software, but for OSS, either:

* You pay developers to build the software and also pay more developers to build the hosting stack — but then your competition only pays for the latter and can beat you on price, or

* You only pay to build the hosting stack, but then — what's the point? You haven't solved funding the software development.

>The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service.

I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying on AWS" they have to be able to translate that into profit. This seems like a lose-lose for Elastic as they have effectively ceded all that away to this fork. The use of SSPL also seems like nonsense here that won't result in them seeing a dime from Amazon.

Seems sad to be them but this has always been the case with open source. There has been countless successful businesses established that run with on source software (think Linux, glibc, etc) and almost none of them payed back open source developers or contributed anything.

To say that developers/authors of open-source believe that if their projects get picked up by some big company they would also be payed seems silly and childish. This has never been the case, why would they even believe that? It was rare when a company payed open source devs for their work (and it made the news, like when RedHat gifted Torvalds a lot of stock before going public and it's not like Torvalds was the only kernel dev at that time).

Maybe the main driver is that self-hosting of Elastic seems to be a very frustrating experience since it easily consumes a lot of memory and the default install seems quite insecure. Still AWS of course has automated all this. I guess completely free projects that are also controlled openly like Postgres don't have these problems and some of core developers seem to do lucrative consulting work. (So individuals are much better off I guess, and there is not the pressure to be like a Startup)

Maybe there is a middle ground for companies to use SSPL/BSL with a "profit sharing" clause or similar. It's still not "open source" in the traditional sense. But it could be a "win/win" scenario?

I think this is the key.

My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is:

1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES 2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES 3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software project will die. But like... isn't that the point of OSS? If a software project lives and dies with a single company, what exactly is the point of it being OSS?

I think a good example company to answer this question would be: What happened to RethinkDB? They shuttered. How has development changed for that project? Is it still alive and healthy?

That would be a single data point to start with, at least.

>AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.

With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.

That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.

> >AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

> AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.

> With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.

> That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.

There's a lot of businesses with a lot of budget who want to use ES and don't want to go near AWS. Let's not pretend there's not an enormous opportunity out there for a good hosted ES platform not on AWS.

I think the "war chest" argument here is that AWS can out compete any other hosting solution by "slowly burning" their way to the top. AWS is a conglomerate and can afford to lose money on a single service. Companies like ES cannot without going under. It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

It's really not a monopoly though? There are quite a few cloud providers.

AWS has lots of services. Customers like it when all of their cloud is managed under one roof (apparently).

AWS is definitely competing fairly, it's just... people like their offering better.

Plenty of businesses compete with AWS just fine. Looking at Elastic Co's financials, they also appear to be competing just fine.

If they tell you they're not, what they're actually saying is that they've chosen a poor business model.

In this case, it looks like they've got a perfectly reasonable business, but they're upset it's not even bigger, and therefore they'd like a monopoly over ES hosting.

> It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

The irony is strong here.

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