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Comment by sparrc | Hacker News Reader

Because ultimately you are drawing a line between two for-profit corporations and asserting that one of them is exploitative and selfish (Amazon) and one of them is not (Elastic).

In my opinion, Elastic is being just as selfish and exploitative as Amazon is, which is just as much as any other private for-profit company is.

What I don't like is Elastic putting out PR and pretending as if they are some sort of divine for-profit corporation that doesn't do things out of their own self-interest, but is somehow only interested in open software.

In other words, Elastic is clearly not the same thing as the Apache Foundation, but they seem to want everyone to think that they are.

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> Because ultimately you are drawing a line between two for-profit corporations and asserting that one of them is exploitative and selfish (Amazon) and one of them is not (Elastic).

There is obviously a difference between a monopolistic corporations like Amazon that is actively crushing any competition with its control of the market and a bigger tech company like Elastic that is mostly driven by technological innovation (for now).

Does not mean that one is more morally evil than the other. In fact monopolistic corporations can offer their workers much better working conditions because of the extra profits they make from abusing their position. Well Amazon is not exactly known for that but in general they do. I guess Developer are treated pretty well at least.

So again, the point is not a moral failure but the economic position and the system that creates such a situation. While the creation of big monopolies is more or less inevitable it is still a good idea to be critical of the social and economic dangers.

I would say the difference between Amazon and Elastic is that Amazon has to compete in the marketplace and keep their customers happy to earn money. Elastic now has a business model where they simply own a rare thing and charge people to look at it.

You have two choices: Either a mostly-open, company-backed ElasticSearch, or a community-backed, completely open ElasticSearch with possibly an order of magnitude fewer development resources. Which do you choose?

False dichotomy.

No.

Yes. The Apache Software Foundation, relevantly, doesn't seem to be having any trouble whatsoever maintaining Lucene and Solr.

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