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Comment by pritambarhate | Hacker News Reader

I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK.

Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.

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According to LWN [0], Redis was already maintained by big corporations/cloud providers:

  Tencent - 24.8%
  Redis Labs - 19.5%
  Alibaba- 6.7%
  Huawei - 5.2%
  Amazon.com - 5.2%
  Bytedance - 2.0%
  NetEase - 1.3%

[0] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/

On the surface of it, it looks like literally no one wins. Redis Labs are going to lose a large amount of labour they've been getting for free. This seems like biting the hand that feeds it.

Users lose out on the fruits of that labour, harming bug fixes, feature development etc., as well as now having to consult with legal experts and the like to ensure there is no chance the fall afoul of the new license (you need to be really careful with the wording and the way it might be interpreted, not just how you interpret it or how Redis Lab's blog post suggests it is), and any time and hassles spent switching.

The people providing that labour now have the hassles and expense of forking, setting up governance, legal stuff etc, when they could have been just getting on with things.

They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly.

Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years.

You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen.

I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition.

As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it.

They do that because it's required of them out of sheer necessity, but it's the absolute bare minimum they can do because capitalism dictates it so

Just like you might imagine a leech could evolve some attribute to help defend its host against other predators.

I can't speak on the elastic vs open search topic though - does being part of the fiefdom of amazon work as a survival strategy?

But this just isnt true, and hasnt been true. There are bad companies out there: There are also good companies out there. This reductive "every company is capitalism and every capitalism is evil" mindset for sure feels good, but is wrong. And there's really no further argument beyond a simple denial until you decide to take cognizance of the ecosystem you're detracting.

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