013a 5 years ago

Mongo and Elastic built all of their technology on top of open source tech. Elasticsearch is built on Lucene. Its written in Java, and I'd bet a penny that they're not paying Oracle for that. Let's just take a quick look at Mongo and Oh look at that they're using dozens of open source libraries, such as zstandard [1]

When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source addons to their "open source core". When its convenient for them, they'll point a finger at Amazon and say "look at how evil they are, they took all the hard work we put into this and want to sell it" (simultaneously, the hundreds of unpaid community contributors in the audience look perturbed, raise their hands to complain, and are immediately shushed, "just ignore them")

"Open Core" companies like Docker, Mongo, or Elastic want to have it both ways; they want the moral high-ground that comes with accepting free contributions from the community, alongside executive power when it comes to deciding what will and wont be open source and who can and cannot use it for what purposes. You shouldn't have it both ways. That doesn't mean you can't build a successful "open core" company (all three of these companies are successful), but lets drop the act of granting them moral superiority. The only reason they exist is because of the exact same licenses and policies which enabled Amazon to do this.

[1] https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...

  • thatoneuser 5 years ago

    Yeah - damn these businesses for using open source rather than building common tools from scratch. Cleary they are just as bad as a company with about a trillion dollar market cap that deliberately cannibalizes fledgling companies once said companies have bled themselves dry exploring a new market.

    When will the corporate shilling on HN end?

    • ctvo 5 years ago

      Your moral position is based on market capitalization?

      The core piece of ElasticSearch's technology is Lucene, an open soure project. Elastic the company uses this open source work to become a 5 billion dollar company.

      The core piece of AWS's ES service is ElasticSearch, an open source project. Amazon the company uses this open source work to further enrich themselves.

      Amazon is bad because they're a 1 trillion dollar company. Elastic is OK because they're a 5 billion dollar company.

      • mgoetzke 5 years ago

        I get where you are coming from, but Lucene is a building block, a library and cannot be immediately used as a valuable service. ES can be used by quite high level developers to implement scalable solutions.

        Building blocks and libraries offering convenience are not as valuable on its own than solutions that offer some quite immediate value at a reasonably high level. Even if from an abstract view both still require developers as users the applicability is quite different. Amazon cannot 'host' lucene as a service per se.

        Services vs Libraries

        • geezerjay 5 years ago

          > I get where you are coming from, but Lucene is a building block, a library and cannot be immediately used as a valuable service. ES can be used by quite high level developers to implement scalable solutions.

          Your argument makes no sense. Even if we accept the thesis that building block components are up for grabs because they cannot be immediately used as valuable services... Well, neither can services. You need to design a system architecture, figure out how and if a component plays a role, pick a component, config the component, setup a deployment ans scaling strategy, config and integrate metrics and health checks, ingest data, monitor the service, etc etc etc.

          And if we actually want to make an objective comparison between libraries and services... Well, in the end they are all components of a larger system.

          So, obviously there is no objective distinction. There's only intellectual property and companies being hypocrite wanting to have their cake and eating it too. They can't get it both ways.

      • AsyncAwait 5 years ago

        The difference, I feel, is that Amazon's solutions are not even open-core. They're straight up closed-source, which I think is objectively worse.

        • 013a 5 years ago

          Their elasticsearch fork is literally called Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Its totally open, and all licensed as Apache 2.0.

          Their mongodb clone isn't. It'd be kind of cool if it was, but there's substantial evidence its based on the Aurora Storage engine. Through the docs and various talks at Re:Invent, its clear that the ASE is insanely coupled to AWS, with tight integration to S3 and deep availability-zone awareness. It would be useless beyond an academic exercise to someone who isn't on AWS. It would be cool to see it all open sourced, but not really valuable.

          AWS has a pretty strong history of open source in the cloud space, such that it feels strange to me that people still think they're an "enemy" or something. Not as strong as Google or Microsoft, but they're certainly not a New Oracle or anything. You should check out their Open Source Blog [1], and notice that new posts are made literally every two days.

          [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/

      • blazespin 5 years ago

        Yes, the whole argument is based on anti trust. Did you not read the article?

        • majewsky 5 years ago

          Please don't insinuate that someone has not read the submitted article. You could rephrase this, for example, like this:

          > Yes, the whole argument is based on anti trust, as the article explains.

    • meowface 5 years ago

      Mongo and Elastic would probably continue doing the same thing if they became Amazon's size. If something is unethical in the business world, it should be unethical regardless of your company's size. Although I don't personally find the integration of open source software into a commercial project to be unethical, if the license is adhered to.

      • blazespin 5 years ago

        This is not how anti trust works. The idea is that once you gain certain monopolistic powers you have to play by different rules.

        • tguedes 5 years ago

          How exactly is Amazon a monopoly though?

          • Jommi 5 years ago

            It's "monopolistic" not monopoly. There is a huge difference.

    • automated_toast 5 years ago

      Fledgling? Since when is a $5B company a 'fledgling'?

    • paulddraper 5 years ago

      Damn these businesses for trying to profit from others' open source, and then condemning the other businesses that do the same to them.

      The only difference -- as you pointed out -- is size.

      "Might makes right" is just as untrue as its opposite.

  • sorryforthethro 5 years ago

    This was a conscious decisions by the developers of these libraries, characterized by the cultural shift from GPLv1 to LGPL, explicitly to allow closed-source releases that build on open-source libraries.

jimrhods23 5 years ago

"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free"

I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.

"It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive"

So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.

This article has some good info on this fight: https://www.datanami.com/2019/03/12/search-war-unfolding-for...

It sounds like Amazon wants to add new features to Elasticsearch, which just so happen to be proprietary features that requires a license from Elasticsearch.

This is always the risk when basing your entire business on an open source project. A much larger company with more resources could build the same features and release them under the same open source license, for free...which is what's going to happen here...and it's actually exactly the spirit of the open source community.

This is why I would never create a business based on open source software and attempt to have a dual licensing model. In the end, the only real way to make money is by having better support (because any big company can come along and eat your lunch)...which is much less scalable and requires many more employees.

  • sergiosgc 5 years ago

    > So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.

    The logic behind complement commoditization [1] is to kill your fine-grained competition, when you can recoup the commoditization costs in the larger product. It is something every company above a certain size does. There is no fundamental problem with the practice.

    The commoditization practice is problematic when your company is so large it distorts the market. Hence the antitrust perspective of the article.

    From a monopoly prevention perspective, Amazon should not be allowed to commoditize complements.

    [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

  • yardie 5 years ago

    > Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart.

    No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price.

    You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify the product you sold them and that they own. If I wanted to strip out analytics services from a browser I can do that in Chromium and Webkit. I can't do that with Chrome or Edge.

    • ralph84 5 years ago

      I don't think anything you wrote refutes what you quoted. Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. There are a lot more people who run apt-get install than open up pull requests. It's why Stack Overflow has more MAUs than GitHub. Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it.

      • yardie 5 years ago

        That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model.

        > Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software.

        That hasn't been the case for most projects I see. Most developers can afford to pay for proprietary software. Yet they choose to work on opensource, why is that? I can purchase 1 month of Adobe CC with less than 15 minutes of work. Why spend years, months and days developing and debugging an open source image editor?

        > most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code.

        Most users would pirate the cracked version of the proprietary software (i.e. Photoshop, Windows) rather than use something like GiMP or Ubuntu. If money is the motivation there is a lot less friction in sticking to cracked Windows than opensource ArchLinux.

        > Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it.

        Not sure what this means. Freeware can be put on an FTP server or repo and and downloaded quickly. What is the scaling issue?

      • SXX 5 years ago

        > Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software.

        This is just not the case anymore. I know tons of people who choose to work on open source and I pretty sure none of them did it because of money.

        I guess it's might be like that 25-30+ years ago for the people who started GNU and Linux ecosystems when vendor lock-in was big deal and a lot of programming tools were proprietary and expensive include compilers.

        And 14 years back when I started to work in web development there was similar situation where a lot of tools and software is proprietary and expensive. Not anymore.

        > And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code.

        For initial adoption this is still true, but I believe many people who stick with open source products doing it for entirely different reasons. As others pointed out it's might be not the case in rich 1st world countries, but everywhere else people just go with illegal software instead of open source.

    • jimrhods23 5 years ago

      "No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price."

      Open office is a good example. Everybody I know uses it as a free alternative for Microsoft Office. How is this not competing on price?

      From a developer standpoint, it's great to be able to tinker, check for spyware, etc. But 99% of users will never actually care or look at the source and only even care about it because it's a free version of a proprietary counterpart.

      "You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day"

      You can. But you have no competitive advantage because you are required under the GNU to release your source to everyone (and any other company can sell it for X amount less).

      Companies need to either sell support or something else to stay relevant (redhat sells support, certifications, and books).

      This is one of the reasons SaaS have become so popular over the last couple of years. You don't need to release your source and could base your entire business on open source software without having to release anything back and lose your competitive advantage.

      • justinclift 5 years ago

        > How is this not competing on price?

        Perhaps some of us don't actually like Microsoft Office, and prefer things created for public benefit?

  • thatoneuser 5 years ago

    Competitiveness isn't just about giving the customer something. Look at Microsoft in the 90s packaging their software. Users got more software but the anti competitive nature of Microsoft bundling was illegal.

    • jyrkesh 5 years ago

      Yeah, I'd argue that's the problem: the law's definition of anti-competitive doesn't actually address whether or not consumers were harmed.

capkutay 5 years ago

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO.

Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to

Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize.

Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.

  • burtonator 5 years ago

    What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

    It's really a tragedy of the commons.

    Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money.

    People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.

    • webmobdev 5 years ago

      > What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

      It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them!

      The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company.

      The fact that a public for-profit corporate made a product open source doesn't mean that they have suddenly become altruistic - it just means that it made business sense for them to make it so.

      The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

      • tracer4201 5 years ago

        >It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them!

        I don't think that's what op wrote.

        It doesn't make sense that folks use open source code from these companies but then there's shock and outrage that these companies are also using open source code written by others.

        >because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product

        It's hard to take you seriously when you blanketly dismiss companies as being "evil" (whatever that means). By what metric are these companies "evil"? Wow.

        • webmobdev 5 years ago

          I addressed that:

          The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

          • oefrha 5 years ago

            What a gross mischaracterization of open source.

            > The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ...

            Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime.

            > The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you.

            No, releasing open source code doesn't imply signing away copyright or ownership. For instance, Mozilla owns Firefox (not only in the trademark sense); you can build another browser with their code, but you need to call it Iceweasel or something else.

            > And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

            Open source doesn't mean that at all. Good old immutable tarball dump can be every bit as open source as accepting contributions from everyone on the planet. In fact, check out esr's The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

            "Open source" is already intentionally or unintentionally skewed to represent many things it isn't, please don't add more arbitrary attributes to it.

            • TelmoMenezes 5 years ago

              > Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime.

              Companies are not people. It is nonsensical to say that someone is being grateful or ungrateful to some abstract legal construct.

              If the executives of some company decide to let their employees work on open source projects, it's because they think this will improve profitability in some way: advertisement, attracting talent, benefiting from free work, facilitating adoption, etc.

              Most of these companies benefit from open source way more than they contribute. Which is fine, but let's not assign human emotions to things that are not human. Being grateful to a corporation is the same as being grateful to your coffee machine for making coffee when you press the button.

              I am very grateful to people who contribute to open source on their free time.

              • oefrha 5 years ago

                Ever heard of win win relationship? You can benefit from a company open sourcing a project and the company could benefit a lot more from it at the same time. It’s nonsensical to forbid other people from feeling grateful when they benefit from someone else’s (or should I say some company else’s) non-altruistic actions, even if you don’t.

                • TelmoMenezes 5 years ago

                  > Ever heard of win win relationship?

                  How could I not? It's one of the most repeated clichés in the history of clichés.

                  In any case, I am not denying mutual benefit or trying to forbid anyone from anything. I am just saying that if you are shouting "you ungrateful bastard" and the target of gratitude is a legal entity, you are just being silly.

        • chc 5 years ago

          The "evil" characterization is from the comment you're defending. The comment you're replying to just appears to be using the same terminology to discuss the same concept.

      • BigFish12 5 years ago

        >just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them!

        It's the other way around, if you hate them and criticize them so much, you need to stop using their products.

    • throwaway66666 5 years ago

      > What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

      "We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country. And I 'd happily drive on those roads to tell them they are dead wrong.

      • vood 5 years ago

        Can you elaborate? I'm being from a socialist country would love to deliver the same message to my parents

        • CloudNetworking 5 years ago

          If you can't identify bad things your "socialist" regime has done / is doing then I would start by trying to list those.

    • sbov 5 years ago

      Google also contributes to Linux. Am I allowed to criticize Google if I use Linux? At what point am I not allowed to criticize a company based upon their contributions to open source projects I make use of?

    • webmobdev 5 years ago

      > Users on average refuse to pay for software / web apps

      Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.

      • umvi 5 years ago

        > And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model.

        You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?

        • 4ntonius8lock 5 years ago

          You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry.

          Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible.

          Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big financial players and against the small.

          Personally I believe if setting up the competetion to MasterCard/Visa weren't made virtually impossible via legislation, we'd see many card with transactions fees of $0.000X instead of $0.xx/transaction + Y%/transaction + minimums.

          I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.

          I also think that the way money is created an placed into the system could be done in a way that created more smaller competitors instead of such large pools of capital, which can more easily try and engage in anti competitive behavior.

          • kristianc 5 years ago

            > I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.

            I think you'll find that very few people are willing to engage in any degree of per article mental gymnastics to read a news article, and will instead be very very selective about what they read, with ruinous effects for local news.

            If Spotify was not $9.99 flat fee you would likely not happily leave it on all night or use it as background music for fear of what it was costing. The difference between the way people used metered and unmetered internet was huge. Charging any kind of fee on a per article basis would have profound impacts on the way people consume media.

            • abecedarius 5 years ago

              This is said a lot, very confidently, yet I wonder. Water, gas, and power are basically microtransactions on this model, for many people. Most people don't worry about mental accounting when they turn the tap. How sure are we really that this isn't just something that hasn't worked on a large scale for information yet?

              • 4ntonius8lock 5 years ago

                Such a model could even have a cap: It's $0.001/article up to $20/month. Like... cell phone data use? But without having to sign contracts or pre-payment.

                If only a few of the paywall newspapers would implement a direct per article fee, even at $0.10-0.50 I would pay for many articles because I'm too lazy and don't want to pull up a javascript disabled google cache version of the page or fire up a VM... or any of the other techniques SWIM would use to get around paywalls.

          • ibeckermayer 5 years ago

            Great point re: the oftentimes unseen injustice of financial tyranny. Have you heard of Stellar (https://www.stellar.org)? I don't have any experience actually using them and not sure if the blockchain is the correct way to go, but in principle their idea of a federated network for exchanging any unit the parties agree upon is a good one.

          • GoblinSlayer 5 years ago

            Stellar charges 0.00001 lumens per transaction, but it has no network effect and low usage.

        • mgoetzke 5 years ago

          capitalism, by its nature, will optimize all products to the level of 'just bearable'. Look at airplane seating.

    • pathseeker 5 years ago

      > What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

      Pablo Escobar donated tons of money to the Medellín community. Doesn't make any criticisms against him hold less water.

    • ravenstine 5 years ago

      > people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

      I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?

      • james-anthony 5 years ago

        You shouldn't, because there is nothing wrong with React, or the premise behind the team doing it.

        People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything.

        Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associated with taking a hard-line on a company's ethics is no longer worth the inconvenience.

        • ravenstine 5 years ago

          You might be right about that if Facebook wasn't an exceptionally terrible company with rotten leaders.

          I don't think there's anything wrong with the team behind it. The reason I might choose not to use a technology owned by Facebook is that my use would be promoting it; the more popular React becomes, the more encouraged people are to contribute code to it, which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Nonetheless, the popularity of React does contribute to Facebook's success in some way.

          Comcast is a different story, as I'm not aware of people helping them for free by using and developing their own tools. I get what you are saying by generally objecting to Comcast and facing the dilemma of paying them when you have no other options. I guess it depends on how much you dislike Comcast and if you are willing to replace them with free public WiFi and Netflix. At least with Facebook, there are plenty of alternatives(as well as ripoffs of React).

          • scrollaway 5 years ago

            > which helps Facebook in a minuscule way.

            Contributing to firefox, openssh, wikipedia and the linux kernel also helps Facebook in various ways. Should we stop doing that?

            React is an open source project. Facebook did right by it (unlike other open source projects coming out of FB such as Flow). I find this hardline stance kinda ridiculous when it's one of the rare good things to come out of Facebook. It should be encouraged if anything. But even if not, it is a standalone project and a very good model example of how companies should release stuff as open source, so not contributing to it "because it helps Facebook" is completely missing the point of what open source is.

    • fossuser 5 years ago

      I wish they offered that option.

      I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.

      • askafriend 5 years ago

        Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018.

        So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.

        • Marsymars 5 years ago

          "So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now."

          I block ads on Facebook web and don't have any of their mobile apps installed, so I can't imagine they're making more money from me than if I paid them to not have any ads.

          • dspillett 5 years ago

            They don't just make money from you by directly showing your ads, so don't make zero $ if you as an individual manage to block all their ads.

            They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to that earning potential.

            You might not be seeing the resulting adverts, but can you say that about all your direct contacts, and all the people in groups you are linked to, and all the other people who interact with posts & events you comment on or otherwise interact with, and all the people that...?

            You are still very much part of their income model by being part of the data graph - you are not breaking the system remotely as much as you think by arranging not to see adverts.

            Letting people pay to not see ads would require both initial and on-going development & testing effort so you have to include that in any cost/benefit analysis of the situation too. And that design & development could be pretty complex: by making a legitimate ad skipping option available they risk creating a hacking opportunity that makes it easier for people to skip them without paying. It might also send a bad signal to the advertisers: people with more disposable income are more likely to pay to skip the adverts, because the cost will feel less to them, and people with more disposable income are usually those that the advertisers usually most want to reach.

            • Marsymars 5 years ago

              I expect any model where fb allowed payment for an ad-free experience would still involve them doing all that targeting for others with my data anyway.

              That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.

              • dspillett 5 years ago

                But where would be the benefit for them? How many people would pay to block adverts but not tracking & data linking forensics when they can already do that for free? Probably some would, but I suspect not enough to offset the extra development & maintenance time and potential sense of bad faith from the advertisers. Further more, as mentioned in my previous post, making an official ad-free route is likely to make unofficial blocking easier.

                Who the advertisers might want to reach is relevant because FB can currently promise to do whatever is practically possible to block ad blocking. This doesn't amount to much (tricks like the extra divs littered through the word "sponsored" and so forth, to obfuscate the advert related code & markup from blocking scripts, for instance) but is better from the advertisers point of view than them admitting it is going to happen and they've given up stopping it. And again, the official ad blocking method is likely to make unofficial blocking easier - they would have to defend that to their advertising customers.

                The other issue that could come up is effectively creating a two tier system, with those that can afford to pay and those that can't. Equality and privacy defenders might be all over that, and however right or wrong people think each side would be there FB are not going to want that on top of all the public scrutiny they are already getting.

          • snovv_crash 5 years ago

            Just because you don't view the ads doesn't mean they don't charge people for them.

            • Marsymars 5 years ago

              Sure, but that would be fraudulent, and generates no economic value, so I've got no sympathy for that.

        • mjevans 5 years ago

          Also, the users that COULD pay (any price) are likely the PRECISE ones that are most lucrative to target.

        • munk-a 5 years ago

          That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica.

          Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data?

          [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

          • askafriend 5 years ago

            The number you're referencing is for 1 quarter and is looking at a blended global average which is brought down by extremely long term investments in places like Africa.

            I cited a number that is annual and is looking at North American revenue which is an indicator of mature market potential.

          • jay_kyburz 5 years ago

            That is for a quarter, so $2 a month or $24 on the annual plan.

            One day I'm going to build this premium Facebook clone that respects user privacy!

            Come on Hacker News, make it so I don't have to!

        • matthewmacleod 5 years ago

          So I assume that's across all properties. Would I pay $10/month for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram? Probably.

        • GoblinSlayer 5 years ago

          They will still monetize network effect and monopoly status, which paying users will still contribute to.

      • musicale 5 years ago

        It's amazing that it has come to this, but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. Even if it just applied to the worst offenders (Facebook, Google, Amazon...) it might be worth it.

        Such a system could be easily abused, however, without some kind of bulletproof third-party auditing in place.

        If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services (maps, gmail, search, docs, youtube, etc.) I might even consider using it.

        • rchaud 5 years ago

          > but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking.

          It's too late for that, I'm afraid. Google and the others have invested billions in their ad products and made back many more billions. It wouldn't make any sense for them to offer any kind of paid opt-out.

          And even if you didn't use any Google services, they already have reams of data on you based on your correspondence with anyone with a Gmail account, plus whatever data they can buy off your carrier network and your credit card provider.

          • JoeAltmaier 5 years ago

            Why not? Their per-human revenue is in the single-digit dollars. If I pay $10, they're ahead of the game.

            Netflix etc do it with premium services etc

        • fooker 5 years ago

          >If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services

          Gsuite?

        • dontblink 5 years ago

          Spoiler alert: they do for many of their services. GSuite, YouTube premium, etc

      • return1 5 years ago

        would most of your family & friends also do that? Because it doesnt matter if you opt out from targeting , if they can infer everything about you from your friends.

    • musicale 5 years ago

      > People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.

      Facebook tracks you regardless of whether you have a Facebook account.

    • door5 5 years ago

      > What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

      Developers made these products. I'm sure they would be just as happy getting paid the same wage and making awesome products without working for a morally bankrupt company, but those opportunities don't exist. FAANG are the only institutions on the planet that have the resources to fund large-scale open source projects.

    • bartimus 5 years ago

      > yet happily use their Open Source code

      It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on.

      The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.

      • tracer4201 5 years ago

        Many of the folks who wrote the systems or languages you use every day work at these big companies. Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point?

        >Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.

        Who are the parasites?

        These bad-faith posts that are really just unconstructive rants are turning this site into Reddit.

        • bartimus 5 years ago

          > Who are the parasites?

          There can exist a mutual beneficial symbiosis between companies and the open source community. But at some point the symbiotic behavior can become parasitic, causing harm. I think it's super important when such behaviors get pointed out (here at HN).

        • _msw_ 5 years ago

          > Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point?

          He currently does.

      • hnmullany 5 years ago

        If memory serves, IBM had a lot of good engineers on Linux back in the day & I think they were responsible for doing a lot of the hard perf. work on multi-CPU scheduling.

        • fooker 5 years ago

          Also Oracle, iirc Linux was a toy os before IBM and Oracle funded posix compatibility.

    • potta_coffee 5 years ago

      I wouldn't pay for Facebook and I don't use their free product either. I've used the React library so I suppose I'm benefiting from Facebook. If React weren't available, I'd use Vue.

    • mlindner 5 years ago

      > What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

      There's no logical contradiction in attacking a company for doing bad things with the open source software they wrote and instead praise company who use that software for good. Software is not good or evil, it's how the company/people that use it that determines good vs evil.

    • mammalutte 5 years ago

      If users aren't willing to pay $2-3 per month it simply means that they don't value it that much. They can sell ad space, that's fine, but this does not justify all the data abuse simply because they need to turn a profit. Facebook can close doors right now for what I care; other services such as search engines I would pay a monthly fee if I were sure they didn't try to track me to death.

      • z3t4 5 years ago

        The market decide the prices. The value of something has very little to do with the price. You can not charge for something if a free alternative exist. The crux is that Google and Facebook are still profitable, even if it's free, so if they used their huge market share in an attempt to increase the price, competitors would pop up and bring the price down. Something being free also lowers the friction to use. A paywall is a barrier to entry.

    • balls187 5 years ago

      I think you're conflating two different things.

      The people at Google who contribute too, and champion open source are probably not the ones who are making the decisions that we see as "evil."

      Google is competing for top talent engineering, and Googles commitment to open source boils down to a company perk meant to attract and retain top engineers.

      Google is a advertising company. Everything else they do is in service of that.

      • eitally 5 years ago

        your first two sentences are spot-on. The third was really iffy (and not true). The last line is completely false.

        • balls187 5 years ago

          I upvoted you, and yes my statements were gross oversimplifications and reductive, but as a consumer, one has to have a very skeptical view when entering a relationship with Google because their core business is Advertising.

          Regardless of my diatribe, the business decisions are what the HN community rails against, and those are typically not the decision made by the rank-and-file (who are likely contribute the most to open source).

        • disgruntledphd2 5 years ago

          From a business-model perspective, Google are definitely an advertising company, and so are Facebook.

          From a consumer perspective, this is not particularly true, but it's definitely a factor in their behaviour. For instance, if Google made all its money by indexing data for big companies and selling the index, do you think they would own YouTube or have created Gmail?

          • eitally 5 years ago

            Google is a large and complex company with many competing interests internally. Yes, I absolutely believe they would have created Gmail absent any advertising incentive. You have to remember how many seemingly random consumer services were created during the first decade of Google (say, 2000-2010), most of which were engineering experiments and had nothing to do with advertising.

            The Ads org within Google is large but fairly compartmentalized and runs like an absolute machine -- there is no questioning that.

            What most outsiders don't see, though, is how much independence all the other orgs have. For example, the fastest growing collection of stuff are the Hardware & Cloud areas, which account for probably 35000-40000 employees and are almost completely autonomous. If Ads show up on Google hardware products (let's use Google Home as an example), that's because the Home team exposed a service that allowed the Ads team to do it, not because the Home team was necessarily thinking about display/search ads during product design. In fact, there are many services Google provides where it's well understood that users will not tolerate ads at all (like Google Assistant surfaces).

            The reason I responded to the parent was because they made a blanket statement, which, while true if you only look at the fiscal reports, is untrue in practice. One could certainly argue strongly that Google's inability to strike it rich with anything besides Ads is 1) the reason the stock has been in the [relative] doldrums for the past year+, and 2) why Google continues to invest in all sorts of things (like Wing, or Chronicle, or Stadia, or ...) that are pretty far afield, not to mention the pure & applied research happening inside the RMI/Brain org that's often much more academic than practical.

            Besides search & mobile (admob) advertising, the only two major product areas inside Google that take a strong stance supporting the advertising mission are Youtube & Maps, but even then Maps tries to ensure it's surfacing useful, actionable, timely, and local information, which generally place it in a different category. Maps also have strong potential via partnerships for things like ride services, appointment bookings, travel, food delivery, and the like... some of which might technically be considered advertising but which manifests more like functional partnerships.

            • balls187 5 years ago

              Can you definitively say that data collected from all the other Google BU's are siloed from Google's Ad BU?

    • scarejunba 5 years ago

      It's a view of the world that's different from yours. Loads of people would and do use Topographische Anatomie des Menschen (Pernkopf's Anatomy) despite it being drawn and edited by actual true believer Nazis who used concentration camp inmates as the input.

    • return1 5 years ago

      that is not a tragedy of the commons

    • GoblinSlayer 5 years ago

      >you must shut up because it's a monopoly

      okay.jpg

    • TheTruth1234 5 years ago

      Keep kissing corporate @rse.

      Some people don't use FB.

      Some people would say FU to the thought of paying $2-3 to FB for anything.

  • kemitchell 5 years ago

    > It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit.

    That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise.

    When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.

    • pieterh_estc 5 years ago

      OSI is asleep at the wheel on this one IMHO https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensin...

      I wonder why aren't they standardizing an open source license that prevents hyperscale cloud monetization by someone other than the originators? Don't OSS communities hold the cards here? it's just a change to license.txt, broad OSS adoption and it's a very different type of cloud (picture nuclear mushroom cloud)

      • kemitchell 5 years ago

        I no longer participate in the OSI process, largely for reasons laid out here: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html

        I've read quite a bit from OSI stalwarts about why they take the positions they do, but I still don't understand them, and therefore shouldn't try to relate them.

        If I had to make one criticism of the OSI mailing list reaction to both my License Zero Reciprocal License, which later became Parity, and also MongoDB's Server Side Public License, it's that takes almost invariably focused on who was proposing the license, and the business model they seemed to have in mind, and ignored the extent to which older licenses had provided substantially the same functionality, as the basis of similar business models, before the software-as-a-service shift. It wasn't clear whether that was relevant criticism or not, since the process wasn't clear to begin with, and notional clarifications from OSI staff and eventually the board only muddied the waters.

        When literally anyone can object to a license, or block the approval process, for almost any reason, so long as they can phrase it in vague philosophical terms, then no new ideas in copyleft will ever get through. Even if those new ideas boil down to maintenance work on existing licenses now showing their age.

        • _msw_ 5 years ago

          Disclosure: I work for Amazon, but this is my personal opinion. I am also an individual member of the OSI, though I am not currently active in that community.

          I missed that you posted this, Kyle. I think that OSI is worse without your participation, and your criticisms hold a lot of weight for me. I hope that the new board, and all OSI members, will take what you wrote to heart, because stewardship does require caretaking, cultivation, and maintenance.

          I would love to see more productive discussions than the "how many angels fit on the head of a pin" that we so often see on mailing lists, and I think you're right that the Open Source Definition may not capture what is needed to help those discussions be more productive.

    • GoblinSlayer 5 years ago

      Elastic doesn't care about freedom, they complained that they lost an opportunity to monetize it, copyleft will be equally destructive for them. Also Amazon released the sources, no?

  • eanzenberg 5 years ago

    Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

    • staticassertion 5 years ago

      So how do you bootstrap your company?

      You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it.

      You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you.

      You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no one will ever use your software.

      How do you see this working?

      • moreira 5 years ago

        You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK.

        Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder.

        If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

        • capkutay 5 years ago

          There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself.

          What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.

      • busterarm 5 years ago

        Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering.

        It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform.

        The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host.

        If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.

        • coredog64 5 years ago

          At my previous employer we used the AWS managed ES product for an ELK stack that was ingesting terabytes per day. It was painful, and we eventually moved off it, but it was still valuable for the training wheels it provided. If the developers had been better at logging it’s possible we would have been happy to continue on the managed product.

        • jackbravo 5 years ago

          Like algolia

          • busterarm 5 years ago

            From where I sit, Algolia solves a very small subset of problems that Lucene-based search engines do. Often problems people don't actually have.

        • ousta 5 years ago

          people that manage elastisearch configurations are not the same people managing hardware, purchasing, hardware admins. obviously you can save some $ reducing your people while moving to the cloud. I agree that for any complex application (and elastic is one when volume is there) there are still pros of the cloud you cant leverage i.e for search on demand infra is pretty much useless if you cant make it happens in microseconds.

      • WalterSear 5 years ago

        You choose closed source, recognize that people who won't pay weren't your target market anyway, and accrete the reputation for your product that wins people on the fence over to your paid product/service.

      • chongli 5 years ago

        Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.

        • crdoconnor 5 years ago

          The companies ive seen try this receive an ungodly number of complaints about how theyre ruining open source.

          • toyg 5 years ago

            Business and the internet both require pretty thick skins in isolation; combined, they require a turtleshell-like thickness. At some point one has to learn to suck it up.

        • sovande 5 years ago

          MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?

          • jackbravo 5 years ago

            From https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side...

            > AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB

            With the new license:

            > The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service

            Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license:

            > “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

      • Tsubasachan 5 years ago

        Make stuff people want to pay for? If they don't want to pay for it its shit and you move on.

      • IshKebab 5 years ago

        Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal.

        Gitlab is a good example.

        • brunoqc 5 years ago

          I'm not sure about open core. Why should we contribute to an open core project? What if I want to add a feature that is locked away in the enterprise version? I can't fork for one feature and they won't add it to the main product.

        • tracker1 5 years ago

          I'm a fan of Open core... the issues come down to a lot of the time, projects will reject contributions, and have pulled features that allow competition with their non-core features.

          On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option.

          I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven.

          There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.

        • ausjke 5 years ago

          freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model.

          more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support.

          a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days.

          in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise.

          how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.

          • IshKebab 5 years ago

            I think people overestimate the number of customers that need "support". Especially given that the users of projects like these are technically extremely skilled.

      • kristianc 5 years ago

        > So how do you bootstrap your company?

        Services

  • Twirrim 5 years ago

    This may be taking it to an absurd exaggeration but the very cynical part of me thinks step 1 and 2 could well be phrased:

    Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO.

    Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project to get rich, only they also throw a bunch of expensive developer time at it to make it really shine.

    • dman 5 years ago

      You will be surprised how little user contributions most open source projects receive. I have a few friends who are maintainers of key projects in the Python OSS ecosystem, most of them are struggling with burnout.

      • Twirrim 5 years ago

        The kinds of projects that spawn full companies or have that on their future path tend to be ones with a more active community contributing to the project.

        • dman 5 years ago

          I highly encourage you to setup some time to talk to maintainers of open source projects that you think are doing well. Ask them how they are doing and how much help they receive.

  • sgift 5 years ago

    Additionally, I think it's a bit rich when a company that is based 100% on another open source project under a permissive license (Apache Lucene here) cries that someone else uses a permissive license in the same way they do.

  • piokoch 5 years ago

    Exactly, every software solution creator has a choice: be like MongoDB - free, open source to gain traction and users, hoping to monetize this somehow or be like, say, Datomic - fully commercial, less popular, less users, but with viable business model from day 1.

    Sometimes the "open" route works well for founders - see RedHat, but that's not easy. Prior to AWS there were also others who were trying to earn money on someone else free product. In the pre-cloud era those "unfair" competitors were easier to beat, AWS is indeed a game changer here.

  • paedubucher 5 years ago

    I'm reading Pieter Hintjens "Social Architecture" at the moment, and there he warns exactly about what just happened to Elasticsearch.

    • postit 5 years ago

      Gosh I miss this guy.

  • outside1234 5 years ago

    You are right, but on the other hand, Amazon shouldn't be surprised when project maintainers then focus their efforts on the platforms (Azure in particular) that cut them in as partners on a shared success model.

  • pushpop 5 years ago

    I can see both sides of the argument here. On the one hand Amazon are just using open source literally as the license allows. But on the other hand it does feel a little underhanded that Amazon can incorporate these projects into their portfolio as their own and make large amounts of money from it while not giving anything back to the community.

    Maybe there needs to be a new software license. One that allows for commercial use when the project is included as a module or infrastructure but excludes it from being billed separately. So you can use an open source component as a language library, shared object / DLL or even stand alone daemon / service installed as part of your web application (for example) but you cannot make that open source project a product in its own right. Obviously a lawyer would need to write the terms rather than an engineer like myself but I wonder if that kind of software license would offer a happy middle ground?

  • dredmorbius 5 years ago

    There's a busines model for high-fixed, zero-marginal cost economic public goods. It's taxes.

    The alternatives have all been found wanting: "intellectual property" (copyright and patents), patronage, religious commissions, advertising.

    Busking, performance, physical media sales, merch, loss-leaders, widget-frosting, service/support, and shingle-posting all bypass the HFZMC problem by monetising some alternative good, product, or service.

    Several of those specifically tie network-effect, rent-generating monopolies with FCZMC goods. Taxes socialise this process.

    What to tax is the next question. Adam Smith preferred wealth and land (means of production).

    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...

  • shard972 5 years ago

    But if you go the GPL route your just a smelly old neck beard who harbors conspiracy theories about big business by refusing them a license permissive enough for a company to exploit to their liking.

  • vmchale 5 years ago

    > It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.

    You could GPL it...

hpcjoe 5 years ago

Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone.

Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me.

He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to use the systems. I wanted dev environments to be free, and pay for support if you need it. Again, to increase usage.

You can see similar concepts in what companies decide has no value, by what they are willing to bundle for "free". Cell phone plans in the use are doing 2-for-1 deals of some sort. The carriers believe their services have value, and the phones are merely a means to deliver their value.

OTOH, the cell phone vendors believe their devices are the value, and try to give away software they think will make their devices look better.

Yeah, I know, you pay for it in the end. Costs are always borne by the customers.

Amazon is leveraging its market dominance in ways that are hard to view other than as anti-competitive. I do suspect that eventually, they will be held to task for that. But that they will likely keep operating in that manner for as long as possible.

Azure, with its shared success model, may actually manage to convince OSS projects to work more closely with them. It would not surprise me in the least to see licenses rewritten to be friendly to the shared success model, and hostile to the do whatever it is you want model.

  • neilv 5 years ago

    If that Unix workstation vendor was Sun, at one point, everyone got a bundled K&R C compiler (possibly bundled for building custom kernels), and optionally paid extra for the ANSI C compiler, and then C++ compiler.

    Which worked for a while. You either didn't need the extra tools (portable code was a subset of K&R anyway), or you had ample money to pay for extra tools. (Research&education appreciated that the majority of GNU and other open source software favored Sun's bundled compiler, over other workstation platforms. Though there was some brief upset when a competing workstation line would leapfrog performance briefly (e.g., HP 9000/7xx, IBM RS/6000). And the commercial workstation independent software vendors sold such high-ticket software (e.g., 5 figures per seat, plus support contracts and training), and were already dropping huge money on engineers and hardware, so paying for software tools was a relatively small additional expense. The ISV might also go pay others for seats of third-party tools for developers, like Saber-C, Purify, FrameMaker, Interleaf, and niche developer software like EDA or CASE.)

    Meanwhile, GCC was starting to get as credible on some hosts/targets as the workstation vendor compilers (vendor C++ compilers sometimes had bugs). Before that finished playing out, I moved from workstations (I worked on almost all of them, plus the Cray S-MP) and sometimes Windows NT, to move fully to GNU/Linux on mostly PC hardware.

    (Edit: I got access to these toys as a super-nerdy kid. I'm well aware that HR screeners shred the resume of anyone who was paying attention when the Web boom started. :)

  • donmcronald 5 years ago

    Can you give more info on the shared success model thing? I’ve never heard of it. What kinds of differences in licensing are there?

    Oracle closing up “Open” Solaris was a real eye opener for me and I find the licensing / business politics of open source to be fairly interesting.

talkingtab 5 years ago

Amazon is anti-competitive. Microsoft used the same pattern of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish- and MS was judged by a US court to have engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. Arguing that this is about "founders" or that "offering it to your customers for free" is okay just ignores the context of the situation. MS offered lots of things for free or at reduced prices because it could afford to. Amazon is exploiting the work of many people and using its dominance to interfere with healthy competition.

This is not to say that Elasticsearch is great or had the right response, but it is to say that the effects of Amazon will be and are harmful to the open source movement. I do not see easy answers to how fix this, but I think recognizing this as a threat is important.

  • xkcd-sucks 5 years ago

    Hmm. Kind of like explosive bombs are considered "normal weapons of war" but then somebody comes up with a nuclear bomb that's orders of magnitude more powerful and people start freaking out

    • leggomylibro 5 years ago

      Or like how people shouting their opinions on street corners is considered "normal life in the big city", but then somebody comes up with a social network that's orders of magnitude louder and people start freaking out.

lbacaj 5 years ago

To me Amazon feels far more predatory than the other tech giants. I read the arguments being made on HN about this all being fair game but it’s really not ok, none of it is.

1. Amazon takes from open source just as much if not more than any of the other tech giants, in fact the vast majority of managed services on AWS are open source projects with DevOps from amazon.. which by itself is fine but when you consider how much they give back? Fuck all. They haven’t contributed any major framework, system, project, or library that I use. I use things from Google every single day, from Kubernetes to Flutter, to Tensorflow the list goes on and on. I use things from Microsoft every single day in my development from Visual Studio Code, to .net core. I use things like react from Facebook every day. Maybe I’m living in a bubble but Man, this feels like theft these guys take everything to make Bezos richer and give us shit.

2. Although not directly related to Open Source, it reinforces the predatory tactics, Take a look at what they do to Brands on their market place. Any well selling product becomes an Amazon basics, generic, of which they make lots of money and shut you out using Sales data and other predatory practices.

3. You have a streaming service on AWS, an e-commerce shop, any other number of SaaS services? No problem as soon as it’s proven Amazon will launch its own product to compete with you. Everyone told Netflix it was a terrible idea to enrich Amazon but they did it anyway now they have original shows on Amazon video to contend with and I bet you they wish they didn’t.

The list just goes on and on and on. Not saying the other tech giants are angels but man these guys are egregious in the way they take. I don’t blame these companies for crying foul none of this behavior is Moral, it might be legal for now but even that time is coming.

Anyway I know I’m coming off as harsh and you don’t have to agree with me but this is just my two cents. I believe Amazon is the most predatory, largest, capitalist company in America today.

jeffnappi 5 years ago

Personally I think Amazon is in the right here. Open source projects should not mix proprietary code into their code base period. Build a plugin architecture that supports any proprietary additions you wish to have, but mixing proprietary code with free/open source code should be widely opposed by the community.

And I'd echo the sentiment of others here - Elastic itself has benefited GREATLY by building their product on top of many other open source projects. Java, Lucene, Netty, etc.

Here's a partial list of dependencies:

com.carrotsearch.randomizedtesting

com.fasterxml.jackson.core

com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat

com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs

com.fasterxml.jackson.module

com.github.spullara.mustache.java

commons-codec

commons-io

commons-lang

commons-logging

com.nimbusds

com.sun.jersey

com.sun.mail

io.dropwizard.metrics

io.netty

joda-time

junit

net.jcip

net.minidev

net.sf.supercsv

net.shibboleth.utilities

net.sourceforge.csvjdbc

org.antlr

org.apache.hadoop

org.apache.httpcomponents

org.apache.james

org.apache.logging.log4j

org.apache.lucene

org.apache.pdfbox

org.apache.poi

org.apache.santuario

org.apache.tika

org.bouncycastle

org.carrot2

org.cryptacular

org.hamcrest

org.jline

org.locationtech.jts

org.locationtech.spatial4j

org.openjdk.jmh

org.opensaml

org.ow2.asm

org.slf4j

org.yaml

ua.net.nlp

mooreds 5 years ago

So actually, they are talking about AWS. I clicked through expecting to read about FBA and the Amazon basics, but this is more technology/open source oriented.

  • edoo 5 years ago

    That is what I thought too. If you have a hit product Amazon will roll their own version and drink your milkshake.

    • erichocean 5 years ago

      First, they'll demand you tell them where you're getting your (white-labeled) product, as a condition of continuing to sell. That's the truly shady part.

      • myroon5 5 years ago

        Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this before.

        • peteretep 5 years ago

          Going to guess this is for compliance and tax reasons, and people are (rightly or wrongly) saying Amazon then use that to poach suppliers

epa 5 years ago

When AWS launched, they cut the price of a typical VPN service by 80% or more. They were cutthroat from the start. Amazon did not price for the existing market, they priced for a theoretical market they knew could exist when prices were that low.

  • busterarm 5 years ago

    To the benefit of our entire industry.

    • awakeasleep 5 years ago

      The long term effects of this remain to be seen.

      All our cloud providers are currently in growth mode.

      What will happen when they're in 'mature industry with trapped customers mode'?

      We know how Oracle handles that situation.

      • busterarm 5 years ago

        Cloud services adoption rate is 19% and AWS has been around since 2006. The vast majority of companies in that 19% penetration are still in-transition. OpenStack and container orchestration platforms are now a thing.

        Not only do we have a long time to figure things out but it's never been easier to be on prem if you need to be.

        • awakeasleep 5 years ago

          Have you been a part of many successful cross-cloud migrations? Or migrations from the cloud to on-prem?

          • busterarm 5 years ago

            I'd have to say only partially to both questions. Cloud agnosticism is important enough to us that we're able to deploy the most critical bits of our infrastructure on prem, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OpenStack. We operate all of the above but some resources have a bit of a lock-in problem for now. Total yearly infrastructure costs in the 10s of millions, US.

            If there's any takeaways that I have from this journey it's that Azure's platform is simply not competitive and is likely to continue to not be.

  • smilekzs 5 years ago

    Did you mean VPS (like Linode), or VPN specifically?

Invictus0 5 years ago

> On the campaign trail, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently called for the breakup of Amazon, declaring that “you can be an umpire, or you can own a team, but you can’t do both at the same time.” She was referring to Amazon’s role as both an e-commerce platform and a vendor — a scheme that lets the company observe market trends and undercut sellers with in-house products at opportune moments.

Why should Amazon not be allowed to sell its own products on its own site, but the grocery store is allowed to sell its own branded milk at its own stores, in competition with other milk sellers?

The fact that Amazon is rolling open source products into its own offerings isn't anti-competitive: it's a reflection of a key flaw in the open source philosophy. The moat of open source is that it is expensive to maintain and difficult to monetize, thereby disincentivizing unserious forks: but now that Amazon is monetizing it, it's a problem, because their resources are effectively unlimited and they are effectively monetizing it. The potential was always there for anyone to do this, but the difficulty of it meant that no one ever tried.

nartz 5 years ago

This issue here is with new "Open Source" software companies earning revenue through hosting as opposed to simply providing support / custom feature development / etc.

It creates a conflict of interest when others want to host it, since it takes their revenue away. However, in my opinion anyone should be able to compete on hosting/support.

This revenue goes back into funding development, but places restrictions on how the software can be used - making it "Open Sourced, Closed Service Based Hosting" or something like that. Inotherwords, we need a new name for this type of software.

My question is - if AWS simply made it easy to spin up an elastic search cluster, but didn't offer a specific API/Service - whats the difference here? Very little.

  • kemitchell 5 years ago

    Providing support and custom development, such as integration, creates its own conflicts of interest. Support models create incentives to keep documentation sparse and the software esoteric. Integration models create incentives to keep integration difficult, and to withhold tooling for doing so efficiently.

dcbadacd 5 years ago

Don't like people using your open-source and not contributing back? DON'T USE A NON-COPYLEFT LICENSE.

clhodapp 5 years ago

It seems like the problem here is that these companies are voluntarily put out their code under terms that gives rise to use by competitors in a space they they want to be the sole vendors in. If they want people to be able to self-host these components for free but have no big competitors for managed services, they could easily set up the licensing terms to create that situation.

resters 5 years ago

In the realm of physical products, it's already pretty annoying not being able to purchase Nest products on Amazon.

One of the main things Amazon has going for it is that one can usually expect to see the whole gamut of competitive products, read helpful reviews, etc.

But when products are missing from the results for competitive reasons, the trustworthiness of the platform goes out the window.

So this may be a short-term beneficial strategy for Amazon but will surely backfire in the future. I'll be reluctant to buy more stock until the impact of the strategy becomes more clear.

point78 5 years ago

Amazon is blueprint monopoly. Selling their own brand products in the platform they control.

Remember MS and IE? Something needs to be done asap.

nateburke 5 years ago

Forget about open source. AWS is eating the lunch of venture backed pure software (and hardware!) businesses everywhere. Go to re:Invent and look at what they release in terms of MVPs. Each product release that they present could be a huge headline for Sequoia, a16z, etc on TechCrunch 5 years ago. For example, in 2018 we had:

Ground Station

Robo Maker

DeepRacer

Bunch of storage features (many could be standalone startups)

Bunch of IoT stuff (same -- SiteWise, ThingsGraph, etc.)

Many launched with real customers, too.

It is NOT EASY to bring a software MVP to market and AWS does it massively, across many efforts, in parallel, EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

Being a developer right now and complaining about AWS cannibalizing open source is a lot like running a late 1400s monastery and complaining about how Gutenberg Bibles are displacing hand-written Bibles.

dgudkov 5 years ago

Elastic hoped to monetize someone else's work, but someone monetized their own work. Ironic.

zygimantasdev 5 years ago

I always kept hearing that elastic search was a great product, helped to solve some difficult problems and was open source. However, when I wanted to use it I quickly found out that some important features are paid only. And the licenses cost a ton. It felt very disingenuous for it to be called open source when there are things I cannot use for personal or commercial use. Amazon enabled me to use this stack the way I wanted and now again I think elastic search is a great product. Reputation wise I think Amazon's move will only help them. Not sure business wise

zby 5 years ago

This story is not about AWS contra Open Source - it is about cloud computing versus selling software licenses: https://hackernoon.com/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-efcdcfb... . I am waiting for AWS to publish their fork under an Open Source license (maybe even be more Open Source than Elastic), this would not change anything for them, and still kill Elastic.

Reedx 5 years ago

> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money.

Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?

  • thinkingkong 5 years ago

    Because then AWS would fork from a version of redis with a more permissive license and only support a subset of functionality moving forward.

    • Reedx 5 years ago

      They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.

  • yodon 5 years ago

    MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community

    • EGreg 5 years ago

      Just use AGPL and suddenly the big boys won’t touch you!

      They can negotiate a special license just for them.

      • kaidax 5 years ago

        AGPL is what they used before. It does nothing vs. Amazon because they don't care if they have to share changes - they can host it anyway

      • RcouF1uZ4gsC 5 years ago

        Dual licenses kind of defeat the one of the purposes of open source which is getting outside developers to contribute to your product. Why should I as an outside developer submit pull requests and be required to assign copyright to you so you can make money selling a proprietary license?

        • dhd415 5 years ago

          Frankly, open source is more of a distribution model than a way to solicit free work from outside developers. As a developer paid to work on a popular open-source product with paying customers, most of the outside PRs I see are small tweaks that address very specific use cases, not major new functionality. Those are certainly welcome, but those kinds of contributions are not going to make or sustain the product.

        • syn0byte 5 years ago

          Because everyone using the OSS license still benefits from your contribution? Why contribute to any of these projects now if Amazon is just going to integrate it into AWS for their own profit anyway?

rdiddly 5 years ago

I notice nobody even questions the cloud-style architecture itself anymore, even though that's what gives Amazon the data to decide which service to ape next. Who owns your data?

jbigelow76 5 years ago

Regardless of where you come down on the argument, that's a hell of an evocative graphic at the top of the article.

product50 5 years ago

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong?

This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

  • zelon88 5 years ago

    Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using Elasticsearch in the long term. This kind of behavior reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish days of MS.

    This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

    • zknz 5 years ago

      Elastic.co the n'th most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's n'th most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project, Lucene, made it easier to operate, and then sold access to it.

      • sumedh 5 years ago

        Do you think that someone with 1 million dollars has the same power and influence as someone with 1 billion dollars?

      • antt 5 years ago

        Valid for n as n -> oo.

        You can't pretend that a monopoly plays by the same rules as everyone else. For capitalism to work no one can be allowed to control a market influencing chunk of it.

      • inapis 5 years ago

        This is disingenuous. Yes elastic cloned an open source project and improved it in some measure but also made the access free for a decent chunk of the features. Most of what is under the paid license in the elastic stack has less to do with lucene itself and more to do with quality of life improvements in deployment, security, analysis etc. There are enough improvements over and above the lucene project to make elastic worthwhile in itself.

        OTOH, AWS pretty much xeroxed the elastic stack and added a paywall (at least after a year). Compared to that you still get immense value out of the elastic stack for free.

        • cthalupa 5 years ago

          How has AWS added a paywall? They charged you for hosting ElasticSearch on their infrastructure and their management, yet there was no difference in the software.

          When they decided to implement features that were only available in the proprietary version of ElasticSearch, they open sourced it.

          Charging for infrastructure and management of said infrastructure is not the same as placing a paywall on software.

    • dralley 5 years ago

      >> This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

      Not true. Even GPL code is able to have proprietary modifications so long as the code stays in-house. As a cloud provider, Amazon can do an end run around the license by simply providing access to your code (with their proprietary modifications) via Web APIs.

      That was the root of the whole MongoDB debacle, and several minor skermishes with Redis Labs.

      • jessaustin 5 years ago

        That's the purpose of AGPLv3, the Affero variant that was written to close the "ASP loophole". This has been out a long time. Unfortunately the anti-copyleft zealots have discouraged creators from adopting it.

        [EDIT:] I thought the "MongoDB debacle" was the wide-open default auth thing? I don't see how that connects...

        • dralley 5 years ago

          Look up mongodb licensing

          • jessaustin 5 years ago

            OK, I can understand what MongoDB are thinking with SSPL: make the open source license so onerous (using this software requires you to open source your entire stack) that any ASP has to come to them for a commercial license. That makes sense for them, and probably for several other firms. However MongoDB were previously using AGPL, which specifically does not allow AWS to close their modifications. It's probably an open question as to whether Amazon can purchase enough judges to make the point moot, but the license itself is at least trying to keep the software free. In the long run if AWS abides by the license and releases all updates to their Mongo fork it will strengthen AGPL. Admittedly, I've been unable to find the repo through which that's happening now, so maybe my hopes are already dashed...

            • _msw_ 5 years ago

              Disclosure: I work at AWS, but I do not directly work on DocumentDB, and I have no personal experience with MongoDB's server code. But I am familiar with the facts regarding how AWS provides services that include open source code.

              AWS has never used the AGPL licensed MongoDB code as part of a service, therefore the license change from AGPL to SSPL has nothing to do with AWS. There is no "Mongo fork" as you stated above.

              See more in MongoDB's FAQ about the triggers for changing the license, in particular "international cloud vendors". https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...

    • snarfy 5 years ago

      My problem is Elastic acts like the employees of that company are the only people that ever contributed code to their project. Being open source that's simply not true.

      What about all of the contributors to Elastic that are not employees. Why does Elastic own the monetization of other people's work?

      • tjungblut 5 years ago

        Exactly, what's with all the work that is behind Apache Lucene that's running under the covers of ElasticSearch. All of these people [1] would also never see a dime from elastic.co either. So you can spin the wheel the other way around and say they are monetizing other peoples free work as well.

        [1] http://lucene.apache.org/whoweare.html

        • dhd415 5 years ago

          A lot of those people are Elastic and LucidWorks employees who are monetizing their contributions to Lucene through their companies' respective products. I'm sure there are others there, too, but those were the obvious ones.

          • jackbravo 5 years ago

            LucidWorks is not Elastic. So Elastic is benefiting from the work done by another company, without paying anything to it. Or am I missing something?

            • dhd415 5 years ago

              My point is that many of the contributors to Lucene are motivated by the benefit it provides to their own companies and are paid to make those contributions as part of their job. Their contributions also benefit anyone else who chooses to use Lucene including large corporate entities such as Apple, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Akamai even those companies contribute little or nothing to Lucene. In other words, on the spectrum of people who are "monetizing" Lucene, Elastic and LucidWorks contribute far more than others and are called out about it only because their products are externally distributed and visibly leverage Lucene.

      • dhd415 5 years ago

        The significant majority of contributors to Elasticsearch are Elastic employees. Nothing prevents outside contributors from attempting to monetize their work through selling, supporting, consulting on, or hosting Elasticsearch. They're just not likely to be nearly as well-positioned to monetize it as Elastic is.

      • nova22033 5 years ago

        https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/supporting-apache-so...

        Many of our engineers, such as Robert Muir and Mike McCandless, were already contributors to ASF projects before they joined AWS. Robert worked with the Apache Lucene and Apache Solr projects as part of his role at AWS, which led to three more employees earning committer roles on these projects. Mike continues to be a very active contributor on behalf of Amazon to Apache Lucene, the storage engine that powers Solr and Elasticsearch.

    • zethraeus 5 years ago

      > I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming

      That's ridiculous. Of course they were keenly aware that they could be competed with with the free software they put out.

      They just hoped that no significant competitor would risk upsetting the balance of the open source community, or that they could at least make good money until someone did.

      In the meantime, they selfishly avoided licensing with GPLv3 (which would have reinforced the things you care about) because it would have decreased their revenue (which is the thing they care about).

    • Invictus0 5 years ago

      > Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being,

      All of this is irrelevant to your argument.

      > and then sold access to it.

      Are the purchasers of this free software foolhardy, or is Amazon providing them value in some way? I suspect it's the latter.

    • kansface 5 years ago

      > Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using Elasticsearch in the long term.

      Surely, more competition is actually good for consumers, not bad?

    • AEB62189 5 years ago

      > Amazon...cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it.

      This is almost completely wrong.

      Amazon sold a managed service for the project long before they forked it. Elastic.co didn't like that Amazon was doing so successfully, so they tried to restrict access to the open source project.

      Amazon, on the other had, offers complete access to their fork -- https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch

  • pkaye 5 years ago

    If Amazon takes too much of the revenue stream from those companies that produce the software might not be able to fund development.

    • EpicEng 5 years ago

      Well... tough? Elastic has created a business heavily based on the work of others. They made a concious decision to license the code in the way that they did. Now they're moaning that Amazon is eating their lunch when Amazon is doing exactly what thousands of open source projects have done before them (provide a free service to replace a premium service.)

      I don't feel sorry for them.

mfatica 5 years ago

Amazon was ever considered a neutral platform?