21 ms·

Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

430 points by howard941 8y ago

petra 8y ago
Article is pay-walled. any tricks ?
- howard941 8y ago
  Does this help? https://outline.com/XNLYLg https://outline.com/XNLYLg
mfatica 8y ago
Amazon was ever considered a neutral platform?
product50 8y 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.
- pkaye 8y 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 8y 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.
- zelon88 8y 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.
  - snarfy 8y 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 8y 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 http://lucene.apache.org/whoweare.html
      - dhd415 8y 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 8y ago
mooreds 8y 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 8y ago
  That is what I thought too. If you have a hit product Amazon will roll their own version and drink your milkshake.
  - erichocean 8y 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 8y ago
      Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this before.
      - peteretep 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
  To the benefit of our entire industry.
  - awakeasleep 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
        Have you been a part of many successful cross-cloud migrations? Or migrations from the cloud to on-prem?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        busterarm 8y 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.
adamnemecek 8y ago
Amazon was neutral?
capkutay 8y 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.
- eanzenberg 8y 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 8y 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?
    - kristianc 8y ago
      > So how do you bootstrap your company? Services
    - moreira 8y 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.
Reedx 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
    They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.
    - ecnahc515 8y ago
      Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their fork, than to pay royalties forever.
      - silentsea90 8y ago
        That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has no importance?
        dingo_bat 8y ago
        2-3 dedicated high-quality devs in a company like Amazon can run circles around 200-300 random github PR contributors when it comes to implementation of features.
nartz 8y 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 8y 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.
resters 8y 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.
- _msw_ 8y ago
  Find Nest products here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011 https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011
jimrhods23 8y 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-control-of-elasticsearch/ 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.
- yardie 8y 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 8y 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.
talkingtab 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
clhodapp 8y 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.
Invictus0 8y 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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
013a 8y 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/zstandard-1.3.7/zstd https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...
- thatoneuser 8y 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?
  - paulddraper 8y 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.
  - 8y ago
jeffnappi 8y 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
dcbadacd 8y ago
Don't like people using your open-source and not contributing back? DON'T USE A NON-COPYLEFT LICENSE.
hpcjoe 8y 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 8y 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. :)
point78 8y 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.
dgudkov 8y ago
Elastic hoped to monetize someone else's work, but someone monetized their own work. Ironic.
jbigelow76 8y ago
Regardless of where you come down on the argument, that's a hell of an evocative graphic at the top of the article.
lbacaj 8y 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.
rdiddly 8y 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?
zby 8y 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-efcdcfb00514 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.
nateburke 8y 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.
zygimantasdev 8y 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

430 points by howard941 8y ago

petra 8y ago

Article is pay-walled. any tricks ?

howard941 8y ago
Does this help? https://outline.com/XNLYLg https://outline.com/XNLYLg

mfatica 8y ago

Amazon was ever considered a neutral platform?

product50 8y 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.

pkaye 8y 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 8y 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.
zelon88 8y 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.
- snarfy 8y 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 8y 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 http://lucene.apache.org/whoweare.html
    - dhd415 8y 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 8y ago

mooreds 8y 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 8y ago
That is what I thought too. If you have a hit product Amazon will roll their own version and drink your milkshake.
- erichocean 8y 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 8y ago
    Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this before.
    - peteretep 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
To the benefit of our entire industry.
- awakeasleep 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
      Have you been a part of many successful cross-cloud migrations? Or migrations from the cloud to on-prem?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - busterarm 8y 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.

adamnemecek 8y ago

Amazon was neutral?

capkutay 8y 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.

eanzenberg 8y 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 8y 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?
  - kristianc 8y ago
    > So how do you bootstrap your company? Services
  - moreira 8y 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.

Reedx 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
  They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.
  - ecnahc515 8y ago
    Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their fork, than to pay royalties forever.
    - silentsea90 8y ago
      That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has no importance?
      - dingo_bat 8y ago
        2-3 dedicated high-quality devs in a company like Amazon can run circles around 200-300 random github PR contributors when it comes to implementation of features.

nartz 8y 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 8y 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.

resters 8y 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.

_msw_ 8y ago
Find Nest products here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011 https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011

jimrhods23 8y 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-control-of-elasticsearch/ 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.

yardie 8y 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 8y 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.

talkingtab 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.

clhodapp 8y 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.

Invictus0 8y 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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

013a 8y 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/zstandard-1.3.7/zstd https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...

thatoneuser 8y 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?
- paulddraper 8y 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.
- 8y ago

jeffnappi 8y 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

dcbadacd 8y ago

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

hpcjoe 8y 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 8y 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. :)

point78 8y 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.

dgudkov 8y ago

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

jbigelow76 8y ago

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

lbacaj 8y 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.

rdiddly 8y 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?

zby 8y 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-efcdcfb00514 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.

nateburke 8y 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.

zygimantasdev 8y 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