7 ms·

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 th

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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

pkaye 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.