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"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 p

"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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
sergiosgc 7y 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/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

yardie 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

sergiosgc 7y 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/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/