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> This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem. I used to manage a licensed ELK cluster. The licensing was expensive (order of

> This is not a good outcome for people who want an independent OSS ecosystem. I used to manage a licensed ELK cluster. The licensing was expensive (order of six figures) and was really only necessary for LDAP integration. Features like timelion were cool, but definitely not worth the price tag. I migrated to an AWS-managed solution to for two reasons: 1) to alleviate the burden of managing a cluster, 2) get away from the onerous costs associated with licensing. Even thought it was more expensive to run a managed cluster, since, at the time, AWS limited the disk space per node. The cost savings was significant enough to warrant migration. I realize that Elastic.co offers their own managed solution. But the version on AWS was an easier sell to management due to known costs and not having to deal with sales people. I think a lot of OSS is having difficulty transitioning to a cloud-first model. The people making choices on tech stacks want to spend less time dealing with infrastructure and more time developing stuff. And this model of charging high licensing fees for "enterprise" features feels antiquated, and provides a large attack service for companies like AWS. What enterprise engineers really want are AMIs, or better yet, fully managed cloud interfaces, to bring up and manage OSS deployments. Something that lets us focus on the products we sell; not the ones we buy. I believe that we need to rethink how OSS is delivered and how to make money from it. "Enterprise" support looks a lot different not than it did when Redhat was founded, yet the OSS business model remains eerily similar.

mrkurt 6y ago
It makes _total_ sense to migrate to AWS's Elasticsearch product. This is, I think, the problem with incredibly powerful companies. Acting rationally as consumers makes them more powerful. I mean, I still buy stuff from Amazon, use Gmail, etc. We definitely need to rethink how OSS is delivered, but part of rethinking that is understanding how dominant AWS over OSS revenue.
bostik 6y ago
> not having to deal with sales people. This aspect does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Unless your product is an exceptionally well focused developer tool, it will take months, and sometime multiple quarters, to see whether it adds any real value. Exceptions exist but are rare. In practice the generous[TM] 30-day trial period is almost always worthless, and often a gateway to sustained net negative. Add to that the constant barrage of dark patterny attempts to infest your calendar and the upsell pressure tactics. Every third-party integration is an additional liability for maintenance, and far too frequently an increase in attack surface. Time is your most precious asset and the sales people are trying to rob you of it. To every sales person on the planet: if you want to sell me a service or product, then sell me NOTHING BUT the service or product. Make useful documentation accessible, and make additional features discoverable, with unambiguous pricing clearly in place where necessary. Then get out of my way. With OSS product I can install and trial it as long as I need, without needing to give off my contact details or be added to your invasive CRM. If I need additional features that are only available under your more restrictive license offering, I will buy them when I have the need. Your sales quota or bonus thresholds do not factor in, and if you try make them my problem, I will look at migration options.

mrkurt 6y ago

It makes _total_ sense to migrate to AWS's Elasticsearch product. This is, I think, the problem with incredibly powerful companies. Acting rationally as consumers makes them more powerful. I mean, I still buy stuff from Amazon, use Gmail, etc. We definitely need to rethink how OSS is delivered, but part of rethinking that is understanding how dominant AWS over OSS revenue.

bostik 6y ago

> not having to deal with sales people. This aspect does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Unless your product is an exceptionally well focused developer tool, it will take months, and sometime multiple quarters, to see whether it adds any real value. Exceptions exist but are rare. In practice the generous[TM] 30-day trial period is almost always worthless, and often a gateway to sustained net negative. Add to that the constant barrage of dark patterny attempts to infest your calendar and the upsell pressure tactics. Every third-party integration is an additional liability for maintenance, and far too frequently an increase in attack surface. Time is your most precious asset and the sales people are trying to rob you of it. To every sales person on the planet: if you want to sell me a service or product, then sell me NOTHING BUT the service or product. Make useful documentation accessible, and make additional features discoverable, with unambiguous pricing clearly in place where necessary. Then get out of my way. With OSS product I can install and trial it as long as I need, without needing to give off my contact details or be added to your invasive CRM. If I need additional features that are only available under your more restrictive license offering, I will buy them when I have the need. Your sales quota or bonus thresholds do not factor in, and if you try make them my problem, I will look at migration options.