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Yeah let's talk about greed for a second. Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/
by __blockcipher__ 6y ago
Yeah let's talk about greed for a second.
Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.
So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.
Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.
And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.
Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>?
So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.
They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.
They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:
> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming
Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
- glogla 6y ago> Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist Yes, that's why you and people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society) will never agree on matters of ethics and morality. The gist of it is that what Amazon is doing is exploitative - and some people think that's despicable even if legal - and some people think being exploitative is just smart business play - why leave money on the table? Those two groups of people will never agree, not matter how long will they shout at each other.
- julianmarq 6y ago> people who like open source (generally left-wing people doing stuff for betterment of society) Do you really think that liking open source is in any way correlated with politics?[1] I'd like to read a source on that one, because it's certainly not been my experience. Maybe we've contributed to different projects and/or read different people. But even that aside, you think that everyone who likes open source is condemning amazon and on elastic's side? That is even more suspect. Just as an example, the creator of sourcehut has been criticizing elastic all week, and all of his posts—at least one of them explicitly saying that Amazon is definitely allowed to do what it's doing—have reached the front page here. And he's someone whose "liking open source" credentials are good enough, I think. [1]: I'm not even going to get into other implication, that wanting to improve society is also in any way related to any given political leaning.
- parasubvert 6y agoExcept What Elastic is doing is fundamentally opposed to open source, and what Amazon is doing is fundamentally aligned. At least according to the OSI, who last I checked, really care about open source ideals. https://opensource.org/node/1099 https://opensource.org/node/1099
- bigiain 6y agoIt's not like the OSI and the FSF haven't got at least a few major differences about "ideals" though. Pretty sure rms is 100% convinced _both_ sides of this disagreement are morally wrong.