9 ms·

Playing the Open Source Game

188 points by lladnar 5y ago

imagineerschool 5y ago
"Software you can love" is much like the idea of 'the opposite of jank'. Software that feels like home. I have this feeling using QubesOS, warm and fuzzy.
- waynesonfire 5y ago
  zfs for me
- yoru-sulfur 5y ago
  "The opposite of jank" - I love it, what a resonant quote.
- lokedhs 5y ago
  I think Qubes OS is a great example. It's a system that besides the security benefits also gives me the control to remove jank from other software (usually software that thinks it should take control of my computer to do what it feels is the right thing)
giovannibonetti 5y ago
IMHO most (if not all) of the problems described in the article (talking about other companies) started when the stakeholders sold their companies for the highest bidder. Is it a surprise that this money would corrupt the company? It's just like when WhatsApp founders sold the company to Facebook. They got billions of dollars but eventually became disappointed with Facebook plans to shove ads into it (eventually). The same idea applies to core developers accepting cushy high-paying jobs in huge companies. The root cause is people become greedy. That's what happens when people optimize just for money. And these are exactly the cases that appear in the news, which further influences other people facing a similar choice...
- AndyKelley 5y ago
  Is that the root cause? Individuals being greedy? I think we can traverse up a few more parents to find the actual root of the tree. There's an entire economic system here actively encouraging and rewarding this cycle. Blaming individuals is not an effective strategy to improve society. We need to examine the system that is influencing the behavior of many individuals.
  - kristoff_it 5y ago
    This is actually a discussion that has been explored here on HN too. YC has as a sort of a motto "build something people want", or something along those lines, and I doubt that founders are all equally happy to see their ideas become a garbage can of hamfisted revenue streams, but that's where you end up when you get VC money, give up board seats, and can't show "sufficient" growth. On this last topic there was an interesting discussion a while ago about where VCs and founder interest is misaligned. https://medium.com/@jodij/why-is-venture-capital-so-misaligned-395bb9434ffc https://medium.com/@jodij/why-is-venture-capital-so-misalign... https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/vcHwylgEDmCC9JatZ0kTQM/A-misaligned-founderVC-relationship.html https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/vcHwylgEDmCC9JatZ0kTQM/A-... This problem alone is probably at the root (or very close to) a disproportionate amount of dissatisfaction when it comes to startup software. That said, there's surely more to this story, but this is already a great point to discuss, especially in a place like HN.
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      The picture of software dev you paint in the article (great read btw) is of a dichotomy: it's either a Big Tech corporate-politics nightmare, or a startup doomed to be that. I think there is another option. There are thousands of small software companies that don't have the growth or traction to get bought out, are happily making relatively small amounts of money in their niche (but still enough to pay decent salaries - not SV salaries, but enough to live on comfortably), and care about both their customers and their code. They tend to employ relatively few engineers, who stay for a long time, and have founders who know their market niche really well. You won't hear of them, because you're not in their specialised niche and they don't market outside their niche because they don't need investment. They're not really interested in going public, or being acquihired, or even gaining a trade sale, though that is the ultimate destination for most of them (when the founder decides to retire). They're not "sexy", except if you like actually practising your craft and building rock-solid products ("software you can love" - good phrase).
DoreenMichele 5y ago
"Hell is still other people" and the need to eat and keep a roof over one's head remains an aggravating pain in the ass for all idealistic people everywhere who wish they could do good works without having to sort out such inconveniences imposed by reality. (Me included, so it's not intended in an ugly way.)
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  This is the same wish of all creative people - "please someone feed me while I scratch my creative itch". It's why we should be supporting UBI.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dash2 5y ago
    It's interesting that you put that quote forward as a reason to support UBI. I have the opposite reaction: I have no desire to be taxed to feed people "scratching their creative itches".
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      Yeah, I understand that. Took me a while to get past it too. What helped was the realisation that almost all of the history of Science is made up of wealthy individuals scratching their creative itches. Art and Music less so, because patronage was a common method of funding that, but we lost out on a huge amount of both because patronage was rare. Imagine what we will discover, what vast wealth of new knowledge and talent we will enjoy, if we can free up those who can make a genuine contribution from having to pay rent? (and yes, 90% of everything is shit, but the 10% makes up for it). Also, I changed my "scarcity" mindset. I enjoy what I do, and get paid enough to do it. Paying taxes is part of that. I resent the various governments I've paid taxes to for wasting my money in all sorts of ludicrous ways, including the vast subsidies to wealthy people and industries I flat disagree with. Paying my tax money to actual people seems like a great deal to me :)
thegeekpirate 5y ago
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779257
paxys 5y ago
The Redis example particularly stands out for me. For the longest time Redis was hailed as a shining example of open source success – small group (mostly a single developer) working on lightweight, performant, easy-to-use, free (in terms of both cost and freedom) software which beat out several goliaths in the space. Now the biggest call to action on its official website is to sign up for a trial subscription. New features are hidden behind an enterprise version that you have to contact sales to get the price of.
- zomglings 5y ago
  I remember when antirez announced that he was leaving redis in the hands of the community. Didn't expect it to take such a blatantly commercial turn, but guess it shouldn't be surprising in retrospect. Are there any meaningful or developing alternatives to Redis that are truly free?
  - maccard 5y ago
    > Are there any meaningful or developing alternatives to Redis that are truly free? And how are those alternatives to be funded?
    - elkos 5y ago
      Free beer != Free speech
      - maccard 5y ago
        The comment I replied clearly indicated they weren't happy with the commercial turn of Redis after antirez left. Redis is still free as in speech (and also, beer).
        elkos 5y ago
        I do stand corrected
vinceguidry 5y ago
I really really really wish the FSF-haters all the luck in the world in their quest to thread the needle between bigcorp-hostile, GPL-style copyleft and user-hostile, bigcorp-friendly open source. I'm sad they can't learn to love GNU projects. I for one do. They just... work. Whenever they don't, invariably there's some freedom-hostile hardware in the way. This makes me want to move closer to FSF-recommended hardware. I wish them all the luck because the FSF just seems cursed at this point. They do absolutely essential legal and advocacy work and the world wouldn't be what it is without them, and virtually nobody has a deep enough sense of history to recognize that. They will still get my donation dollars for the foreseeable future, and I hope they can rehabilitate their image. I do sorta think this whole thing will end up working out well overall for the FSF's mission of building a software domain that's solidly out of the clutches of proprietary predation. I've never seen the FSF, the distinction between open and free software, in the public mind more than the last year. I can get really snarky about how all these people who never cared before suddenly come out against the FSF. You didn't care before, you still don't care, good job expressing the total lack of impact you insist on wanting to have. Are more free software foundations a good thing? Probably. It'll dilute the impact in the short run, these new projects will have to spend time and effort solving run-of-the-mill nonprofit stuff that the FSF worked out decades ago, but it also means more people will get invested. Eventually the new blood will learn to work with the old guard and we can all build a new order together. Color me optimistic about the future of free software.
- paxys 5y ago
  > and I hope they can rehabilitate their image. Do you believe they are making a genuine effort to do that? Or is it arrogance on the part of Stallman and co. which is still keeping the FSF closely associated with the Epstein scandal, while MIT and others have successfully moved on.
  - vinceguidry 5y ago
    It's an old org with a lot of cruft. Stallman isn't stupid, and absolutely cares about the cause of free software, more than any of us could ever possibly care. What's happening isn't 100% the fault of Stallman, but a continuation of the long-running chasm between the free software and open source communities. Though it certainly didn't help that Stallman chose to reclaim his board seat. There's just a lot of antipathy between the two camps. There always has been.
temp-dude-87844 5y ago
There's not a lot of material to directly address here other than to congratulate Zig and its team for trying to chart a path that is both practical and principled. But yet the post touches on a dozen or so issues that one can commiserate with. One is the notion that future stewards of a project may diverge from the vision of the founders. But this is unsolvable, unless you try to force them (with some combination of blunt and imperfect tools, such as licenses, patents, secrets, shame, money, power) or outlive them (as a chartered foundation, since humans do not live indefinitely). Instead, it's far better to rely on accidental ossification, where your work becomes so widespread and popular that some ancient subset of it becomes commonplace and impractical to fully displace by a future actor, friendly or otherwise. This sounds like sarcasm, but, it's thoroughly difficult to entirely displace C, Bourne shell, vi, grep, zip and deflate, TCP, HTTP... mostly-compatible independent implementations proliferate over time, but many of the design choices of the original creators nonetheless live on. Another is the realization that for many startups, "open source" (in ironic quotes) is a recruitment/marketing/discoverability strategy rather than a genuine ideological stance. It's a way to get the attention of hip developers, and a way to hook people in a crowded landscape to try before they (or, more properly, their flush-with-cash company) buys, maybe 3-5 years down the road. And I can't fault people for wanting to get paid, but it's blatantly obvious that most of the open source products we all remember from the last 10 years have just been trying to do the plan of "1. give away, 2. ???, 3. PROFIT!". It's hard to feel sorry for them when a competent and well-known vendor comes along and offers a managed service of the open source thing, and they're left holding the bag. One weird thing about the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is that it made it obvious that mindshare and familiarity are almost mental pre-requisites of compatibility, even when the achieved compatibility is only partial. Clearly, Android was not the Java Platform, but yet a bazillion Java libraries worked anyway, and a bazillion programmers could pick up Java from a hodgepodge tutorial and crank out apps onto smartphones. In the end, this "programmer compatibility" was as key to Android's success as the fact that if you wanted to milk the gold rush of $1 games with ads, your only other comparable platform was Apple, who required you to own an expensive Mac. If they chose C++ or a brand-new language like (later) Dart, the barrier to entry would have been higher. In the end, everything boils down to "barrier to entry". If Zig achieves lasting relevance, it's unlikely that the design vision of its founders will be invalidated in the future. But getting to that future is far from easy.
throwaway823882 5y ago
If you really want to win as a business with OSS, stop writing OSS. Use it, contribute back to it, support existing projects rather than running your own, donate to important development work. Build your business on it. Don't build your business on the idea that nobody should be able to compete with you using it.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Open source is fine, single corporate entities controlling and owning the copyright is not. That was always a problem and Elastic, Mongo, and Redis are forcing the issue by unilaterally changing the license and doing a bait and switch on their loyal users and contributors. They have the right to do that. That's the problem. Linux, Mysql, Postgresql, etc. prosper and thrive with many companies collaborating and competing at the same time. These projects survive pretty dramatic changes to the companies backing them including bankruptcy, acquisition, hostile take overs, etc. There are many healthy open source projects like that. What they have in common is that individual developers rather than a single corporate entity owns the copyright. This makes changing the license impractical. The best you can do is fork the code base and then hope developers continue to work with your code base. IMHO distributed copyright ownership is far more important than the license text because it makes changing that text impractical. So Linux is fine despite the legal pitfalls (perceived or real) associated with GPL2. It's a take it or leave it deal. Most of the industry seems to have taken that deal and is actively contributing and has found ways to bundle proprietary code regardless. So Linux is fine. It's used by mutually hostile companies and even countries. That's the whole point. The OSS community is a neutral place where you can choose to collaborate. That makes the AWS fork of Elasticsearch interesting because they forked but don't insist on copyright transfers. They are going to do some legal checks to verify who you are and that you are legitimate. That's basically the nuclear option in OSS. It happened to Oracle when they took over Sun. Forking is a dangerous weapon and it tends to only be used when companies mess up the stewardship of their code bases. That's basically what just happened to Elastic. This means that over time, the ownership of the forked code base will get more distributed and include lots of Elastic, AWS, and (mostly) third party developers. Elastic employees will likely not contribute (or even be allowed to contribute) to the AWS fork. At least not while they remain employed at Elastic. However, Elastic might see some of their external contributors, former employees, and people from e.g. the Solr and Lucene communities contribute to the AWS fork instead of Elastic's "we own everything" non OSS copy. My guess is that this is exactly what AWS wants to happen. Drive a wedge between their contributors and Elastic. Never mind their motives, I actually think it is the right thing for the Elastic code base. And I say that as somebody who has been a long time fan, occasional contributor (and mildly disgruntled about Elastics recent moves) that has several friends, former colleagues, etc. working for them. It's an interesting experiment that doesn't cost much to run for AWS. I don't think AWS is going to do much to make a lot of change happen but I'm sure they are happy to accept pull requests. If that start happening in more volume, the right move might be to eventually move control to the Apache Foundation. Amazon wins, users win, developers win, oss wins, Elastic & its share holders lose. Might be unfair but I prefer using open source and not betting my career on proprietary code bases. If successful, there are other companies that need to worry about losing control in a similar way.
oolonthegreat 5y ago
had me in the first half ngl. then i was really taken aback when he just went on to totally dismiss FSF by saying it has failed so utterly and completely because... it doesn't do accessibility? because rms is "incapable of being kind"?

188 points by lladnar 5y ago

"Software you can love" is much like the idea of 'the opposite of jank'. Software that feels like home. I have this feeling using QubesOS, warm and fuzzy.

waynesonfire 5y ago
zfs for me
yoru-sulfur 5y ago
"The opposite of jank" - I love it, what a resonant quote.
lokedhs 5y ago
I think Qubes OS is a great example. It's a system that besides the security benefits also gives me the control to remove jank from other software (usually software that thinks it should take control of my computer to do what it feels is the right thing)

giovannibonetti 5y ago

IMHO most (if not all) of the problems described in the article (talking about other companies) started when the stakeholders sold their companies for the highest bidder. Is it a surprise that this money would corrupt the company? It's just like when WhatsApp founders sold the company to Facebook. They got billions of dollars but eventually became disappointed with Facebook plans to shove ads into it (eventually). The same idea applies to core developers accepting cushy high-paying jobs in huge companies. The root cause is people become greedy. That's what happens when people optimize just for money. And these are exactly the cases that appear in the news, which further influences other people facing a similar choice...

AndyKelley 5y ago
Is that the root cause? Individuals being greedy? I think we can traverse up a few more parents to find the actual root of the tree. There's an entire economic system here actively encouraging and rewarding this cycle. Blaming individuals is not an effective strategy to improve society. We need to examine the system that is influencing the behavior of many individuals.
- kristoff_it 5y ago
  This is actually a discussion that has been explored here on HN too. YC has as a sort of a motto "build something people want", or something along those lines, and I doubt that founders are all equally happy to see their ideas become a garbage can of hamfisted revenue streams, but that's where you end up when you get VC money, give up board seats, and can't show "sufficient" growth. On this last topic there was an interesting discussion a while ago about where VCs and founder interest is misaligned. https://medium.com/@jodij/why-is-venture-capital-so-misaligned-395bb9434ffc https://medium.com/@jodij/why-is-venture-capital-so-misalign... https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/vcHwylgEDmCC9JatZ0kTQM/A-misaligned-founderVC-relationship.html https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/vcHwylgEDmCC9JatZ0kTQM/A-... This problem alone is probably at the root (or very close to) a disproportionate amount of dissatisfaction when it comes to startup software. That said, there's surely more to this story, but this is already a great point to discuss, especially in a place like HN.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    The picture of software dev you paint in the article (great read btw) is of a dichotomy: it's either a Big Tech corporate-politics nightmare, or a startup doomed to be that. I think there is another option. There are thousands of small software companies that don't have the growth or traction to get bought out, are happily making relatively small amounts of money in their niche (but still enough to pay decent salaries - not SV salaries, but enough to live on comfortably), and care about both their customers and their code. They tend to employ relatively few engineers, who stay for a long time, and have founders who know their market niche really well. You won't hear of them, because you're not in their specialised niche and they don't market outside their niche because they don't need investment. They're not really interested in going public, or being acquihired, or even gaining a trade sale, though that is the ultimate destination for most of them (when the founder decides to retire). They're not "sexy", except if you like actually practising your craft and building rock-solid products ("software you can love" - good phrase).

DoreenMichele 5y ago

"Hell is still other people" and the need to eat and keep a roof over one's head remains an aggravating pain in the ass for all idealistic people everywhere who wish they could do good works without having to sort out such inconveniences imposed by reality. (Me included, so it's not intended in an ugly way.)

marcus_holmes 5y ago
This is the same wish of all creative people - "please someone feed me while I scratch my creative itch". It's why we should be supporting UBI.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dash2 5y ago
  It's interesting that you put that quote forward as a reason to support UBI. I have the opposite reaction: I have no desire to be taxed to feed people "scratching their creative itches".
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Yeah, I understand that. Took me a while to get past it too. What helped was the realisation that almost all of the history of Science is made up of wealthy individuals scratching their creative itches. Art and Music less so, because patronage was a common method of funding that, but we lost out on a huge amount of both because patronage was rare. Imagine what we will discover, what vast wealth of new knowledge and talent we will enjoy, if we can free up those who can make a genuine contribution from having to pay rent? (and yes, 90% of everything is shit, but the 10% makes up for it). Also, I changed my "scarcity" mindset. I enjoy what I do, and get paid enough to do it. Paying taxes is part of that. I resent the various governments I've paid taxes to for wasting my money in all sorts of ludicrous ways, including the vast subsidies to wealthy people and industries I flat disagree with. Paying my tax money to actual people seems like a great deal to me :)

thegeekpirate 5y ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779257

paxys 5y ago

The Redis example particularly stands out for me. For the longest time Redis was hailed as a shining example of open source success – small group (mostly a single developer) working on lightweight, performant, easy-to-use, free (in terms of both cost and freedom) software which beat out several goliaths in the space. Now the biggest call to action on its official website is to sign up for a trial subscription. New features are hidden behind an enterprise version that you have to contact sales to get the price of.

zomglings 5y ago
I remember when antirez announced that he was leaving redis in the hands of the community. Didn't expect it to take such a blatantly commercial turn, but guess it shouldn't be surprising in retrospect. Are there any meaningful or developing alternatives to Redis that are truly free?
- maccard 5y ago
  > Are there any meaningful or developing alternatives to Redis that are truly free? And how are those alternatives to be funded?
  - elkos 5y ago
    Free beer != Free speech
    - maccard 5y ago
      The comment I replied clearly indicated they weren't happy with the commercial turn of Redis after antirez left. Redis is still free as in speech (and also, beer).
      - elkos 5y ago
        I do stand corrected

vinceguidry 5y ago

I really really really wish the FSF-haters all the luck in the world in their quest to thread the needle between bigcorp-hostile, GPL-style copyleft and user-hostile, bigcorp-friendly open source. I'm sad they can't learn to love GNU projects. I for one do. They just... work. Whenever they don't, invariably there's some freedom-hostile hardware in the way. This makes me want to move closer to FSF-recommended hardware. I wish them all the luck because the FSF just seems cursed at this point. They do absolutely essential legal and advocacy work and the world wouldn't be what it is without them, and virtually nobody has a deep enough sense of history to recognize that. They will still get my donation dollars for the foreseeable future, and I hope they can rehabilitate their image. I do sorta think this whole thing will end up working out well overall for the FSF's mission of building a software domain that's solidly out of the clutches of proprietary predation. I've never seen the FSF, the distinction between open and free software, in the public mind more than the last year. I can get really snarky about how all these people who never cared before suddenly come out against the FSF. You didn't care before, you still don't care, good job expressing the total lack of impact you insist on wanting to have. Are more free software foundations a good thing? Probably. It'll dilute the impact in the short run, these new projects will have to spend time and effort solving run-of-the-mill nonprofit stuff that the FSF worked out decades ago, but it also means more people will get invested. Eventually the new blood will learn to work with the old guard and we can all build a new order together. Color me optimistic about the future of free software.

paxys 5y ago
> and I hope they can rehabilitate their image. Do you believe they are making a genuine effort to do that? Or is it arrogance on the part of Stallman and co. which is still keeping the FSF closely associated with the Epstein scandal, while MIT and others have successfully moved on.
- vinceguidry 5y ago
  It's an old org with a lot of cruft. Stallman isn't stupid, and absolutely cares about the cause of free software, more than any of us could ever possibly care. What's happening isn't 100% the fault of Stallman, but a continuation of the long-running chasm between the free software and open source communities. Though it certainly didn't help that Stallman chose to reclaim his board seat. There's just a lot of antipathy between the two camps. There always has been.

temp-dude-87844 5y ago

There's not a lot of material to directly address here other than to congratulate Zig and its team for trying to chart a path that is both practical and principled. But yet the post touches on a dozen or so issues that one can commiserate with. One is the notion that future stewards of a project may diverge from the vision of the founders. But this is unsolvable, unless you try to force them (with some combination of blunt and imperfect tools, such as licenses, patents, secrets, shame, money, power) or outlive them (as a chartered foundation, since humans do not live indefinitely). Instead, it's far better to rely on accidental ossification, where your work becomes so widespread and popular that some ancient subset of it becomes commonplace and impractical to fully displace by a future actor, friendly or otherwise. This sounds like sarcasm, but, it's thoroughly difficult to entirely displace C, Bourne shell, vi, grep, zip and deflate, TCP, HTTP... mostly-compatible independent implementations proliferate over time, but many of the design choices of the original creators nonetheless live on. Another is the realization that for many startups, "open source" (in ironic quotes) is a recruitment/marketing/discoverability strategy rather than a genuine ideological stance. It's a way to get the attention of hip developers, and a way to hook people in a crowded landscape to try before they (or, more properly, their flush-with-cash company) buys, maybe 3-5 years down the road. And I can't fault people for wanting to get paid, but it's blatantly obvious that most of the open source products we all remember from the last 10 years have just been trying to do the plan of "1. give away, 2. ???, 3. PROFIT!". It's hard to feel sorry for them when a competent and well-known vendor comes along and offers a managed service of the open source thing, and they're left holding the bag. One weird thing about the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is that it made it obvious that mindshare and familiarity are almost mental pre-requisites of compatibility, even when the achieved compatibility is only partial. Clearly, Android was not the Java Platform, but yet a bazillion Java libraries worked anyway, and a bazillion programmers could pick up Java from a hodgepodge tutorial and crank out apps onto smartphones. In the end, this "programmer compatibility" was as key to Android's success as the fact that if you wanted to milk the gold rush of $1 games with ads, your only other comparable platform was Apple, who required you to own an expensive Mac. If they chose C++ or a brand-new language like (later) Dart, the barrier to entry would have been higher. In the end, everything boils down to "barrier to entry". If Zig achieves lasting relevance, it's unlikely that the design vision of its founders will be invalidated in the future. But getting to that future is far from easy.

throwaway823882 5y ago

If you really want to win as a business with OSS, stop writing OSS. Use it, contribute back to it, support existing projects rather than running your own, donate to important development work. Build your business on it. Don't build your business on the idea that nobody should be able to compete with you using it.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Open source is fine, single corporate entities controlling and owning the copyright is not. That was always a problem and Elastic, Mongo, and Redis are forcing the issue by unilaterally changing the license and doing a bait and switch on their loyal users and contributors. They have the right to do that. That's the problem. Linux, Mysql, Postgresql, etc. prosper and thrive with many companies collaborating and competing at the same time. These projects survive pretty dramatic changes to the companies backing them including bankruptcy, acquisition, hostile take overs, etc. There are many healthy open source projects like that. What they have in common is that individual developers rather than a single corporate entity owns the copyright. This makes changing the license impractical. The best you can do is fork the code base and then hope developers continue to work with your code base. IMHO distributed copyright ownership is far more important than the license text because it makes changing that text impractical. So Linux is fine despite the legal pitfalls (perceived or real) associated with GPL2. It's a take it or leave it deal. Most of the industry seems to have taken that deal and is actively contributing and has found ways to bundle proprietary code regardless. So Linux is fine. It's used by mutually hostile companies and even countries. That's the whole point. The OSS community is a neutral place where you can choose to collaborate. That makes the AWS fork of Elasticsearch interesting because they forked but don't insist on copyright transfers. They are going to do some legal checks to verify who you are and that you are legitimate. That's basically the nuclear option in OSS. It happened to Oracle when they took over Sun. Forking is a dangerous weapon and it tends to only be used when companies mess up the stewardship of their code bases. That's basically what just happened to Elastic. This means that over time, the ownership of the forked code base will get more distributed and include lots of Elastic, AWS, and (mostly) third party developers. Elastic employees will likely not contribute (or even be allowed to contribute) to the AWS fork. At least not while they remain employed at Elastic. However, Elastic might see some of their external contributors, former employees, and people from e.g. the Solr and Lucene communities contribute to the AWS fork instead of Elastic's "we own everything" non OSS copy. My guess is that this is exactly what AWS wants to happen. Drive a wedge between their contributors and Elastic. Never mind their motives, I actually think it is the right thing for the Elastic code base. And I say that as somebody who has been a long time fan, occasional contributor (and mildly disgruntled about Elastics recent moves) that has several friends, former colleagues, etc. working for them. It's an interesting experiment that doesn't cost much to run for AWS. I don't think AWS is going to do much to make a lot of change happen but I'm sure they are happy to accept pull requests. If that start happening in more volume, the right move might be to eventually move control to the Apache Foundation. Amazon wins, users win, developers win, oss wins, Elastic & its share holders lose. Might be unfair but I prefer using open source and not betting my career on proprietary code bases. If successful, there are other companies that need to worry about losing control in a similar way.

oolonthegreat 5y ago

had me in the first half ngl. then i was really taken aback when he just went on to totally dismiss FSF by saying it has failed so utterly and completely because... it doesn't do accessibility? because rms is "incapable of being kind"?