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I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wh
by rpdillon 5y ago
I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wholly inappropriate. Third-party hosting of open source is the norm, not the exception, in my experience.
The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch.
So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry.
[0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting