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How truly far we've fallen that people refer to using open source software— literally software given away for other people to use, exploitation. Gonna go tell

by Spivak 2y ago

How truly far we've fallen that people refer to using open source software— literally software given away for other people to use, exploitation. Gonna go tell those freeloading kids who take my candy on Halloween that they're exploiting me unless they contribute to next year's candy bowl.

prepend 2y ago
I think the logic goes something like: 1) Amazon is powerful, thus bad 2) we’re discussing Amazon 3) find something potentially bad 4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1 It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.
- arp242 2y ago
  This is not the argument at all. Software (open source or otherwise) is not created for free; devs gotta eat, pay rent, etc. The business model of Elastic and similar is to offer a SaaS. They feel that Amazon offering a SaaS is directly competing with their business model, and because half the world runs on AWS it's not too different from Windows shipping IE back in the day killing Netscape. Elastic feels Amazon is eating their pie. Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.
  - prepend 2y ago
    Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation. It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that. But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time. If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. It’s quite simple. But it’s ridiculous, I think, to claim Amazon is doing anything wrong by abiding by the license. Elastic shouldn’t feel that Amazon is eating their pie because they chose to put their pie out with a “free pie for everyone” under ASL. If they feel bad, that may be so, but their feelings aren’t as important as what their intellect should set up.
    - arp242 2y ago
      I'm not really interested in discussing the merits of the argument (or lack thereof); I've done this a dozen times over the last few years and I have no interest in repeating it. I am just saying your post hugely misrepresented the argument. That you think the argument is a load of bollocks changes nothing about that.
      - prepend 2y ago
        It’s unfortunate you don’t want to discuss the merits of my argument. Not to give out advice, but if your aim isn’t to learn and debate and change minds and be changed, what’s your point? Do you just want to make noise or something? I would like to properly characterize the argument to understand all sides. Because I want more great software to exist in the world. My belief is that the way to do this is to have people create and share, of their own free will. And I want to learn if there’s a better way.
        arp242 2y ago
        > Do you just want to make noise or something? So correcting your enormous straw-man of misinformation is "noise"? Oh just sod off with your bollocks.
    - lucianbr 2y ago
      Funny, you're doing exactly what you accused others of: defend Amazon with argument 1. Ah, argument 1 completely misses the point? Well, just defend Amazon with argument 2. Say no word about how you missed the point originally, because the only important thing is to defend Amazon.
    - jen20 2y ago
      > If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. So maybe they should stop releasing future contributions as OSS? Oh, wait…
      - prepend 2y ago
  - cortesoft 2y ago
    This is kinda funny, because I am arguing both sides a bit here in my reply to different comments, mostly because I am not actually sure what my final belief on this topic is. But maybe we shouldn’t fund open source development via companies whose entire revenue is selling support for that product? I feel like my favorite OSS projects are ones that are created and maintained by developers working for companies whose business model is based on something entirely separate from the OSS project, but who need the OSS project to support that business. They, and many other companies who have the same need, pay developers to work on the project so they can get what they need from it, but they keep it open source because it isn’t core to their business and being OSS makes it easier and cheaper to maintain. In this way, there is no conflict of interest between the open source needs and the companies business model.
samspenc 2y ago
I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events: - ElasticSearch was open-source - Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service - ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license - Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch - (Few years pass) - Amazon and ElasticSearch are now buddies I think GP is talking about the events that transpired a while back before Amazon and ElasticSearch made up.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  What, when Amazon forked an open source project, as was allowed by the license, and continued to support that open source license even when the original company abandoned theirs? I’m not an Amazon fan, but they did the same thing (forking) that many others do, and they did it perfectly legally according to the license.
  - mx_03 2y ago
    Yes, doesnt Elasticsearch do the same thing with Lucene? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-difference-between-lucene-and-elasticsearch https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-dif... AWS just offered a convenience layer over ElasticSearch
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    It's a bit more complicated than that because Elastic during all of this had some of the plugins in Amazon's OpenDistro (now OpenSearch) project recycling proprietary code from Elastic's commercial, source available codebase under OpenDistro's permissive Apache-2.0 license. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-including-amazon-elasticsearch-service-open-distro-and-others https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
    - ok_dad 2y ago
      Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did. I get it, Amazon is bad, I agree they are too, but not because they’re malicious, Amazon is bad because they’re too large to compete on level ground with anyone other than Google or Microsoft in the cloud. My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps. At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They don’t even go around acting all superior like those “open source” corps do about it.
sanderjd 2y ago
I think the word "using" here is doing a lot of work. When talking about an entire application, I think of "using" it as being, well, using the application. But what I think we're talking about here is "using" the application code by selling it as your own product. I recognize that "open source" is ok with that second way of "using" the code, but I do think it's meaningfully different.

by Spivak 2y ago

prepend 2y ago

I think the logic goes something like: 1) Amazon is powerful, thus bad 2) we’re discussing Amazon 3) find something potentially bad 4) use confusing and negative language to throw shade to discredit my target because #1 It’s really frustrating to experience these types of conversation. People explicitly choose to donate their work to the world under an open source license. Complaining they someone uses without contributing is so stupid it defies belief. It’s like complaining because Amazon only pays $5 for a Big Mac when that is the posted price.

arp242 2y ago
This is not the argument at all. Software (open source or otherwise) is not created for free; devs gotta eat, pay rent, etc. The business model of Elastic and similar is to offer a SaaS. They feel that Amazon offering a SaaS is directly competing with their business model, and because half the world runs on AWS it's not too different from Windows shipping IE back in the day killing Netscape. Elastic feels Amazon is eating their pie. Lots can be sad about a lot of this. You can disagree with a lot of this. There have been a million discussion on HN and I don't really feel like repeating it all. But you've spectacularly misunderstood the argument.
- prepend 2y ago
  Developers willingly choose to donate their work under an OSS license. So yes there are costs and thankfully people release without the expectation. It’s perfectly fine to sell your software. There’s trillions of dollars worth of companies that do that. But I make sure I eat through other methods so I’m able to donate my time. If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. It’s quite simple. But it’s ridiculous, I think, to claim Amazon is doing anything wrong by abiding by the license. Elastic shouldn’t feel that Amazon is eating their pie because they chose to put their pie out with a “free pie for everyone” under ASL. If they feel bad, that may be so, but their feelings aren’t as important as what their intellect should set up.
  - arp242 2y ago
    I'm not really interested in discussing the merits of the argument (or lack thereof); I've done this a dozen times over the last few years and I have no interest in repeating it. I am just saying your post hugely misrepresented the argument. That you think the argument is a load of bollocks changes nothing about that.
    - prepend 2y ago
      It’s unfortunate you don’t want to discuss the merits of my argument. Not to give out advice, but if your aim isn’t to learn and debate and change minds and be changed, what’s your point? Do you just want to make noise or something? I would like to properly characterize the argument to understand all sides. Because I want more great software to exist in the world. My belief is that the way to do this is to have people create and share, of their own free will. And I want to learn if there’s a better way.
      - arp242 2y ago
        > Do you just want to make noise or something? So correcting your enormous straw-man of misinformation is "noise"? Oh just sod off with your bollocks.
  - lucianbr 2y ago
    Funny, you're doing exactly what you accused others of: defend Amazon with argument 1. Ah, argument 1 completely misses the point? Well, just defend Amazon with argument 2. Say no word about how you missed the point originally, because the only important thing is to defend Amazon.
  - jen20 2y ago
    > If Elastic doesn’t want Amazon to use their software, then they shouldn’t release it as OSS. So maybe they should stop releasing future contributions as OSS? Oh, wait…
    - prepend 2y ago
- cortesoft 2y ago
  This is kinda funny, because I am arguing both sides a bit here in my reply to different comments, mostly because I am not actually sure what my final belief on this topic is. But maybe we shouldn’t fund open source development via companies whose entire revenue is selling support for that product? I feel like my favorite OSS projects are ones that are created and maintained by developers working for companies whose business model is based on something entirely separate from the OSS project, but who need the OSS project to support that business. They, and many other companies who have the same need, pay developers to work on the project so they can get what they need from it, but they keep it open source because it isn’t core to their business and being OSS makes it easier and cheaper to maintain. In this way, there is no conflict of interest between the open source needs and the companies business model.

samspenc 2y ago

I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events: - ElasticSearch was open-source - Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service - ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license - Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch - (Few years pass) - Amazon and ElasticSearch are now buddies I think GP is talking about the events that transpired a while back before Amazon and ElasticSearch made up.

ok_dad 2y ago
What, when Amazon forked an open source project, as was allowed by the license, and continued to support that open source license even when the original company abandoned theirs? I’m not an Amazon fan, but they did the same thing (forking) that many others do, and they did it perfectly legally according to the license.
- mx_03 2y ago
  Yes, doesnt Elasticsearch do the same thing with Lucene? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-difference-between-lucene-and-elasticsearch https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27793721/what-is-the-dif... AWS just offered a convenience layer over ElasticSearch
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than that because Elastic during all of this had some of the plugins in Amazon's OpenDistro (now OpenSearch) project recycling proprietary code from Elastic's commercial, source available codebase under OpenDistro's permissive Apache-2.0 license. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-including-amazon-elasticsearch-service-open-distro-and-others https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...
  - ok_dad 2y ago
    Your link specifically says Amazon didn’t steal the code, some German company did. I get it, Amazon is bad, I agree they are too, but not because they’re malicious, Amazon is bad because they’re too large to compete on level ground with anyone other than Google or Microsoft in the cloud. My peeve is with the companies like elastic that claim they are for open source but they try to prevent the open source from being used as such. It’s a scam to attract developers who care about open source. If I made code I wanted to be open source, I’d understand that means everyone can use it, like a public road or a public park. That includes big corps. At least Amazon actually supports the Apache licensed OpenSearch product! They don’t even go around acting all superior like those “open source” corps do about it.

sanderjd 2y ago

I think the word "using" here is doing a lot of work. When talking about an entire application, I think of "using" it as being, well, using the application. But what I think we're talking about here is "using" the application code by selling it as your own product. I recognize that "open source" is ok with that second way of "using" the code, but I do think it's meaningfully different.