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Dunno about Redis, but for Elastic I still feel sorry for them being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon. On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, becau

Dunno about Redis, but for Elastic I still feel sorry for them being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon. On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. Amazon is more than willing to sell you their Elasticsearch fork at a loss as long as they can eventually recoup the losses when Elastic inevitably dies. At which point they will naturally abandon the open sources side of their fork and continue development in private, at a much slower rate, while doubling the price of the AWS service. At which point you’ll have no choice but the pay up, cause there aren’t any competitors left.

andrepd 1y ago
I sure wish I lived in a world where anti-competitive regulators weren't a joke.
- ikiris 1y ago
  What exactly do you think is anti-competitive about offering an open source product as a service?
  - palata 1y ago
    Being in a position where you can copy anything and crush competition is a problem. In terms of antitrust, I believe that if you could prove that Amazon forked and offered the service with the intent to crush the competition, it would be downright illegal. A current case is Meta: back then, Zuckerberg was happily writing (internally) that Facebook needed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat to prevent them from ever competing. This is anti-competitive. This post explains it well: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taki...
    - growse 1y ago
      They can't "copy anything". They can only copy what they're explicitly legally allowed to. Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it.
      - palata 1y ago
        I meant they have the resources to copy any product in a way that will crush the competition. As in, they can build an alternative to an open source project, offer it for free (i.e. at a loss) for years until they capture the market, and then start enshittifying. This is an antitrust problem. > Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it. Yeah at the very least they should have started with a copyleft licence.
        growse 1y ago
        Ah I see what you mean. Yes, agree. But that's orthogonal to OSS and like you say is a reg issue.
        ikiris 1y ago
        Its really hard to make an argument that someone is selling under market to try to corner it when the alternative is free as well.
        palata 1y ago
        Well if there is a company paying salaries from it, it's not exactly free.
    - ignaloidas 1y ago
      Companies that build themselves on selling open source software put themselves in the position where anyone else can copy them and compete with them on price, and price alone. This is clearly the disadvantage of open source. It brings plenty of advantages, which is why people do it - but you can't have only the advantages and no disadvantages of open source. Open sourcing your product is a risky investment, and as with all risky investments, it might pay out, or it might not.
      - palata 1y ago
        As I said before, I believe that using permissive licences is a bad idea. I have seen multiple projects choosing a permissive licence as a way to compete against an already established copyleft project, just because it's easier to get adopted by companies. I find it unfair but also a bit stupid: by using a permissive licence, they allow anyone to compete with them with a proprietary fork. Still, there is an antitrust question (that is slightly orthogonal): if TooBigTech can offer a similar product at a loss (e.g. for free) until they capture the market, then that's a problem. And they can only do it because they are too big, and that is an antitrust issue IMO.
lolinder 1y ago
> being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon Can you elaborate on what exactly Amazon did to Elastic? I read all of their blog posts and the only thing I really got out of it was "they sell hosted Elastic cheaper than we can", which is hardly surprising given that Elastic really just packages up AWS/GCP/Azure cloud infra. That doesn't have to be AWS selling at a loss, AWS just doesn't need to pay itself. And by all accounts I've read Amazon did contribute back to Elastic development up until Elastic switched the license on them. At that point they forked, but it's hard to blame them when they were deliberately locked out of the original project. Most of the arguments I've seen against Amazon with regard to Elastic have tended to be very vibe-based. Amazon bullied Elastic because that's always what Amazon does! It's plausible, but it's also plausible that Elastic thought they could use Amazon's terrible reputation as a weapon against it without there being any substance.
- osigurdson 1y ago
  My understanding is the dispute was mostly about the trademark. Here is a link: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws (original license change in 2021, not the most recent one).
- trgn 1y ago
  Elastic was in the same bind as every company which writes opensource. There's no way to monetize it when a hyperscaler can sell it at much thinner margins. Either the product is donated to a foundation, or the parent company dies. While amazon technically wasn't doing anything "wrong", they're effectively squeezing the oxygen out of the ecosystem. The parameters of the problem are relatively new. SAAS - which is now the norm for how software should be delivered, and opensource - which is old - just don't mix, the incentive structure is completely misaligned. Companies are prodding to see how to get out of this conundrum. Mongodb set the tone with the SSPL, and other midcap just kind of followed suit, what else was there to do, what other approaches could have been taken? Now, as the fallout starts to become clear, there's just a lot more information now on what works and doesn't, and companies are pivoting. There's no vibes about it, it's brutal reality out there, big tech is strangling the market, and the small guys are figuring a way out, first trying one way, now another.
rank0 1y ago
Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software): > On September 16, 2024, the Linux Foundation and Amazon Web Services announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.[15][16] Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation. OpenSearch is Apache License 2.0. You can do whatever you want to/with it. How are Elastic the good guys in your mind?
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. And they were using an open source piece of software, but scaling it with closed source secret sauce on top of that. The license was saying they'd have to open up their secret sauce or pay, and their response was to leave the table instead. OpenSearch still lacks tons of really basic functionality from Elastisearch, and watching how far ahead Elasticsearch got as a product shows how much free lunch Amazon was getting... and how much they actually cared about the product when it was time for them to put their money where their mouth was (despite AWS pulling Elastic's yearly revenue every 4 days). Elasticsearch has generally matured like it has a passionate builder with a vision. They pushed on two major fronts (LLMs and Observability) and managed to execute effectively without letting product quality slip. Meanwhile OpenSearch is still the place where tickets requesting 3+ year old ES functionality go to die. - I'm honestly on the opposite side: how is the hyperscaler offering a strictly inferior product with closed extensions and still managing to eat the main developers' lunches for the sole reason they already have sales pipelines established not the bad guy? I guess I'm not really someone who believes in infinite scaling rules: something that can work at the individual scale doesn't have to work when hyperscalers do it (like selling hosted clusters)
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. Irrelevant. Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services. That became a big part of their business model as it drove up it's adoption rates and popularity. If Elastic kept things like Elasticsearch proprietary, they would hardly have the same adoption rates. You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?
motorest 1y ago
> On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. That's specious reasoning at best. The whole point of FLOSS is that anyone is free to use it how they see fit. Whether it's a hobbyist doing a pet project or a FANG using it as their core infrastructure, they are granted the right to use it how they see fit. That's exactly why they started to use it to begin with. Isn't it? When a random corporation decides to pull the rug on the established user base expecting to profit from the pain of migrating existing services, it is not the user base who is the bad actor.
- zwaps 1y ago
  Aws killing off an oss company by shady anti competitive tactics and inherenting their code for free is certainly not in the spirit of oss So if you are only saying it is their right, well, as per know CLA it is well within the oss companies right to change license for new version You also knew this when you started using it. Why do you call it a rug pull now when you knew it could happen?
paulddraper 1y ago
How useful if you can’t run it yourself, or for others? That’s the whole idea, is it not?

andrepd 1y ago

I sure wish I lived in a world where anti-competitive regulators weren't a joke.

ikiris 1y ago
What exactly do you think is anti-competitive about offering an open source product as a service?
- palata 1y ago
  Being in a position where you can copy anything and crush competition is a problem. In terms of antitrust, I believe that if you could prove that Amazon forked and offered the service with the intent to crush the competition, it would be downright illegal. A current case is Meta: back then, Zuckerberg was happily writing (internally) that Facebook needed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat to prevent them from ever competing. This is anti-competitive. This post explains it well: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taki...
  - growse 1y ago
    They can't "copy anything". They can only copy what they're explicitly legally allowed to. Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it.
    - palata 1y ago
      I meant they have the resources to copy any product in a way that will crush the competition. As in, they can build an alternative to an open source project, offer it for free (i.e. at a loss) for years until they capture the market, and then start enshittifying. This is an antitrust problem. > Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it. Yeah at the very least they should have started with a copyleft licence.
      - growse 1y ago
        Ah I see what you mean. Yes, agree. But that's orthogonal to OSS and like you say is a reg issue.
      - ikiris 1y ago
        Its really hard to make an argument that someone is selling under market to try to corner it when the alternative is free as well.
        palata 1y ago
        Well if there is a company paying salaries from it, it's not exactly free.
  - ignaloidas 1y ago
    Companies that build themselves on selling open source software put themselves in the position where anyone else can copy them and compete with them on price, and price alone. This is clearly the disadvantage of open source. It brings plenty of advantages, which is why people do it - but you can't have only the advantages and no disadvantages of open source. Open sourcing your product is a risky investment, and as with all risky investments, it might pay out, or it might not.
    - palata 1y ago
      As I said before, I believe that using permissive licences is a bad idea. I have seen multiple projects choosing a permissive licence as a way to compete against an already established copyleft project, just because it's easier to get adopted by companies. I find it unfair but also a bit stupid: by using a permissive licence, they allow anyone to compete with them with a proprietary fork. Still, there is an antitrust question (that is slightly orthogonal): if TooBigTech can offer a similar product at a loss (e.g. for free) until they capture the market, then that's a problem. And they can only do it because they are too big, and that is an antitrust issue IMO.

lolinder 1y ago

> being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon Can you elaborate on what exactly Amazon did to Elastic? I read all of their blog posts and the only thing I really got out of it was "they sell hosted Elastic cheaper than we can", which is hardly surprising given that Elastic really just packages up AWS/GCP/Azure cloud infra. That doesn't have to be AWS selling at a loss, AWS just doesn't need to pay itself. And by all accounts I've read Amazon did contribute back to Elastic development up until Elastic switched the license on them. At that point they forked, but it's hard to blame them when they were deliberately locked out of the original project. Most of the arguments I've seen against Amazon with regard to Elastic have tended to be very vibe-based. Amazon bullied Elastic because that's always what Amazon does! It's plausible, but it's also plausible that Elastic thought they could use Amazon's terrible reputation as a weapon against it without there being any substance.

osigurdson 1y ago
My understanding is the dispute was mostly about the trademark. Here is a link: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws (original license change in 2021, not the most recent one).
trgn 1y ago
Elastic was in the same bind as every company which writes opensource. There's no way to monetize it when a hyperscaler can sell it at much thinner margins. Either the product is donated to a foundation, or the parent company dies. While amazon technically wasn't doing anything "wrong", they're effectively squeezing the oxygen out of the ecosystem. The parameters of the problem are relatively new. SAAS - which is now the norm for how software should be delivered, and opensource - which is old - just don't mix, the incentive structure is completely misaligned. Companies are prodding to see how to get out of this conundrum. Mongodb set the tone with the SSPL, and other midcap just kind of followed suit, what else was there to do, what other approaches could have been taken? Now, as the fallout starts to become clear, there's just a lot more information now on what works and doesn't, and companies are pivoting. There's no vibes about it, it's brutal reality out there, big tech is strangling the market, and the small guys are figuring a way out, first trying one way, now another.

rank0 1y ago

Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software): > On September 16, 2024, the Linux Foundation and Amazon Web Services announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.[15][16] Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation. OpenSearch is Apache License 2.0. You can do whatever you want to/with it. How are Elastic the good guys in your mind?

BoorishBears 1y ago
Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. And they were using an open source piece of software, but scaling it with closed source secret sauce on top of that. The license was saying they'd have to open up their secret sauce or pay, and their response was to leave the table instead. OpenSearch still lacks tons of really basic functionality from Elastisearch, and watching how far ahead Elasticsearch got as a product shows how much free lunch Amazon was getting... and how much they actually cared about the product when it was time for them to put their money where their mouth was (despite AWS pulling Elastic's yearly revenue every 4 days). Elasticsearch has generally matured like it has a passionate builder with a vision. They pushed on two major fronts (LLMs and Observability) and managed to execute effectively without letting product quality slip. Meanwhile OpenSearch is still the place where tickets requesting 3+ year old ES functionality go to die. - I'm honestly on the opposite side: how is the hyperscaler offering a strictly inferior product with closed extensions and still managing to eat the main developers' lunches for the sole reason they already have sales pipelines established not the bad guy? I guess I'm not really someone who believes in infinite scaling rules: something that can work at the individual scale doesn't have to work when hyperscalers do it (like selling hosted clusters)
- motorest 1y ago
  > Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. Irrelevant. Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services. That became a big part of their business model as it drove up it's adoption rates and popularity. If Elastic kept things like Elasticsearch proprietary, they would hardly have the same adoption rates. You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?

motorest 1y ago

> On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. That's specious reasoning at best. The whole point of FLOSS is that anyone is free to use it how they see fit. Whether it's a hobbyist doing a pet project or a FANG using it as their core infrastructure, they are granted the right to use it how they see fit. That's exactly why they started to use it to begin with. Isn't it? When a random corporation decides to pull the rug on the established user base expecting to profit from the pain of migrating existing services, it is not the user base who is the bad actor.

zwaps 1y ago
Aws killing off an oss company by shady anti competitive tactics and inherenting their code for free is certainly not in the spirit of oss So if you are only saying it is their right, well, as per know CLA it is well within the oss companies right to change license for new version You also knew this when you started using it. Why do you call it a rug pull now when you knew it could happen?

paulddraper 1y ago

How useful if you can’t run it yourself, or for others? That’s the whole idea, is it not?