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XylakantHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

They did profit from being open source, being based on apache lucene

… They did profit from being open source, being based on apache lucene. They profited from the work that the community did for them - I used to be part of the folks running one of the user groups. I was on their IRC channel, helping other folks adopt ES, for free, because it was open source. And they did flip those folks a finger and went and made it closed source because they ended up having a spat between businesses. It's their code, I get it and they get to do whatever they decide. But Elastic is very much not a paragon of open source virtue in shining armor. They, too, have placed business interest before community interest.

Original discussionThe Rust Implementation of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust218 source comments · at import
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fractalbHN

> Amazon was not even making a closed source fork of ES, they were merely offering managed hosting of the open source version of ES. That sounds even worse. Whatever happened, ES didn't gain anything by having an open business friendly license (as it appears from the events). > As Elastic is making money by selling hosting, they did not like the (admittedly unfair) competition from AWS, they decided to stop doing Open Source. That's sad. ES went from "business friendly opensource license" to "closed source". Now there's no open-source code at all (from ES). Some restrictive open-source code is better than closed source. Always. > And actually now, AWS is maintaining an open source fork of ES... I think, it's not out of generosity. It has customers.

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fractalbHN

Right. Elastic didn't do it for generosity, either. But your point that ES got benefited from the business friendly license and then made it closed source just supports my point that businesses will just maintain their forked-version rather than putting it out there in the open. I'm all in for open-source software, but I'm just making a point that business-friendly open source licenses don't necessarily beget more open source code. Sometimes a restrictive open source license like (GPL) is far better than a business-friendly license for open source community. Edit: grammar, spellings

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tsimionescuHN

> And they did flip those folks a finger and went and made it closed source because they ended up having a spat between businesses. I don't think it's fair to say ES is now closed source. It's no longer FOSS nor GPL-compatible, but the source is very much still open, and nothing much has changed for many users of the self-hosted versions (source: shipping a proprietary appliance-like product with ES as a component, with full legal checking that we are in compliance of the license).

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