Re:Open Distro for Elasticsearch
by houseofzeus on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @01:32PM
(#19370739)
It is not obvious that this action is actually in the best interest of open source. It's obvious that it's in the best interest of Elastic, but there is nothing intrinsically special about them that means they are the best stewards for the code until the end of time itself versus Amazon or anyone else for that matter.
The ability to fork in open source is a feature not a bug and ultimately the community of users and developers of these projects will decide what works best for them. In this case it isn't even a fork, it's new plugins that the community can consume under a FOSS license.
Elastic's business model is entirely predicated on a symbiotic relationship with the open source project. Amazon doesn't have any business incentive to be the primary sponsor of the open source project; certainly not in the long term. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Re:Open Distro for Elasticsearch
by houseofzeus on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:02PM
(#19373523)
At that point it becomes about the nuance of defining what is really best for open source. Is it long term maintenance of ElasticSearch as it exists today, in which case I agree Elastic has the best incentive to keep it going, or is it net new open source code in which case Amazon is bringing new plugins to the table. I suspect in practice this is more of a spectrum than an obvious either/or.
Given that and the fact that Elastic is the primary sponsor of the ElasticSearch open source project, it is obvious that this action actually is in the best interest of open source, as it allows Elastic to continue sponsoring ElasticSearch.
Most of the criticism of Elastic in this thread seems to be predicated on the purist notion that proprietary software is the antithesis of open source software. That's obviously untrue, and we really need to disillusion ourselves of this.