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A comment on AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Parent comment

Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by lmm on Friday January 22, 2021 @04:50AM (#25870098)
> Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich.

On the contrary, the commons gets the version of ElasticSearch that is most useful to end users. If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.

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Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by tsimionescu on Friday January 22, 2021 @05:36AM (#25870383)
> If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.

Not really, because Elastic doesn't get money from people using their free product. So, Elastic could theoretically go bankrupt even while providing an arbitrarily more popular ElasticSearch version.

AWS on the other hand is charging money for using their service, so they only need to compete with Elastic on the hosted version of ES. If their fork of ES is very hard to host on your own, that's a net benefit to AWS, regardless of how easy Elastic's fork is in the same scenarios - neither company is making money off the non-hosted version.

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Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by pydry on Friday January 22, 2021 @05:31AM (#25870359)
ES has to provide a much better service to win. Amazon can use their market power and vendor lock in to drive adoption of a worse service and squeeze out a better ES.

Network effects are great for behemoths but not so good for consumers.

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Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by waheoo on Friday January 22, 2021 @08:33AM (#25871492)
This is a job for antitrust, not licensing.
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Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by pydry on Friday January 22, 2021 @09:56AM (#25872121)
It sure would be nice if the DOJ in an administration sponsored by Amazon can be relied upon to prosecute an antitrust against Amazon.

I'm skeptical though.

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Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana by bccdee on Friday January 22, 2021 @02:44PM (#25875445)
Well, it's actually a job for Elastic, since their primary concern is ensuring that they continue to turn a profit. But I'm certainly not opposed to antitrust.
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