[zucker42]

It's entirely possible that the relicense and now this will have the the precisely the opposite effect though. I'm sure the relicense was an attempt to increase Elastic NV's revenues from SaaS by locking out competitors from using their same codebase (from public financial filings, Elastic NV is not profitable so they are probably looking to become so). But open source also attracts new customers and improves the product by encouraging outside contribution. It could very well be that in 10 years we'll look back as this year that led to downfall of Elastic as a company. Or this move towards a different business model could succeed. But even if it does succeed, it's possible it would also succeed if they had kept the code open source.

The person you responded to didn't even assert that open source software is morally superior to alternatives, but instead said that by moving away from open source, Elastic is failing to understand its customers. His argument doesn't require any judgement about the morality of the relicense.

[altdataseller]

1) Is outside contribution really important going forward? Most of the Elasticsearch contributors are probably already employed by Elastic.

2) Open source doesn't attract new customers. There's nothing special about having software where anyone can contribute freely, that makes it attractive to customers. There is however, something special in making it free to download, setup and use in your own servers that makes it attractive. Which is still the case.

[thayne]

> There's nothing special about having software where anyone can contribute freely, that makes it attractive to customers.

That may be true for some customers, but certainly not all. Being able to fix a bug or add a feature yourself instead of having to wait for a vendor to do it for you can be very attractive. Especially if you need a feature that would never be accepted upstream, and you have the ability to use your own fork/patchset. That is something my company has done many times, and is a factor when choosing software.

[nijave]

>There's nothing special about having software where anyone can contribute freely, that makes it attractive to customers

Community, support, acquisition, extendability and code quality.

Community/Support -- lots of documentation available for free, generally multiple vendors that offer paid support, free access to updates. Don't have any data but I suspect finding people to support/run it is easier (skills are more marketable and easier to learn on your own)

Acquisition -- eg less of a vetting/auditing process for places where that matters (you can handle vetting the code and supporting company separately)

Extendability -- you can hire developers to add features or integrate without being subject to the owner's timeline e.g. you don't have to plead for features

Code quality -- being open, it's more apparent if the software has a high number of bugs or large amount of technical debt that could lead to instability. Usually the issue trackers for OSS are open to everyone

These apply more to large companies with dedicated teams

[altdataseller]

3 of those 4 still apply to Elasticsearch. Mongo, another example has the same license and loads of docs freely available. You can still hire devs to add any missing features to Mongo (albeit you will have to fork it). You can still view their issues in GitHub too

[dantheman]

Open source does matter.

[atonse]

It’s moves like this that have made me go from largely neutral in this fight to actively hating elastic.co.

It’s their fault for not differentiating their offering enough.

When I looked at logz.io, I spent hours trying to get it to work and ultimately gave up, irritated that my seemingly plain vanilla use case (send ubuntu journald logs to ES) wasn’t as straightforward as I would’ve liked. (I’m aware they aren’t affiliated with elastic, just saying there might have been an opportunity for them here)

If elastic had a way for me to blindly copy paste things into an ubuntu server that allowed me to see all my systemd logs, I would’ve happily paid them. Instead it was an endless maze of having to figure out beats vs logstash, finding a journalbeat whose documentation says it’s beta, etc.

Yet ultimately the only thing that worked was AWS ES service hooked up to vector.dev’s agent. And boy does it work amazingly well. And it’s not like Amazon is doing anything special.

It’s on them for not having differentiated and made things drop dead simple. Now they seem to want to play dirty like Oracle.

[nijave]

People give Amazon flack but they offer solid support with reasonable escalation when you have an issue. Imo it's a bit sad Elasti Co couldn't out compete ES on their own product.

When AWS released ES you couldn't even dynamically scale cluster nodes and you had to use Amazon's special library to sign requests for IAM

There are other companies that run curated & managed SaaS on providers like AWS, GCP, etc that offer better services than the native ones. For instance, MariaDB SkySQL offers DBAs with their product and will help tune the DB for the workload vs AWS where they offer limited app-level support outside suggesting things like Performance Insights. When I looked, SkySQL was also a bit cheaper than AWS RDS for comparable hardware