| They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly. Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years. You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen. I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition. As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it. |
Just like you might imagine a leech could evolve some attribute to help defend its host against other predators.
I can't speak on the elastic vs open search topic though - does being part of the fiefdom of amazon work as a survival strategy?