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Nuh-uh. Elastic made millions selling stuff on top of open source that was licensed permissively to create a market. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.


> millions

A company turned a modest profit? Say it isn't so!

The guy who wrote ElasticSearch created a company to finance the development of the project. For most of their history, they released their source code under a permissive license in good faith. Amazon abused that good faith, so now Elastic continues to make the source code open and license it freely to customers and the open source community (just not competitors).

I've got no beef with Amazon, but you're kidding yourself if you compare them with Elastic in terms of ambition, greed, commitment to open source, etc.


Basically sounds like Redhat was the last Redhat. Docker, Mesosphere, ElasticSearch, Aquia etc be damned?


Open source and venture capital do not mix well. I’m not sure I can think of any positive examples outside of OS vendors (Redhat), but there are many negative examples come to mind, going all the way back to Eazel.

These debates go back decades.


Open source work for hire can be a lifestyle business (it's not free until you agree to write it), but VC money wants some kind of sustained competitive advantage that drives huge scale.




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