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Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

(lwn.net)
275 points pabs3 | 2 comments | 06 Sep 25 05:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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cycomanic ◴[06 Sep 25 19:40 UTC] No.45152264[source]▶
>Elasticsearch contributors were Elastic employees; that, unsurprisingly, did not change afterward. OpenSearch started with no strong contributor base, so had to build its community from scratch. As a result, the project has been dominated by Amazon contributors ever since

So in a way the "rug pull" achieved what it wanted, amazon is now contributing to development.

I think discussing these "rug pulls" without discussing the destructive habit of many large companies to only profit without giving back misses the mark. Any community where there is a large imbalance between the ones doing the work and the ones profiting will over the long run become unstable.

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1. thayne ◴[06 Sep 25 22:22 UTC] No.45153433[source]▶
It didn't achieve what Elastic wanted. It didn't lead to more people paying for Elastic licenses, it lead to users switching from Elasticsearch to a fork. And they eventually backpedaled and relicensed again under the AGPL.

Now, it might be better for the Open/elasticsearch ecosystem, because AWS is contributing more, and possibly the competition drives both Opensearch and Elasticsearch to be better. But on the other hand, there is now a split between two incompatible products, and Elastic has certainly lost some trust.

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2. dwood_dev ◴[07 Sep 25 03:10 UTC] No.45155078[source]▶
Elastic might be fine in the long run. But everyone I know(sample size <20 orgs) migrated to OpenSearch and never looked back. They were never interested in running Elastic in a separate cloud or running it themselves, and that's what a lot of these DbaaS providers have to overcome.

It's already annoying to create your first terraform module for a new AWS managed service, but they then want the users to have the extra complexity of VPC peering/privatelink/vpn and then manage that lifecycle as well.