This is meaningless analogy; no one is pooping here.
Whats happening is they’re selling the same product; legally they’re entitled to do so.
They’re selling it in a deceptive (perhaps even legally dubious way), and thats not ok; but forget that, this has nothing really to do with being the good guys for open source and amazon being the bad guys, thats just the narrative that the elastic PR folk are putting out.
What’s happening here is being out-competed by people selling the same product, because despite being technically inferior (in my view) the competition can sell more of it more cheaply and not really care about the margins.
So... yes, I’m sympathetic, but this PR dance we go through every time pains me.
Just say it: we’re struggling. We cant compete with Amazon on equal terms, so we’re changing the license to force them to pay us royalties, or stop selling it.
You’re not doing it from the goodness of your heart, and if amazon wasn’t kicking your ass, you wouldn’t care, you’d just be laughing at them “trying to run a cloud version of elastic, ha!”. ...but amazon is very very good at that, actually, and very good at selling it.
Who’s going to judge you for not having amazons scale? No one; but they’re not being dicks, they’re doing their jobs, very successfully.
If you don’t like losing, that’s perfectly ok, no one does... but it doesnt make them bad, it just means they’re better at it than you.
Changing things to preserve your competitive edge is totally ok; but I don’t think its right to spin this us-them AWS is the evil empire narrative; youre in this situation because of the decisions you made, take a bit of humble pie and acknowledge responsibility for it as well.
Why do we need to forget the trademark infringement?
If Amazon is engaging in trademark infringement, lying about their connection\collaboration with the trademark holder, and including commercially licensed technology in an open source fork of a project, they are acting very poorly. Your argument of Amazon just being able to execute better falls flat if these facts are true and it means they're cheating, and that deserves some recognition.
Why do you feel the need to to free PR work for Amazon? Amazon has no respect for its business partners, let alone competitors or employees; why should the Elastic team have an obligation to not be mad? Mad is a human emotion.
Whats happening is they’re selling the same product; legally they’re entitled to do so.
They’re selling it in a deceptive (perhaps even legally dubious way), and thats not ok; but forget that, this has nothing really to do with being the good guys for open source and amazon being the bad guys, thats just the narrative that the elastic PR folk are putting out.
What’s happening here is being out-competed by people selling the same product, because despite being technically inferior (in my view) the competition can sell more of it more cheaply and not really care about the margins.
So... yes, I’m sympathetic, but this PR dance we go through every time pains me.
Just say it: we’re struggling. We cant compete with Amazon on equal terms, so we’re changing the license to force them to pay us royalties, or stop selling it.
You’re not doing it from the goodness of your heart, and if amazon wasn’t kicking your ass, you wouldn’t care, you’d just be laughing at them “trying to run a cloud version of elastic, ha!”. ...but amazon is very very good at that, actually, and very good at selling it.
Who’s going to judge you for not having amazons scale? No one; but they’re not being dicks, they’re doing their jobs, very successfully.
If you don’t like losing, that’s perfectly ok, no one does... but it doesnt make them bad, it just means they’re better at it than you.
Changing things to preserve your competitive edge is totally ok; but I don’t think its right to spin this us-them AWS is the evil empire narrative; youre in this situation because of the decisions you made, take a bit of humble pie and acknowledge responsibility for it as well.