> Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.
The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. ElasticSearch is trying to remove what makes open source appealing to businesses. No one wants to build their infrastructure on something with expensive IBM/Oracle-costing support. Basically, from now on, ElasticSearch has removed that benefit from their product and businesses are at risk. It's now much less appealing... is the remaining niche profitable? Only time will tell.
Note, why businesses find open-source appealing is not why developers find it appealing, or private individuals.
I'll be honest, I've never heard a single business say the reason they use open source is because support is commodified. It's generally cost or functionality, and quite frankly they want a go-to support expert, not a list of support options.
Redhat didn't become huge because people had all sorts of options for third party support. In fact, I can't say I've ever come across a single enterprise who: uses third party support for their RHEL installed base, has asked for third party support for their RHEL installed base.
CentOS and WhiteBox Linux were 3rd party sources of RHEL and to a large part Linux distros are interchangeable which makes them commodities. Not perfect commodities, but still close. RHEL with subscription vs Debian & burdening yours ops guys are choices available. VMS has no such choice.
But he didn't say: businesses use open source because they can find compatible binaries from multiple entities. He said it commodified support. CentOS and WhiteBox never promised or offered enterprise support agreements that I'm aware of. And if they did, I can't say I ever ran across anyone utilizing it in the wild.
I feel like I just said this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25796849
The main value of open source to businesses is that support is truly commodified and there is no one with a stranglehold on it. ElasticSearch is trying to remove what makes open source appealing to businesses. No one wants to build their infrastructure on something with expensive IBM/Oracle-costing support. Basically, from now on, ElasticSearch has removed that benefit from their product and businesses are at risk. It's now much less appealing... is the remaining niche profitable? Only time will tell.
Note, why businesses find open-source appealing is not why developers find it appealing, or private individuals.