Item — HN Reader

meh. There is nothing new under the sun. There have been several identical losses in FOSS. The bigger they are the better when this happens because there is enough volume and momentum to force a new FOSS branch. If it is a "tiny" FOSS piece, there are not enough champions to fight.

> So AWS was directly competing with Elastic, but *not taking the same responsibility for the open source project or investing in it as heavily as Elastic was*.

Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. They chose to branch, and contribute it back. Several of the fixes and improvements are from AWS. Did the author want an IBM/CentOS takeover? Or, deny AWS to use Elastic but pretend to be FOSS?

2 comments

Before a couple years ago (when elastic started digging deeper into the paid addon realm), I don't think they could've forked and been able to keep enough compatibility / community around their fork to make it as useful and compatible with everything Elasticsearch did.

But today, I think they have a 50/50 shot of the Amazon-forked ES version becoming the de-facto standard, and Elastic's fading into obscurity.

> Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes.

I don't understand this part. AWS doesn't have anything internally that would compete against ELK. Unless you are taking about AWS buying ELK flat out. But then Azure and GCP can fork ELK and keep selling the service. Is my assumption incorrect?

Yes: AWS has launched many "native" offerings to compete with the market's open source product, only to give in to demand and launch a managed version of the open source product (CloudSearch/ElasticSearch, ECS/Kubernetes, SQS/ActiveMQ, DynamoDB/MongoDB, etc)