Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform To Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

An anonymous reader shares a report: Elastic isn't the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar 'rule changes' designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services. In his blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), argued that by making part of its product suite proprietary, Elastic was betraying the core principles of the open source community. 'Customers must be able to trust that open source projects stay open,' Cockcroft wrote. 'When important open source projects that AWS and our customers depend on begin restricting access, changing licensing terms, or intermingling open source and proprietary software, we will invest to sustain the open source project and community.'

AWS's announcement did not attract the immediate attention of the Democratic presidential candidates or the growing cadre of antitrust activists who have recently set their sights on Amazon. But in the world of open source and free software, where picayune changes in arcane language can spark the internet equivalent of the Hundred Years War, the release of AWS's Open Distro for Elasticsearch launched a heated debate. Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon's move a 'hostile takeover' of Elastic's business. Steven O'Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the 'existential threat' that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose.

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