On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
Why write emotionally charged letter instead of one backed with facts? Amazon is claiming [1][2] that Elastic has been intentionally unclear about what part of Elastic stack is open source vs proprietary. It would best serve Elastic if they respond to that with facts.<p>If the claims are true, and done intentionally, it&#x27;s a really bad move on part of Elastic. The ambiguity around licensing hurts all their users and not just Amazon.<p>[1] &quot;Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. While an Apache 2.0 licensed download is still available, there is an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on. For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary.&quot;<p>[2] &quot;Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate&quot;