Right. I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects, surf on the goodwill of open source, and then turn around and complain when other companies use elasticsearch as open source.
The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well funded companies and self appointed governing bodies.
I think the corporate patronage is alive and well. If you look at Apache or Linux Foundation, lots of contributors are employees of large corporations. This works out ok in the sense that lots of great software is being created.
I think the problem with Elastic is they have lots of VC investment pushing for a big payout, so it’s not a “pay the hackers” it’s a “make a big payout for founders and investors.” Which I’m not against and think is cool, but I don’t really care about it that much.
I think "hackers" should just ask for money for their work before you are allowed to use it, just like they did years ago - how to do this was already a problem solved even in the 90s. Sure you wont get brownie points with those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda, but at least you'll be able to get food from the supermarket. And besides, cults are only nice at the beginning when there are parties, later they start to suck when sacrifices enter in the picture.
> ...this was already a problem solved in the 90s. Sure you won’t get brownie points by those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda...
The “indoctrinated” industry has created a massive community and even more massive ecosystem of interoperability which almost certainly wouldn’t exist under the walled off from everything else and “fuck everyone” nightmare of the 1990s.
Those 90s walled off isolated companies were significantly more cult like and significantly less effective than the system which won out in the open market—the “GNU propaganda” as you refer to it.
>I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "extend existing open source projects". Elastic the company was founded by the creators of Elasticsearch and is the way that its authors and most of its contributors are rewarded with actual cash money.
Elasticsearch uses Lucene for the actual inverted index DB systems. They then built a robust and updateable distributed system on top of it. By updateable, I mean that Lucene indexes are fixed at creation, and Elasticsearch coordinates multiple index versions to expose an updateable index system.
The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well funded companies and self appointed governing bodies.
Let’s find a way to pay hackers!