Amazon Snaps at New York Times Open Source Critique

Amazon snapped back at a recent New York Times article that delves into the cloud giant’s complex relationship with the open source community. Amazon snapped back at a recent New York Times article that delves into the cloud giant’s complex relationship with the open source community. The story notes that a number of software companies have struggled to prevent Amazon from taking core pieces of their open source platforms and packaging them as services that Amazon ties into its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. The story leans heavily on the plight of Elastic, which developed a free, open source search and analysis platform that AWS used to produce its Elasticsearch product. Elastic filed a lawsuit against AWS claiming a copyright violation for using the company’s name in AWS’ product. “People are afraid that Amazon’s ambitions are endless,” Matthew Prince, CEO at Cloudflare, is quoted as saying in the story. “This New York Times article is skewed and misleading,” Andi Gutmans, VP for analytics and ElastiCache at AWS, states in an Amazon blog post. “The reporter had a story he wanted to write and didn’t let the facts get in the way of his story. He ignored most of what we shared with him, left out many of the positive partner comments various partners shared with him, and conflated various software terms.” In explaining AWS’ side of things, Gutmans first notes that AWS has a large number of vendors that participate in its “partner community,” noting firms like Adobe, Databricks, Salesforce, and VMware. He then notes that the article is focused on “open source software projects and companies who’ve tried to build businesses around commercializing that open source software.” “These open source projects enable any company to utilize this software on-premises or in the cloud and build services around it,” Gutmans explained. “AWS customers have repeatedly asked AWS to build managed services around open source.” Gutmans names a number of open source projects that AWS contributes into, such as Linux, Java, Kubernetes, and Chromium, before awkwardly adding that “AWS has not copied anybody’s software or services.” AWS does have a number of supporters on its position. “The [New York Times] article demonstrated that the author doesn’t have a full grasp on how open source works,” wrote Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an email to SDxCentral. “Open source is all about taking a source technology and if improvements are made to it, then sending those upstream. Companies like AWS, RedHat, and even SiFive in silicon, package the base technology up, make it usable by the intended customer, support, and charge for all of it. Raw open source technologies aren’t typically ready for an enterprise audience and needs TLC to make it usable.” This licensing issue has come to the fore as a number of firms, including Elastic, have changed the licensing model on some of their technology in an attempt to prevent larger cloud providers from taking that technology, changing up a bit of the code, and offering it as-a-service. That move ignited considerable debate within the open source community as to the continued “openness” of those platforms. “This puts open source software vendors in a difficult place,” explained Paul Dix, founder and CTO of InfluxData, in an interview with SDxCentral earlier this year. “We are trying to create something valuable that has a community around it but we have to have a value proposition to allow those community members to be customers.” Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and COO of the Linux Foundation-based Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), earlier this year told SDxCentral that such moves could “confuse” downstream adopters that these new models were still open source. “We are cool with businesses trying to come up with new and innovative business models, but don’t call it open source,” Aniszczyk said.