Not sure why the Times is taking this stance, I do not really hear much from the open source community complaining much.
From this article, I found it a little hard to understand the real issue raised by the Times' article. It helps to go straight to the source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html
In the case of Elasticsearch, the company open-sourced its core technology, so it was a natural risk that some big competitor might come along and exploit it in exactly that way. I can't feel that much sympathy for them - it's almost as if they were just daring someone to do that.
IMO, there are two viable strategies for businesses to open-source the software they develop:
- Act as a consultancy and sell services around the tech (i.e. adding custom features for people, or helping them deploy and optimize it for their use case). Maybe that's what Elastic was trying to do, I don't know.
- Open-source non-core technologies - the annoying kinds of nuts and bolts that are necessary but really aren't central to the company's main value proposition or differentiating features. This way, you can offload some of the testing & maintenance burden of those pieces, while also offering something to the community and getting yourself a bit of positive PR with prospective employees.
However, it might be the case that some of their biggest customers will
only use open source software, for security reasons. Perhaps NYT should've probed that aspect.
After reading the article, I was left feeling like the main complaint was something MS was accused of, back in heyday of Windows. Basically, if you sold PC software and it turned out to be sufficiently profitable, MS would create their own copycat product and drive you out of business. Being the OS vendor supposedly gave them an advantage that they could use non-public features of the OS, but the main advantages they had were being able to bankroll big development efforts and using their market power to push their version and create bundle deals with PC vendors.
Another analogy, that hits a little closer to Amazon's home, would be the way Amazon Marketplace sellers complain when Amazon seems to "notice" their successful products and finds a way to source and sell the same thing for less $. This could apply directly to AWS, and the only way that open source factors in is that you're just saving them the effort of re-implementing your service from scratch.
I do think the article overly-focuses on open source, however. Although they're particularly vulnerable, even services not using open source can suffer from the same problem of doing all the hard work to innovate a product category and build a market for it, only to have Amazon take notice of its popularity and swoop in with a competing service. It's just that open source makes this very easy for Amazon.
An interesting possibility might be to have governments run datacenters, or maybe they just mandate that the datacenter operator can only provide the bare metal and limited facilities for using it. This would essentially create a shared data center, where Google, MS, AWS, and others could all co-exist, allowing customers to pick-and-choose features and services from each. So, if the current model is a department store, then a "level playing field" would be more like a shopping mall or a town's shopping district. In other words, it would cut the amount of vertical integration that AWS can offer, thereby enabling other service providers and datacenter operators to more easily compete.
If this sounds strange, to you, I would point out that my analogy between physical infrastructure and cloud infrastructure is a very deliberate one. If we employ government to help establish and manage shared physical space, why not extend this into the virtual realm? Or, even if it's not owned or run by a government entity, governments could establish a set of regulation to help foster fair competition and more level playing fields.
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