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Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

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Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#51
I am personally much happier to see AWS implement managed versions of OSS like Kubernetes and Kafka, than to only see them offer their proprietary versions (Kinesis & ECS).

The fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they continue to grow and dominate, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host.

I am not holding my breath for some kind of government driven intervention, nor have I heard an idea of how that would work that makes sense. I think OSS is what is saving us here, and we should celebrate when a project becomes popular enough for AWS to offer it.

Is it fair to the developers that they don't get compensated, nope, but isn't part of the point of OSS to make sure that great solutions get reused and widely deployed?

I think companies building great software can continue to make money servicing it even with AWS in the picture, but I think if you want to make unicorn returns you are going to have to move further up the stack.

Honestly, at some point I hope we are no longer even taking about low level components like Kubernetes and Kafka and that we look back and laugh at the fact that we used to have to license and get support for these things individually. I do also hope that we manage to find a sustainable (if not equitable) model to support the development of these tools.

All the clouds are built on top of the Linux kernel and nobody really expects the kernel devs to get a cut of all those profits, but they seem to have a sustainable model for development, I hope we can continue to figure out good ways to do this for more and more OSS tools.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder with Amazon if we’re seeing a failure mode of Apache and BSD licenses, and if the future OSS might trend back towards more aggressively being copy left... or some place in between.

I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host. To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The tho…

Good luck self-hosting DynamoDB and your AWS Lambdas...

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#53
post #15

That's why I think MongoDB's new license which prevents AWS etc from hosting as a service without open sourcing makes sense ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 ). Amazon barely contributes anything back to the community and is known for destroying OSS businesses.

I'm super interested in Amazon being known for destroying OSS businesses. Can anybody expand with some examples I can dig into?

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#54
post #15

That's why I think MongoDB's new license which prevents AWS etc from hosting as a service without open sourcing makes sense ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 ). Amazon barely contributes anything back to the community and is known for destroying OSS businesses.

I wonder with Amazon if we’re seeing a failure mode of Apache and BSD licenses, and if the future OSS might trend back towards more aggressively being copy left... or some place in between.

I'm actually not sure how this is a failure mode of those licenses.

I thought the point of permissive licenses over copyleft licenses is that you're explicitly granting companies the right to make money off your code without giving anything back.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host. To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The tho…

Good luck self-hosting DynamoDB and your AWS Lambdas...

All the more reason for an AWS managed version of MongoDB and Knative...

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host. To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The tho…

If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software, then it is proprietary software. I think amazon are unlikely to give up any competitive advantage they are not forced to give up.

> If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software

I'm not sure I'm reading your statement correctly, but it sounds like you're saying that anything not developed under a copyleft license is proprietary.

If it was important for authors to receive contributions from derivative works, why would they have selected a license that doesn't require that?

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#57
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of companies you simply don't get the time to study things. I am right now working on porting a project to the cloud that was previously supported (and fucked up) by our IT department but it's hard to do it right. Ths director has declared that AWS is best and there is a lot of pressure to show something soon or the move to cloud may get cancelled. There is no way to get something really that way but getting…

I feel your pain. I was the dev lead at a company and responsible for a decently complex new green field project. They decided to “move to the cloud” at the time I didn’t know anything about AWS and the “consultants” that were brought in only knew networking and the best they could help us do is a “lift and shift”. I was neither given the time to research, given good consultants that knew anything about the developme…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree that AWS should do a better job of contributing back to OSS communities both in terms of code, money and man hours, however I don't think most ppl appreciate that a lot of AWS' secret sauce just doesn't make sense to open source even if they wanted to. They build their own custom nitro ASICs to integrate with KVM, for networking, storage, security, etc. That code doesn't make sense anywhere but AWS. The…

What about DynamoDB? I'm pretty sure they could open source a lot but they just don't want. Google had the same pathetic excuse when asked why they don't open source appengine or datastore.

I mean it would be cool if they did, but the secret sauce behind DynamoDb is really the scale, without it it probably wouldn't have the performance characteristics end users are looking for. Nor do I think AWS ever wants to be in the business of supporting a non-managed piece of software.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#59
post #15

That's why I think MongoDB's new license which prevents AWS etc from hosting as a service without open sourcing makes sense ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 ). Amazon barely contributes anything back to the community and is known for destroying OSS businesses.

I wonder with Amazon if we’re seeing a failure mode of Apache and BSD licenses, and if the future OSS might trend back towards more aggressively being copy left... or some place in between.

I don't think the existing permissive to copyleft spectrum is what matters here. MongoDB, for example, was previously licensed under the AGPL, which is the most aggressive OSI-approved copyleft license I can think of, but they still felt the need to adopt a controversial new license targeted at cloud providers. For another example, Redis Labs didn't decide to adopt a stronger copyleft license for their extensions, they decided to make them proprietary.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kills me that a website full of well paid people in IT who all benefit from the free market always cry for regulation. I guess you don’t realize how many people in middle America would love to “tax the rich” and if you’re making six figures “they” consider you rich.

The problem with crony capitalism is the crony part, not the capitalism part. So I agree that laws (usually passed by people with more self-interest than understanding) are almost never the optimal solution, by definition. Trouble is that we don't actually have a true free market, so the question becomes what is the best real-world solution, given the distortions/limits of the existing system?

I trust the capitalist a lot more than the government. Capitalist are motivated with making money the transparent way - people give them money and they give people goods and services.

The government is ruled by cronyism and even worse cow tow to people’s worse instincts, superstitions, and prejudices.

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