161–170 of 182 posts
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.
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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.
Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license".
It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?".
The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.
Therefore if you do not want to compete with the same platform on which you've based your solution you should make solutions that are niche specific - I believe the example was a Apple and a dentistry service, because no matter how much revenue your dentistry service made Apple would not go and copy it because it had nothing to do with their business.
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 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…
Open source takes work and the foresight to separate your custom shit from things genuinely helpful to the community. Amazon doesn't encourage or incentivize that kind of thinking.
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Don't get me wrong, you can still make a niche multi-million dollar company out there in tech land and sell it off at some point. That's not my point. My point is that you can't make a company today that will beat Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. There isn't going to be a "changing of the guard" like what happened with IBM, Sun, etc... The "agility" of a startup, which itself isn't unique anymore, doesn'…
> There isn't going to be a "changing of the guard" like what happened with IBM, Sun, etc... Said the same people when those companies changed the guard of predecessors. Don't you remember the time when people thought Walmart and IBM were infallible? > Trust me I have first hand experience here. Trust me, I can cite billions of dollars that have bets (with real money) that say otherwise. > My point is that you can't…
That's a pretty naive view to how markets work. You can easily come up with scenarios where FAANG companies end up wrecking the scene for both startups and themselves. Stifle innovation long enough through a combination of acquisitions and lobbying government officials for big tech company legislation (e.g. this EU copyright bill, GDPR, obscure data compliance specs, etc) to ensure that nothing too disruptive can really take hold. Then just bloat like all uncompetitive companies while failing to meaningfully grow revenue for 30 years and you have a recipe for underperforming the rest of the market.
I would imagine this should be a primary concern for a lot of companies operating in Google, Microsofts, and Amazon's cloud. You are dealing with companies that have the power and money to become your main competitor overnight, and you don't know what kind of business intelligence they are gaining from you being on their hardware, and if there is espionage going on with your software and service. How honest are they…
You don't need any espionage to implement and release the new Amazon Kafka product. Kafka is an open source package after all. Profiting from any marginal gain from such espionage would be deterred by the huge reputational risk for AWS, were they caught.
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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…
This is a lame excuse. Google has open sourced all kinds of Linux kernel work and they were doing custom hardware with huge proprietary internal systems way before AWS was a thing. Open source takes work and the foresight to separate your custom shit from things genuinely helpful to the community. Amazon doesn't encourage or incentivize that kind of thinking.
That is exactly what AWS has done in releasing Firecracker[1]. Better late than never.
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I doubt McDs has the worst burgers but I get your point. The pros of McDs, you go anywhere in the world, you can expect reasonable quality, the familiarity of the brand/ products at reasonable prices. They won't be the best or the worst but do the job.
They are absolutely the worst burgers in the world. I'd take a burnt freshly grilled burger over a McDisappointment.
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Amazon’s goal with this is to check the boxes. Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance.
Not true, they clearly do care about quality. It works because if you are already using a bunch of AWS services, and then you need something that they are providing, you will give that a go first. If it doesn't provide enough, you will move to something else.
Many, many projects, will meet business or contract requirements with the lowest friction product. A great example is "IDS/IPS" or "Anti-malware". Unless specific metrics, requirements, or fine/fee structures exist, 9/10 times, people will check the box on the easiest to deploy.