License Changes for Confluent Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#51

Post by _msw_ » Mon, Dec 17, 2018, 6:02 AM UTC

sauceop wrote: post #40

Speaking as someone who makes a living contributing to open source, it's a frustrating trend that the major cloud providers (Amazon being the worst offender) have decided that it's in their interests to take open source projects and never contribute back or even interact with the community. It's less clear to me whether this is rational on their part - whether the incentives have actually changed. It's generally been…

Hi,

I work for Amazon Web Services, and I will risk responding to the first and only comment from a brand new account.

Amazon does contribute back and does interact with open source communities. You can find information on AWS's open source activities here: https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

The page hasn't been updated for some of the latest news, such as releasing the Firecracker virtualization technology as open source: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#52

Post by prance » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:42 AM UTC

yarrel wrote: post #42

andrewshadura wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually not even that. It is just defined from the other point of view. Open source is free software. Free software is open source. http://deblanc.net/blog/2018/12/13/the-osd-and-user-freedom/

I agree very strongly with the penultimate paragraph there. "Methods of development are tools being used to protect software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom. User freedom, and what we get from that, is what’s valuable." But Open Source and Free Software are not synonyms, as the rest of the article shows. Open Source cannot account for itself or for why anything other than "having the source"…

I agree with your reasoning. Also, particularly

> software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom

is AFAIK an assumption, or has this ever been proven?

I mean, isn't it entirely possible that helping software startups protect their business model of whatever "near-enough" OS/free software they build will help user freedom more than taking a purist OSS stance and leaving it all up for grabs by Amazon, Alibaba etc.? Because of increased choice and competition?

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#53

Post by djrosanova » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

prance wrote: post #52

yarrel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree very strongly with the penultimate paragraph there. "Methods of development are tools being used to protect software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom. User freedom, and what we get from that, is what’s valuable." But Open Source and Free Software are not synonyms, as the rest of the article shows. Open Source cannot account for itself or for why anything other than "having the source"…

I agree with your reasoning. Also, particularly > software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom is AFAIK an assumption, or has this ever been proven? I mean, isn't it entirely possible that helping software startups protect their business model of whatever "near-enough" OS/free software they build will help user freedom more than taking a purist OSS stance and leaving it all up for grabs by Amazon…

I suppose anything is "possible"...