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Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

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Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#12
> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money.

Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#13
post #12

> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money. Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?

Because then AWS would fork from a version of redis with a more permissive license and only support a subset of functionality moving forward.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#14
post #12

> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money. Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?

MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#15
This issue here is with new "Open Source" software companies earning revenue through hosting as opposed to simply providing support / custom feature development / etc.

It creates a conflict of interest when others want to host it, since it takes their revenue away. However, in my opinion anyone should be able to compete on hosting/support.

This revenue goes back into funding development, but places restrictions on how the software can be used - making it "Open Sourced, Closed Service Based Hosting" or something like that. Inotherwords, we need a new name for this type of software.

My question is - if AWS simply made it easy to spin up an elastic search cluster, but didn't offer a specific API/Service - whats the difference here? Very little.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#16
post #14
post #12

> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money. Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?

MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community

Just use AGPL and suddenly the big boys won’t touch you!

They can negotiate a special license just for them.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#17

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#18

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong? This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangement would benefit anybody using Elasticsearch in the long term. This kind of behavior reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish days of MS.

This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#19
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community

Just use AGPL and suddenly the big boys won’t touch you! They can negotiate a special license just for them.

Dual licenses kind of defeat the one of the purposes of open source which is getting outside developers to contribute to your product. Why should I as an outside developer submit pull requests and be required to assign copyright to you so you can make money selling a proprietary license?

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#20

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

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