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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

#31

Post by resters »

In the realm of physical products, it's already pretty annoying not being able to purchase Nest products on Amazon.

One of the main things Amazon has going for it is that one can usually expect to see the whole gamut of competitive products, read helpful reviews, etc.

But when products are missing from the results for competitive reasons, the trustworthiness of the platform goes out the window.

So this may be a short-term beneficial strategy for Amazon but will surely backfire in the future. I'll be reluctant to buy more stock until the impact of the strategy becomes more clear.

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

#32

Post by IshKebab »

staticassertion wrote: post #21
eanzenberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal.

Gitlab is a good example.

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

#33

Post by TurningCanadian »

zelon88 wrote: post #18
product50 wrote: post #3

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 arrangem…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License is probably what you're thinking of

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

#34

Post by tjungblut »

snarfy wrote: post #22
zelon88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arrangem…

My problem is Elastic acts like the employees of that company are the only people that ever contributed code to their project. Being open source that's simply not true. What about all of the contributors to Elastic that are not employees. Why does Elastic own the monetization of other people's work?

Exactly, what's with all the work that is behind Apache Lucene that's running under the covers of ElasticSearch. All of these people [1] would also never see a dime from elastic.co either. So you can spin the wheel the other way around and say they are monetizing other peoples free work as well.

[1] http://lucene.apache.org/whoweare.html

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

#35

Post by kemitchell »

capkutay wrote: post #10

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…

> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit.

That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise.

When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.

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

#36

Post by burtonator »

capkutay wrote: post #10

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…

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

It's really a tragedy of the commons.

Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money.

People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.

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

#37

Post by kemitchell »

nartz wrote: post #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 ho…

Providing support and custom development, such as integration, creates its own conflicts of interest. Support models create incentives to keep documentation sparse and the software esoteric. Integration models create incentives to keep integration difficult, and to withhold tooling for doing so efficiently.

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

#38

Post by gonehome »

burtonator wrote: post #36
capkutay wrote: post #10

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…

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…

I wish they offered that option.

I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.

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

#39

Post by ausjke »

IshKebab wrote: post #32
staticassertion wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal. Gitlab is a good example.

freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model.

more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support.

a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days.

in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise.

how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.

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

#40

Post by erichocean »

edoo wrote: post #7
mooreds wrote: post #4

So actually, they are talking about AWS. I clicked through expecting to read about FBA and the Amazon basics, but this is more technology/open source oriented.

That is what I thought too. If you have a hit product Amazon will roll their own version and drink your milkshake.

First, they'll demand you tell them where you're getting your (white-labeled) product, as a condition of continuing to sell. That's the truly shady part.
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