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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

#81

Post by musicale »

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…

> 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.

Facebook tracks you regardless of whether you have a Facebook account.

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

#82

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

umvi wrote: post #77
webmobdev wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users on average refuse to pay for software / web apps Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.

> And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?

You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry.

Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible.

Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big financial players and against the small.

Personally I believe if setting up the competetion to MasterCard/Visa weren't made virtually impossible via legislation, we'd see many card with transactions fees of $0.000X instead of $0.xx/transaction + Y%/transaction + minimums.

I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.

I also think that the way money is created an placed into the system could be done in a way that created more smaller competitors instead of such large pools of capital, which can more easily try and engage in anti competitive behavior.

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

#83

Post by dhd415 »

tjungblut wrote: post #34
snarfy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of those people are Elastic and LucidWorks employees who are monetizing their contributions to Lucene through their companies' respective products. I'm sure there are others there, too, but those were the obvious ones.

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

#84

Post by return1 »

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…

that is not a tragedy of the commons

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

#85

Post by return1 »

gonehome wrote: post #38
burtonator wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

would most of your family & friends also do that? Because it doesnt matter if you opt out from targeting , if they can infer everything about you from your friends.

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

#86

Post by musicale »

gonehome wrote: post #38
burtonator wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's amazing that it has come to this, but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. Even if it just applied to the worst offenders (Facebook, Google, Amazon...) it might be worth it.

Such a system could be easily abused, however, without some kind of bulletproof third-party auditing in place.

If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services (maps, gmail, search, docs, youtube, etc.) I might even consider using it.

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

#87

Post by jackbravo »

busterarm wrote: post #28
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…

Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering. It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform. The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud…

Like algolia

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

#88

Post by matthewmacleod »

askafriend wrote: post #53
gonehome wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018. So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.

So I assume that's across all properties. Would I pay $10/month for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram? Probably.

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

#89

Post by jackbravo »

sovande wrote: post #78
chongli wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.

MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?

From https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side...

> AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB

With the new license:

> The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service

Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license:

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

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

#90

Post by yardie »

ralph84 wrote: post #74
yardie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price. You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify…

I don't think anything you wrote refutes what you quoted. Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. There are a lot more people who run apt-get install than open up pull requests. It'…

That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model.

> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software.

That hasn't been the case for most projects I see. Most developers can afford to pay for proprietary software. Yet they choose to work on opensource, why is that? I can purchase 1 month of Adobe CC with less than 15 minutes of work. Why spend years, months and days developing and debugging an open source image editor?

> most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code.

Most users would pirate the cracked version of the proprietary software (i.e. Photoshop, Windows) rather than use something like GiMP or Ubuntu. If money is the motivation there is a lot less friction in sticking to cracked Windows than opensource ArchLinux.

> Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it.

Not sure what this means. Freeware can be put on an FTP server or repo and and downloaded quickly. What is the scaling issue?

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