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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

#91

Post by jackbravo »

dhd415 wrote: post #83
tjungblut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LucidWorks is not Elastic. So Elastic is benefiting from the work done by another company, without paying anything to it. Or am I missing something?

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

#92

Post by _msw_ »

kemitchell wrote: post #72
pieterh_estc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSI is asleep at the wheel on this one IMHO https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensin... I wonder why aren't they standardizing an open source license that prevents hyperscale cloud monetization by someone other than the originators? Don't OSS communities hold the cards here? it's just a change to license.txt, broad OSS adoption and it's a very different type of cloud (picture nuclear mushroom clou…

I no longer participate in the OSI process, largely for reasons laid out here: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html I've read quite a bit from OSI stalwarts about why they take the positions they do, but I still don't understand them, and therefore shouldn't try to relate them. If I had to make one criticism of the OSI mailing list reaction to both my License Zero Reciprocal License, which later…

Disclosure: I work for Amazon, but this is my personal opinion. I am also an individual member of the OSI, though I am not currently active in that community.

I missed that you posted this, Kyle. I think that OSI is worse without your participation, and your criticisms hold a lot of weight for me. I hope that the new board, and all OSI members, will take what you wrote to heart, because stewardship does require caretaking, cultivation, and maintenance.

I would love to see more productive discussions than the "how many angels fit on the head of a pin" that we so often see on mailing lists, and I think you're right that the Open Source Definition may not capture what is needed to help those discussions be more productive.

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

#94

Post by jay_kyburz »

munk-a wrote: post #68
askafriend wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica. Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

That is for a quarter, so $2 a month or $24 on the annual plan.

One day I'm going to build this premium Facebook clone that respects user privacy!

Come on Hacker News, make it so I don't have to!

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

#95

Post by mjevans »

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.

Also, the users that COULD pay (any price) are likely the PRECISE ones that are most lucrative to target.

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

#96

Post by 013a »

Mongo and Elastic built all of their technology on top of open source tech. Elasticsearch is built on Lucene. Its written in Java, and I'd bet a penny that they're not paying Oracle for that. Let's just take a quick look at Mongo and Oh look at that they're using dozens of open source libraries, such as zstandard [1]

When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source addons to their "open source core". When its convenient for them, they'll point a finger at Amazon and say "look at how evil they are, they took all the hard work we put into this and want to sell it" (simultaneously, the hundreds of unpaid community contributors in the audience look perturbed, raise their hands to complain, and are immediately shushed, "just ignore them")

"Open Core" companies like Docker, Mongo, or Elastic want to have it both ways; they want the moral high-ground that comes with accepting free contributions from the community, alongside executive power when it comes to deciding what will and wont be open source and who can and cannot use it for what purposes. You shouldn't have it both ways. That doesn't mean you can't build a successful "open core" company (all three of these companies are successful), but lets drop the act of granting them moral superiority. The only reason they exist is because of the exact same licenses and policies which enabled Amazon to do this.

[1] https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...

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

#97

Post by inapis »

zknz wrote: post #23
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…

Elastic.co the n'th most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's n'th most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project, Lucene, made it easier to operate, and then sold access to it.

This is disingenuous. Yes elastic cloned an open source project and improved it in some measure but also made the access free for a decent chunk of the features. Most of what is under the paid license in the elastic stack has less to do with lucene itself and more to do with quality of life improvements in deployment, security, analysis etc. There are enough improvements over and above the lucene project to make elastic worthwhile in itself.

OTOH, AWS pretty much xeroxed the elastic stack and added a paywall (at least after a year). Compared to that you still get immense value out of the elastic stack for free.

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

#98

Post by jeffnappi »

Personally I think Amazon is in the right here. Open source projects should not mix proprietary code into their code base period. Build a plugin architecture that supports any proprietary additions you wish to have, but mixing proprietary code with free/open source code should be widely opposed by the community.

And I'd echo the sentiment of others here - Elastic itself has benefited GREATLY by building their product on top of many other open source projects. Java, Lucene, Netty, etc.

Here's a partial list of dependencies:

com.carrotsearch.randomizedtesting

com.fasterxml.jackson.core

com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat

com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs

com.fasterxml.jackson.module

com.github.spullara.mustache.java

commons-codec

commons-io

commons-lang

commons-logging

com.nimbusds

com.sun.jersey

com.sun.mail

io.dropwizard.metrics

io.netty

joda-time

junit

net.jcip

net.minidev

net.sf.supercsv

net.shibboleth.utilities

net.sourceforge.csvjdbc

org.antlr

org.apache.hadoop

org.apache.httpcomponents

org.apache.james

org.apache.logging.log4j

org.apache.lucene

org.apache.pdfbox

org.apache.poi

org.apache.santuario

org.apache.tika

org.bouncycastle

org.carrot2

org.cryptacular

org.hamcrest

org.jline

org.locationtech.jts

org.locationtech.spatial4j

org.openjdk.jmh

org.opensaml

org.ow2.asm

org.slf4j

org.yaml

ua.net.nlp

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

#99

Post by ravenstine »

james-anthony wrote: post #75
ravenstine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?

You shouldn't, because there is nothing wrong with React, or the premise behind the team doing it. People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything. Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associat…

You might be right about that if Facebook wasn't an exceptionally terrible company with rotten leaders.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the team behind it. The reason I might choose not to use a technology owned by Facebook is that my use would be promoting it; the more popular React becomes, the more encouraged people are to contribute code to it, which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Nonetheless, the popularity of React does contribute to Facebook's success in some way.

Comcast is a different story, as I'm not aware of people helping them for free by using and developing their own tools. I get what you are saying by generally objecting to Comcast and facing the dilemma of paying them when you have no other options. I guess it depends on how much you dislike Comcast and if you are willing to replace them with free public WiFi and Netflix. At least with Facebook, there are plenty of alternatives(as well as ripoffs of React).

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

#100

Post by thatoneuser »

013a wrote: post #96

Mongo and Elastic built all of their technology on top of open source tech. Elasticsearch is built on Lucene. Its written in Java, and I'd bet a penny that they're not paying Oracle for that. Let's just take a quick look at Mongo and Oh look at that they're using dozens of open source libraries, such as zstandard [1] When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source…

Yeah - damn these businesses for using open source rather than building common tools from scratch. Cleary they are just as bad as a company with about a trillion dollar market cap that deliberately cannibalizes fledgling companies once said companies have bled themselves dry exploring a new market.

When will the corporate shilling on HN end?

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