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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

#121
Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone.

Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me.

He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to use the systems. I wanted dev environments to be free, and pay for support if you need it. Again, to increase usage.

You can see similar concepts in what companies decide has no value, by what they are willing to bundle for "free". Cell phone plans in the use are doing 2-for-1 deals of some sort. The carriers believe their services have value, and the phones are merely a means to deliver their value.

OTOH, the cell phone vendors believe their devices are the value, and try to give away software they think will make their devices look better.

Yeah, I know, you pay for it in the end. Costs are always borne by the customers.

Amazon is leveraging its market dominance in ways that are hard to view other than as anti-competitive. I do suspect that eventually, they will be held to task for that. But that they will likely keep operating in that manner for as long as possible.

Azure, with its shared success model, may actually manage to convince OSS projects to work more closely with them. It would not surprise me in the least to see licenses rewritten to be friendly to the shared success model, and hostile to the do whatever it is you want model.

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

#122

Amazon is anti-competitive. Microsoft used the same pattern of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish- and MS was judged by a US court to have engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. Arguing that this is about "founders" or that "offering it to your customers for free" is okay just ignores the context of the situation. MS offered lots of things for free or at reduced prices because it could afford to. Amazon is exploiting…

Hmm. Kind of like explosive bombs are considered "normal weapons of war" but then somebody comes up with a nuclear bomb that's orders of magnitude more powerful and people start freaking out

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

#123

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.

I'm a fan of Open core... the issues come down to a lot of the time, projects will reject contributions, and have pulled features that allow competition with their non-core features.

On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option.

I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven.

There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.

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

#124

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 you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now."

I block ads on Facebook web and don't have any of their mobile apps installed, so I can't imagine they're making more money from me than if I paid them to not have any ads.

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yet happily use their Open Source code It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on. The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.

Many of the folks who wrote the systems or languages you use every day work at these big companies. Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point? >Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players. Who are the parasites? These bad-faith posts that are really just unconstructive rants are turning this site into Reddit.

> Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point?

He currently does.

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

#127
post #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 arrangem…

> I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming

That's ridiculous. Of course they were keenly aware that they could be competed with with the free software they put out.

They just hoped that no significant competitor would risk upsetting the balance of the open source community, or that they could at least make good money until someone did.

In the meantime, they selfishly avoided licensing with GPLv3 (which would have reinforced the things you care about) because it would have decreased their revenue (which is the thing they care about).

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long term effects of this remain to be seen. All our cloud providers are currently in growth mode. What will happen when they're in 'mature industry with trapped customers mode'? We know how Oracle handles that situation.

Cloud services adoption rate is 19% and AWS has been around since 2006. The vast majority of companies in that 19% penetration are still in-transition. OpenStack and container orchestration platforms are now a thing. Not only do we have a long time to figure things out but it's never been easier to be on prem if you need to be.

Have you been a part of many successful cross-cloud migrations? Or migrations from the cloud to on-prem?

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

#129

"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free" I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. "It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive" So offering a fr…

Competitiveness isn't just about giving the customer something. Look at Microsoft in the 90s packaging their software. Users got more software but the anti competitive nature of Microsoft bundling was illegal.

Yeah, I'd argue that's the problem: the law's definition of anti-competitive doesn't actually address whether or not consumers were harmed.

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

#130
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.

Yes.

They did it with ElasticSearch

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elastic...

And Java

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-corretto-no-c...

And something similar with Mongo DB.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-documentdb-with-...

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