Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

onezero.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 226 posts

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

#141

Post by leggomylibro »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #122
talkingtab wrote: post #54

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

Or like how people shouting their opinions on street corners is considered "normal life in the big city", but then somebody comes up with a social network that's orders of magnitude louder and people start freaking out.

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

#142

Post by scarejunba »

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…

It's a view of the world that's different from yours. Loads of people would and do use Topographische Anatomie des Menschen (Pernkopf's Anatomy) despite it being drawn and edited by actual true believer Nazis who used concentration camp inmates as the input.

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

#143

Post by meowface »

thatoneuser wrote: post #100
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?

Mongo and Elastic would probably continue doing the same thing if they became Amazon's size. If something is unethical in the business world, it should be unethical regardless of your company's size. Although I don't personally find the integration of open source software into a commercial project to be unethical, if the license is adhered to.

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

#145

Post by lbacaj »

To me Amazon feels far more predatory than the other tech giants. I read the arguments being made on HN about this all being fair game but it’s really not ok, none of it is.

1. Amazon takes from open source just as much if not more than any of the other tech giants, in fact the vast majority of managed services on AWS are open source projects with DevOps from amazon.. which by itself is fine but when you consider how much they give back? Fuck all. They haven’t contributed any major framework, system, project, or library that I use. I use things from Google every single day, from Kubernetes to Flutter, to Tensorflow the list goes on and on. I use things from Microsoft every single day in my development from Visual Studio Code, to .net core. I use things like react from Facebook every day. Maybe I’m living in a bubble but Man, this feels like theft these guys take everything to make Bezos richer and give us shit.

2. Although not directly related to Open Source, it reinforces the predatory tactics, Take a look at what they do to Brands on their market place. Any well selling product becomes an Amazon basics, generic, of which they make lots of money and shut you out using Sales data and other predatory practices.

3. You have a streaming service on AWS, an e-commerce shop, any other number of SaaS services? No problem as soon as it’s proven Amazon will launch its own product to compete with you. Everyone told Netflix it was a terrible idea to enrich Amazon but they did it anyway now they have original shows on Amazon video to contend with and I bet you they wish they didn’t.

The list just goes on and on and on. Not saying the other tech giants are angels but man these guys are egregious in the way they take. I don’t blame these companies for crying foul none of this behavior is Moral, it might be legal for now but even that time is coming.

Anyway I know I’m coming off as harsh and you don’t have to agree with me but this is just my two cents. I believe Amazon is the most predatory, largest, capitalist company in America today.

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

#146

Post by webmobdev »

tracer4201 wrote: post #113
webmobdev wrote: post #55

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 a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! The…

>It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! I don't think that's what op wrote. It doesn't make sense that folks use open source code from these companies but then there's shock and outrage that these companies are also using open source code written by others. >because an ev…

I addressed that:

The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

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

#147

Post by Twirrim »

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…

This may be taking it to an absurd exaggeration but the very cynical part of me thinks step 1 and 2 could well be phrased:

Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO.

Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project to get rich, only they also throw a bunch of expensive developer time at it to make it really shine.

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

#148

Post by busterarm »

awakeasleep wrote: post #128
busterarm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd have to say only partially to both questions. Cloud agnosticism is important enough to us that we're able to deploy the most critical bits of our infrastructure on prem, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OpenStack. We operate all of the above but some resources have a bit of a lock-in problem for now. Total yearly infrastructure costs in the 10s of millions, US.

If there's any takeaways that I have from this journey it's that Azure's platform is simply not competitive and is likely to continue to not be.

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

#149

Post by dman »

Twirrim wrote: post #147
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…

This may be taking it to an absurd exaggeration but the very cynical part of me thinks step 1 and 2 could well be phrased: Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community a…

You will be surprised how little user contributions most open source projects receive. I have a few friends who are maintainers of key projects in the Python OSS ecosystem, most of them are struggling with burnout.

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

#150

Post by throwaway66666 »

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…

> 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.

"We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country. And I 'd happily drive on those roads to tell them they are dead wrong.

Post reply on HN