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

151–160 of 226 posts

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

#151

Post by fooker »

musicale wrote: post #86
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.

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,…

>If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services

Gsuite?

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

#152

Post by fooker »

hnmullany wrote: post #110
bartimus wrote: post #109

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.

If memory serves, IBM had a lot of good engineers on Linux back in the day & I think they were responsible for doing a lot of the hard perf. work on multi-CPU scheduling.

Also Oracle, iirc Linux was a toy os before IBM and Oracle funded posix compatibility.

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

#153

Post by pathseeker »

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.

Pablo Escobar donated tons of money to the Medellín community. Doesn't make any criticisms against him hold less water.

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

#154

Post by automated_toast »

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?

Fledgling? Since when is a $5B company a 'fledgling'?

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

#155

Post by eitally »

balls187 wrote: post #133
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 think you're conflating two different things. The people at Google who contribute too, and champion open source are probably not the ones who are making the decisions that we see as "evil." Google is competing for top talent engineering, and Googles commitment to open source boils down to a company perk meant to attract and retain top engineers. Google is a advertising company. Everything else they do is in service…

your first two sentences are spot-on. The third was really iffy (and not true). The last line is completely false.

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

#156

Post by capkutay »

moreira wrote: post #26
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…

You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK. Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, bu…

There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself.

What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.

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

#157

Post by ctvo »

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?

Your moral position is based on market capitalization?

The core piece of ElasticSearch's technology is Lucene, an open soure project. Elastic the company uses this open source work to become a 5 billion dollar company.

The core piece of AWS's ES service is ElasticSearch, an open source project. Amazon the company uses this open source work to further enrich themselves.

Amazon is bad because they're a 1 trillion dollar company. Elastic is OK because they're a 5 billion dollar company.

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

#158

Post by Twirrim »

dman wrote: post #149
Twirrim wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The kinds of projects that spawn full companies or have that on their future path tend to be ones with a more active community contributing to the project.

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

#159

Post by antt »

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.

Valid for n as n -> oo.

You can't pretend that a monopoly plays by the same rules as everyone else. For capitalism to work no one can be allowed to control a market influencing chunk of it.

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

#160

Post by shard972 »

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…

But if you go the GPL route your just a smelly old neck beard who harbors conspiracy theories about big business by refusing them a license permissive enough for a company to exploit to their liking.
Post reply on HN