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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

#171

Post by dingo_bat »

silentsea90 wrote: post #112
ecnahc515 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their fork, than to pay royalties forever.

That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has no importance?

2-3 dedicated high-quality devs in a company like Amazon can run circles around 200-300 random github PR contributors when it comes to implementation of features.

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

#172

Post by pushpop »

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…

I can see both sides of the argument here. On the one hand Amazon are just using open source literally as the license allows. But on the other hand it does feel a little underhanded that Amazon can incorporate these projects into their portfolio as their own and make large amounts of money from it while not giving anything back to the community.

Maybe there needs to be a new software license. One that allows for commercial use when the project is included as a module or infrastructure but excludes it from being billed separately. So you can use an open source component as a language library, shared object / DLL or even stand alone daemon / service installed as part of your web application (for example) but you cannot make that open source project a product in its own right. Obviously a lawyer would need to write the terms rather than an engineer like myself but I wonder if that kind of software license would offer a happy middle ground?

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

#173

Post by CloudNetworking »

vood wrote: post #164
throwaway66666 wrote: post #150

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. "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.…

Can you elaborate? I'm being from a socialist country would love to deliver the same message to my parents

If you can't identify bad things your "socialist" regime has done / is doing then I would start by trying to list those.

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

#174

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

eitally wrote: post #155
balls187 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From a business-model perspective, Google are definitely an advertising company, and so are Facebook.

From a consumer perspective, this is not particularly true, but it's definitely a factor in their behaviour. For instance, if Google made all its money by indexing data for big companies and selling the index, do you think they would own YouTube or have created Gmail?

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

#175

Post by bartimus »

tracer4201 wrote: post #115
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.

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.

> Who are the parasites?

There can exist a mutual beneficial symbiosis between companies and the open source community. But at some point the symbiotic behavior can become parasitic, causing harm. I think it's super important when such behaviors get pointed out (here at HN).

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

eitally wrote: post #155
balls187 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

>you must shut up because it's a monopoly

okay.jpg

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

#178

Post by GoblinSlayer »

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #82
umvi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Stellar charges 0.00001 lumens per transaction, but it has no network effect and low usage.

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

#179

Post by oefrha »

webmobdev wrote: post #146
tracer4201 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What a gross mischaracterization of open source.

> The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ...

Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime.

> The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you.

No, releasing open source code doesn't imply signing away copyright or ownership. For instance, Mozilla owns Firefox (not only in the trademark sense); you can build another browser with their code, but you need to call it Iceweasel or something else.

> 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.

Open source doesn't mean that at all. Good old immutable tarball dump can be every bit as open source as accepting contributions from everyone on the planet. In fact, check out esr's The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

"Open source" is already intentionally or unintentionally skewed to represent many things it isn't, please don't add more arbitrary attributes to it.

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

#180

Post by dspillett »

Marsymars wrote: post #124
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.

"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.

They don't just make money from you by directly showing your ads, so don't make zero $ if you as an individual manage to block all their ads.

They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to that earning potential.

You might not be seeing the resulting adverts, but can you say that about all your direct contacts, and all the people in groups you are linked to, and all the other people who interact with posts & events you comment on or otherwise interact with, and all the people that...?

You are still very much part of their income model by being part of the data graph - you are not breaking the system remotely as much as you think by arranging not to see adverts.

Letting people pay to not see ads would require both initial and on-going development & testing effort so you have to include that in any cost/benefit analysis of the situation too. And that design & development could be pretty complex: by making a legitimate ad skipping option available they risk creating a hacking opportunity that makes it easier for people to skip them without paying. It might also send a bad signal to the advertisers: people with more disposable income are more likely to pay to skip the adverts, because the cost will feel less to them, and people with more disposable income are usually those that the advertisers usually most want to reach.

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