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

191–200 of 226 posts

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

#191

Post by majewsky »

blazespin wrote: post #187
ctvo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dolla…

Yes, the whole argument is based on anti trust. Did you not read the article?

Please don't insinuate that someone has not read the submitted article. You could rephrase this, for example, like this:

> Yes, the whole argument is based on anti trust, as the article explains.

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

#192

Post by sergiosgc »

jimrhods23 wrote: post #41

"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…

> So offering a free product and adding value to it/offering it to your customers for free is now "anti-competitive"? Isn't this only beneficial to customers? We should want more companies to do this.

The logic behind complement commoditization [1] is to kill your fine-grained competition, when you can recoup the commoditization costs in the larger product. It is something every company above a certain size does. There is no fundamental problem with the practice.

The commoditization practice is problematic when your company is so large it distorts the market. Hence the antitrust perspective of the article.

From a monopoly prevention perspective, Amazon should not be allowed to commoditize complements.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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

#193

Post by mgoetzke »

ctvo wrote: post #157
thatoneuser wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dolla…

I get where you are coming from, but Lucene is a building block, a library and cannot be immediately used as a valuable service. ES can be used by quite high level developers to implement scalable solutions.

Building blocks and libraries offering convenience are not as valuable on its own than solutions that offer some quite immediate value at a reasonably high level. Even if from an abstract view both still require developers as users the applicability is quite different. Amazon cannot 'host' lucene as a service per se.

Services vs Libraries

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

#194

Post by snovv_crash »

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.

Just because you don't view the ads doesn't mean they don't charge people for them.

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

#195

Post by mgoetzke »

umvi wrote: post #77
webmobdev wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users on average refuse to pay for software / web apps Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.

> 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)?

capitalism, by its nature, will optimize all products to the level of 'just bearable'. Look at airplane seating.

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

#196

Post by dralley »

jessaustin wrote: post #52
dralley wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This is why I like the GPLv3 license. Sure it excludes my work from ever being considered in a large corporate project but I'll never have to worry about being beaten over the head with my own product by one of them either. Not true. Even GPL code is able to have proprietary modifications so long as the code stays in-house. As a cloud provider, Amazon can do an end run around the license by simply providing access…

That's the purpose of A GPLv3, the Affero variant that was written to close the "ASP loophole". This has been out a long time. Unfortunately the anti-copyleft zealots have discouraged creators from adopting it. [EDIT:] I thought the "MongoDB debacle" was the wide-open default auth thing? I don't see how that connects...

Look up mongodb licensing

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

#197

Post by tguedes »

blazespin wrote: post #188
meowface wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not how anti trust works. The idea is that once you gain certain monopolistic powers you have to play by different rules.

How exactly is Amazon a monopoly though?

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

#198

Post by nova22033 »

snarfy wrote: post #22
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…

My problem is Elastic acts like the employees of that company are the only people that ever contributed code to their project. Being open source that's simply not true. What about all of the contributors to Elastic that are not employees. Why does Elastic own the monetization of other people's work?

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/supporting-apache-so...

Many of our engineers, such as Robert Muir and Mike McCandless, were already contributors to ASF projects before they joined AWS. Robert worked with the Apache Lucene and Apache Solr projects as part of his role at AWS, which led to three more employees earning committer roles on these projects. Mike continues to be a very active contributor on behalf of Amazon to Apache Lucene, the storage engine that powers Solr and Elasticsearch.

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

#199

Post by AsyncAwait »

ctvo wrote: post #157
thatoneuser wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dolla…

The difference, I feel, is that Amazon's solutions are not even open-core. They're straight up closed-source, which I think is objectively worse.

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

#200

Post by kaidax »

EGreg wrote: post #16
yodon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community

Just use AGPL and suddenly the big boys won’t touch you! They can negotiate a special license just for them.

AGPL is what they used before. It does nothing vs. Amazon because they don't care if they have to share changes - they can host it anyway
Post reply on HN