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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google is a large and complex company with many competing interests internally. Yes, I absolutely believe they would have created Gmail absent any advertising incentive. You have to remember how many seemingly random consumer services were created during the first decade of Google (say, 2000-2010), most of which were engineering experiments and had nothing to do with advertising.

The Ads org within Google is large but fairly compartmentalized and runs like an absolute machine -- there is no questioning that.

What most outsiders don't see, though, is how much independence all the other orgs have. For example, the fastest growing collection of stuff are the Hardware & Cloud areas, which account for probably 35000-40000 employees and are almost completely autonomous. If Ads show up on Google hardware products (let's use Google Home as an example), that's because the Home team exposed a service that allowed the Ads team to do it, not because the Home team was necessarily thinking about display/search ads during product design. In fact, there are many services Google provides where it's well understood that users will not tolerate ads at all (like Google Assistant surfaces).

The reason I responded to the parent was because they made a blanket statement, which, while true if you only look at the fiscal reports, is untrue in practice. One could certainly argue strongly that Google's inability to strike it rich with anything besides Ads is 1) the reason the stock has been in the [relative] doldrums for the past year+, and 2) why Google continues to invest in all sorts of things (like Wing, or Chronicle, or Stadia, or ...) that are pretty far afield, not to mention the pure & applied research happening inside the RMI/Brain org that's often much more academic than practical.

Besides search & mobile (admob) advertising, the only two major product areas inside Google that take a strong stance supporting the advertising mission are Youtube & Maps, but even then Maps tries to ensure it's surfacing useful, actionable, timely, and local information, which generally place it in a different category. Maps also have strong potential via partnerships for things like ride services, appointment bookings, travel, food delivery, and the like... some of which might technically be considered advertising but which manifests more like functional partnerships.

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

#202
post #49

"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…

> Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price. You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify…

"No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price."

Open office is a good example. Everybody I know uses it as a free alternative for Microsoft Office. How is this not competing on price?

From a developer standpoint, it's great to be able to tinker, check for spyware, etc. But 99% of users will never actually care or look at the source and only even care about it because it's a free version of a proprietary counterpart.

"You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day"

You can. But you have no competitive advantage because you are required under the GNU to release your source to everyone (and any other company can sell it for X amount less).

Companies need to either sell support or something else to stay relevant (redhat sells support, certifications, and books).

This is one of the reasons SaaS have become so popular over the last couple of years. You don't need to release your source and could base your entire business on open source software without having to release anything back and lose your competitive advantage.

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

#203

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,…

Spoiler alert: they do for many of their services. GSuite, YouTube premium, etc

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

#204
Forget about open source. AWS is eating the lunch of venture backed pure software (and hardware!) businesses everywhere. Go to re:Invent and look at what they release in terms of MVPs. Each product release that they present could be a huge headline for Sequoia, a16z, etc on TechCrunch 5 years ago. For example, in 2018 we had:

Ground Station

Robo Maker

DeepRacer

Bunch of storage features (many could be standalone startups)

Bunch of IoT stuff (same -- SiteWise, ThingsGraph, etc.)

Many launched with real customers, too.

It is NOT EASY to bring a software MVP to market and AWS does it massively, across many efforts, in parallel, EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

Being a developer right now and complaining about AWS cannibalizing open source is a lot like running a late 1400s monastery and complaining about how Gutenberg Bibles are displacing hand-written Bibles.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I expect any model where fb allowed payment for an ad-free experience would still involve them doing all that targeting for others with my data anyway.

That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Sure, but that would be fraudulent, and generates no economic value, so I've got no sympathy for that.

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

#207
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I highly encourage you to setup some time to talk to maintainers of open source projects that you think are doing well. Ask them how they are doing and how much help they receive.

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

#208
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…

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…

> 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.

Your argument makes no sense. Even if we accept the thesis that building block components are up for grabs because they cannot be immediately used as valuable services... Well, neither can services. You need to design a system architecture, figure out how and if a component plays a role, pick a component, config the component, setup a deployment ans scaling strategy, config and integrate metrics and health checks, ingest data, monitor the service, etc etc etc.

And if we actually want to make an objective comparison between libraries and services... Well, in the end they are all components of a larger system.

So, obviously there is no objective distinction. There's only intellectual property and companies being hypocrite wanting to have their cake and eating it too. They can't get it both ways.

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

#209
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…

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.

Their elasticsearch fork is literally called Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Its totally open, and all licensed as Apache 2.0.

Their mongodb clone isn't. It'd be kind of cool if it was, but there's substantial evidence its based on the Aurora Storage engine. Through the docs and various talks at Re:Invent, its clear that the ASE is insanely coupled to AWS, with tight integration to S3 and deep availability-zone awareness. It would be useless beyond an academic exercise to someone who isn't on AWS. It would be cool to see it all open sourced, but not really valuable.

AWS has a pretty strong history of open source in the cloud space, such that it feels strange to me that people still think they're an "enemy" or something. Not as strong as Google or Microsoft, but they're certainly not a New Oracle or anything. You should check out their Open Source Blog [1], and notice that new posts are made literally every two days.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/

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

#210

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…

Keep kissing corporate @rse. Some people don't use FB. Some people would say FU to the thought of paying $2-3 to FB for anything.

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