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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

#211

Post by balls187 »

eitally wrote: post #201
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

Can you definitively say that data collected from all the other Google BU's are siloed from Google's Ad BU?

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

#212

Post by jessaustin »

dralley wrote: post #196
jessaustin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OK, I can understand what MongoDB are thinking with SSPL: make the open source license so onerous (using this software requires you to open source your entire stack) that any ASP has to come to them for a commercial license. That makes sense for them, and probably for several other firms. However MongoDB were previously using AGPL, which specifically does not allow AWS to close their modifications. It's probably an open question as to whether Amazon can purchase enough judges to make the point moot, but the license itself is at least trying to keep the software free. In the long run if AWS abides by the license and releases all updates to their Mongo fork it will strengthen AGPL. Admittedly, I've been unable to find the repo through which that's happening now, so maybe my hopes are already dashed...

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

#213

Post by balls187 »

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.

I upvoted you, and yes my statements were gross oversimplifications and reductive, but as a consumer, one has to have a very skeptical view when entering a relationship with Google because their core business is Advertising.

Regardless of my diatribe, the business decisions are what the HN community rails against, and those are typically not the decision made by the rank-and-file (who are likely contribute the most to open source).

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

#214

Post by Jommi »

tguedes wrote: post #197
blazespin wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's "monopolistic" not monopoly. There is a huge difference.

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

#215

Post by AEB62189 »

zelon88 wrote: post #18
product50 wrote: post #3

Why is this a problem? Aren't these companies there to take a cut of the service they put in? If Amazon can incorporate those services/tools and that reduces the prices for the end users, why is it looked as wrong? This is basically the middlemen analogy in commerce which internet completely decimated by allowing manufacturers/retail to go directly to users.

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…

> Amazon...cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it.

This is almost completely wrong.

Amazon sold a managed service for the project long before they forked it. Elastic.co didn't like that Amazon was doing so successfully, so they tried to restrict access to the open source project.

Amazon, on the other had, offers complete access to their fork -- https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch

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

#216

Post by rchaud »

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,…

> but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking.

It's too late for that, I'm afraid. Google and the others have invested billions in their ad products and made back many more billions. It wouldn't make any sense for them to offer any kind of paid opt-out.

And even if you didn't use any Google services, they already have reams of data on you based on your correspondence with anyone with a Gmail account, plus whatever data they can buy off your carrier network and your credit card provider.

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

#217

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rchaud wrote: post #216
musicale wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. It's too late for that, I'm afraid. Google and the others have invested billions in their ad products and made back many more billions. It wouldn't make any sense for them to offer any kind of paid opt-out. And even if you didn't use any Google services, they already have reams of data on you based on your correspondence with an…

Why not? Their per-human revenue is in the single-digit dollars. If I pay $10, they're ahead of the game.

Netflix etc do it with premium services etc

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

#218

Post by mlindner »

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.

There's no logical contradiction in attacking a company for doing bad things with the open source software they wrote and instead praise company who use that software for good. Software is not good or evil, it's how the company/people that use it that determines good vs evil.

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

#219

Post by _msw_ »

resters wrote: post #31

In the realm of physical products, it's already pretty annoying not being able to purchase Nest products on Amazon. One of the main things Amazon has going for it is that one can usually expect to see the whole gamut of competitive products, read helpful reviews, etc. But when products are missing from the results for competitive reasons, the trustworthiness of the platform goes out the window. So this may be a short…

Find Nest products here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/node/3036671011

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

#220

Post by justinclift »

jimrhods23 wrote: post #202
yardie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

> How is this not competing on price?

Perhaps some of us don't actually like Microsoft Office, and prefer things created for public benefit?

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