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AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

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Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#141

Could everyone take a moment here and reflect on their hostile attitude towards an open source author who just wants to be treated fairly (in a moral sense)? My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.

Yeah part of the social contract for open source is people get appreciation, respect, and visibility in exchange for their contributions ..

[deleted]

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read further down the Twitter thread you’ll see others point out that AWS actually DID acknowledge him in the release and thus his original rant isn’t accurate. He acknowledges that later in the thread. Of course the, now inaccurate, headline Tweet remains the thing getting attention.

Are people really expecting the devs at AWS to give a "thank you" to every third party developer out there who's code they use? This is just ridiculous. When does this become an obligation? Is there an unwritten rule of how large/successful a team has to be before they need to give thank's like this?

Eh yes. Even my TV has an open source acknowledgements section in the menu.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read further down the Twitter thread you’ll see others point out that AWS actually DID acknowledge him in the release and thus his original rant isn’t accurate. He acknowledges that later in the thread. Of course the, now inaccurate, headline Tweet remains the thing getting attention.

Are people really expecting the devs at AWS to give a "thank you" to every third party developer out there who's code they use? This is just ridiculous. When does this become an obligation? Is there an unwritten rule of how large/successful a team has to be before they need to give thank's like this?

I don't think you need to give a "thank you" in the announcement to every library you use, but if you have a product that's just a fork of an open source project, then, yes, I definitely think you should thank them in the announcement.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#144
post #62

I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't." Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land. Either we as a community hold ourselv…

> Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OSS community that actually instills this mantra in people. I like to think that I also see OSS as a community and digital public square, but there's no universality to that philosophy. > Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to…

> OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry

I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#145
post #62

I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't." Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land. Either we as a community hold ourselv…

This, incidentally, is why I tend to prefer the AGPL for stuff I write myself, as it aligns most closely with this "digital public square" idea. I'd simply rather not have an Amazon use my work in this sort of taking-without-giving way at all.

Meanwhile, the open source code I write for my employer is Apache 2.0 licensed because the permissive licenses seem to be the most friendly towards large corporations and hence is what they prefer.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#146
i don't see what the issue is. his project is licensed under apache2:

https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0...

i mean, as long as they include the license, they don't have to give any credit whatsoever.

remember this, companies do things according to their legal department and i'm almost certain that their legal department said flat out that if they credit the author they could set themselves up for a lawsuit down the line. so they followed the license requirements to the book.

if the author is pissed about a big company using his project and them not giving him a props, he should have used a license that requires an attribution of the original author.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#147
post #139

Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. If your company makes more than, say, $50 billion in revenue per year or something crazy like that, then you need to pay for a license. Everyone else can use the free license. Amazon in particular is well known to be aggressively anti-competitive, as we saw with the Diapers.com fia…

> with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies.

Every multi billion dollar company: runs subsidiary to not trigger legal threshold. They probably do it anyway for tax purposes.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#148
post #62

I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't." Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land. Either we as a community hold ourselv…

> Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square.

I've never found this square.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people really expecting the devs at AWS to give a "thank you" to every third party developer out there who's code they use? This is just ridiculous. When does this become an obligation? Is there an unwritten rule of how large/successful a team has to be before they need to give thank's like this?

"thank you" is a pretty low price for software.

I think thatguyagain is making a good point about infinite regress. Should we all add a thank you to our github pages, thanking every dependency, library, framework, to Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to John von Neumann?

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#150
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear of bad PR is the most effective way to motivate larger American companies.

Motivate them for what, though? Fixing your license issues? Where is the bad PR? Edit: Those downvotes are not really giving me answers. Anyone care to explain the issue?

Motivate them to be mindful of the shoulders they stand on. The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post is at the top of a popular tech forum.
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