Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 673 posts

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

#151

Post by toolz »

thatguyagain wrote: post #137
code4tee wrote: post #97

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?

If someone gave you tens of thousands of dollars of valuables would you say thank you? If people gave that to you regularly would you become too bothered to say thank you? especially when your acknowledgement could help the person giving you their wealth?

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

#152

Post by dboreham »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #144
save_ferris wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It benefitted the hardware industry in the same way free gasoline would benefit the auto industry.

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

#153

Post by CydeWeys »

bogwog wrote: 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…

Why so high? Why not, say, $10M? If you want to be paid for your work, why let most of even the Fortune 500 still use it for free?

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

#154

Post by aequitas »

thatguyagain wrote: post #137
code4tee wrote: post #97

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?

Well since they save a tremendous amount of time and effort by incorporating code that other developers spend their time on it the least they could do. Heck, it's even possible to mostly automate this as a lot of companies already (automatically) check for licences that require attribution or have other conflicts before you release your product.

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

#155

Post by geodel »

josalhor wrote: post #134
frabert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this point is kind of nonsense to me. If people acted as if they were held to the higher standard, we would not need licenses. People (especially when they're not acting alone, e.g. corporations) act in their monetary interest, most of the time. Hence, stick to the license that's least restrictive that still ticks all the boxes you feel are important. If you feel attribution is important, choose a license t…

If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude. If I got that idea from examining the competition, that would be seen as a smart move. Sure, if attribution is a requirement then the natural thing to do is to turn it into a legal requirement . But I don't think that is the discussion here. It comes down to how we want to treat open sour…

> If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude.

It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social media berating you for stealing other people's ideas. If just office ideas were this important may be they need to be submitted with process of academic journals with proper attribution.

It can't be both ways: "Announcing that take my idea / software and run with it" And if someone does, telling them "you are first rate moocher, aren't ya?"

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

#156

Post by TallGuyShort »

rusk wrote: post #142
thatguyagain wrote: post #137

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?

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

As does this - that's what the NOTICES file is for. When I've looked at it on TVs it looks the same: Copyright notice and license terms that they're required to bundle with any redistribution.

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

#157

Post by prepend »

duckerude wrote: post #127
code4tee wrote: post #97

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.

They did the legal bare minimum in terms of attribution, but you're very unlikely to find it unless you're looking for it. I don't usually read through files like ~/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/bhdnlmmgiplmbcdmkkdfplenecpegfno/0.0.1_0/NOTICE.txt (though perhaps I should).

That’s to be expected then, the legal bare minimum.

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

#158

Post by varispeed »

3pt14159 wrote: post #74
varispeed wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal. Currently you cannot hire someone as an apprentice and don't pay them - you need to give at least the minimum wage. OSS is sort of a loophole where companies can obtain work without payment. I think this practice should be illegal and regardless of the license company adopting OSS solution should pay its contributors…

I appreciate the underlying sentiment, but I disagree. When I contribute to OSS it's my choice to and I want the right to let anyone do whatever they want with code even if I never exercise that right. Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the startups and medium sized businesses around the worl…

There is the same argument that people who want apprenticeship use. They want to work for a company and learn, but company won't hire them because they don't have money to pay for "idle" worker and the overhead to teach them. But this is for the greater good. In the past you had companies who used their market share in particular city to drive wages down and people had a choice either work for them and starve or move to different city. Minimum wage stops this, at a cost of some people being unable to work for free. I can accept that.

There will be projects for sure that would love their software were used by AWS and other companies without paying them, but that will only create a race to the bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these giant companies.

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

#159

Post by varispeed »

pfdietz wrote: post #103
varispeed wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal. Currently you cannot hire someone as an apprentice and don't pay them - you need to give at least the minimum wage. OSS is sort of a loophole where companies can obtain work without payment. I think this practice should be illegal and regardless of the license company adopting OSS solution should pay its contributors…

> The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal. So, once an author is dead, it should be illegal to sell anything they created? Or should ownership rights in content for the estate last forever? Your idea is terrible when examined in detail.

This is an edge case, but for sure they would have family members who would inherit the titles and in an event of absence of such people then the state should take ownership.

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

#160

Post by CydeWeys »

cdnsteve wrote: post #132

Congrats, your work was good enough to turn into a commercial project by a major top 3 cloud provider. That would make me feel like I would stand a little taller! You basically created a new AWS service, as v1, that's pretty cool to add to a CV ;) Just be patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of your Lambo now.

The Lambo bit is rubbing salt in the wound, because the author isn't actually benefiting financially from this at all. Amazon is taking all of the profits. How's he supposed to compete against them?
Post reply on HN