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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

#171

Post by barkingcat »

EamonnMR wrote: post #81
barkingcat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that licenses are able to be written and rewritten right? If someone wanted attribution, someone could hire a lawyer and make a license (or make an edit/fork of an existing license) that does what someone needs. Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers who make open source licensing function is also a thing.

I'm not sure most companies would touch software with a nonstandard license like that though.

Isn't that the point?

Companies want to take and exploit free/opensource licenses in exactly this way.

By putting in a clause for attribution for example, you winnow away the companies like Amazon who would totally want to fork and re-release without crediting you.

If a company doesn't want to credit you, and your license is dissuading them from forking your project, then the non-standard license has achieved its goal.

You can't have it both ways. It's like people complaining that the GPL is "viral". That's the whole point of it. Companies that don't want to re-contribute their source changes are dissuaded from using it at all.

If you put an attribution clause in the license, the companies that don't touch your code is the company you never wanted to use your code at all. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I need the exposure so I use a totally permissive license" and then say "Oh but I actually want attribution in a way that if people knew about this requirement, wouldn't use it to begin with"

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

#172

Post by save_ferris »

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…

> 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.

Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely. Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues? Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software titans play the biggest role in what you've described here. Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and the government has completely failed to police their behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create the motivation to do those questionable things.

> 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?

I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC, MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not exclusive.

> Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.

I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.

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

#173

Post by rfrey »

Much of the discussion in this thread has highlighted the difference between those who regard open source as a community and public good, and those who regard it as a resource to be exploited. The latter sees anything beyond legalistic compliance as an unreasonable expectation.

Personally I'm disappointed with the exploitation view, but I also think it's an interesting example of how different assumptions lead groups to talk past each other. "AWS was in complete compliance, what's the problem?" versus "AWS violated the spirit of the community". Each camp agrees with the other camp's assertion but sees it as irrelevant.

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

#174

Post by segfaultbuserr »

ksec wrote: post #63
jasode wrote: post #42

There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the content of Tim Nolet's twitter post. (Probably because the short headline has pitchfork raising overtones.) - He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses - He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thank…

Yes I remember there was a similar scenario with Microsoft as well. > In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement". Yes. What we need is ABSD, AMIT or AAPL where the first A stands for appreciation / Attribution

Congratulations, you've just reinvented the original BSD-4 license! It included what was called the "obnoxious advertising clause".

> 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the .

There's a good reason why we no longer use BSD-4 anymore.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html

> The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences. When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad. This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. (Fortunately NetBSD has decided to stop adding them, and to remove those it could.)

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

#175

Post by varispeed »

Muromec wrote: post #147
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…

> 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.

You can exclude companies that have multi billion company in their tree.

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

#176

Post by segfaultbuserr »

thomasahle wrote: post #136
tinus_hn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s a great idea but for instance the Linux kernel would have to come with documentation that mentions the tens of thousands of authors. A massive undertaking that doesn’t help anyone, really.

> for instance the Linux kernel would have to come with documentation that mentions the tens of thousands of authors It wouldn't be too hard to maintain though. Could probably mostly pull it out of git even.

Documentation is not the problem. The problem is that, the advertising clause requires ALL promotional materials to include these acknowledgements, for ALL software that has been used in the software. It was not a problem for BSD back then, since UCB was the only developer. But for projects with multiple copyright owners, such as the Linux kernel, a Linux distro poster would contain a thousand lines of acknowledgements, and this is not even counting the packages in the userspace.

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

#177

Post by RKearney »

0xmohit wrote: post #128

The OP posted "Show HN: Headless Recorder" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24577642 > 22 days ago. Amazon forked and released it as a service. They are efficient.

Wrong post. It was over 2 years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17760536

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

#178

Post by _verandaguy »

jasode wrote: post #42

There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the content of Tim Nolet's twitter post. (Probably because the short headline has pitchfork raising overtones.) - He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses - He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thank…

I believe CC-BY[0] covers this. Worth noting that CC is more of a generalist license than software, though, so you may not have as fine-grained control as with BSD/GPL/MIT etc.

  [0] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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

#179

Post by devthrowawy »

dak1 wrote: 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 is incredibly naive. FOSS ultimately is business (if the code has any real value) and that's why there are licenses, to keep industry in 'check'. If RMS shared your optimism there would be no FOSS. Business are not people, they are entities driven by profit and the limits of law. Call it greed if you want but that's how you get endless $1 loafs of bread and the ability to fly anywhere in the US for a couple hundred bucks or less. If you really want something to be so, get it in writing. There is no 'community' like you illude to. Maybe in certain corners of the web or for some more notable projects, but there is plenty of FOSS that is really the backbone of a lot of sw and non sw infrastructure that is contributed to almost exclusively by corporations that are in competition with each other. FOSS is not just web devs hanging out on twitter making some app with a cute logo that will be forgotten in 3 years. There is big business going on and without a good license you have nothing.

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

#180

Post by rbanffy »

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…

Corporations the size of Amazon are imune to shame. If it's not a hard requirement, they'll only comply if it's not against their self interest to do so.
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