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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

#211

Post by ivanbakel »

dalbasal wrote: post #88
ivanbakel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the author can set out what they think is acceptable in their license terms. Attribution costs nothing to the user - so if you want it, stick it in your license. People should be able to comfortably use software within the bounds of the license without worrying about the author coming along and then shaming them for not complying with an additional set of implicit constraints. Yes, it would have been ni…

Look.. going back up the thread and the tweet. There has to be daylight between legal "fault" or obligation and courtesy. The author isn't going on a tirade, he made a quip. We have faculties, as humans, that aren't strictly legible in the way a license or legal code is. Laws are not a substitute for custom or courtesy. We do need both. No one said they stole. They said they were discourteous.

But the author had the opportunity to specify the behaviour that he felt was courteous enough. Some people do not care about shout-outs, and those people do not include attribution clauses in their code licenses.

I also did not mean "fault" in the legal sense, but rather in the sense of courtesy. It is not a faux pas to comply neatly with the terms of a public contract. What you're suggesting is that Amazon erred in not mentioning the author, but the fact that is visible to everyone in the license is that the author does not care about attribution.

I don't like the insinuation that a license can be non-exhaustive in its conditions for the "correct" use of open-source software. You shouldn't run the risk of offending an author by violating some tacit, contradictory rule.

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

#212

Post by nitrogen »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #176
thomasahle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 acknowledgemen…

A modern revisiting would probably require crediting the project as a whole rather than each individual author, and maybe have separate consideration for products that derive from a large number of such projects.

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

#213

Post by eplanit »

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…

You'd have to get the warm and fuzzy emotional parts (community, public square, commons) codified into the license in order to enforce that "higher standard".

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

#214

Post by JoeAltmaier »

arbitrage wrote: post #207
prepend wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had a professor, once, who chewed me out for submitting work at the deadline. I told them that if they wanted me to submit it on Thursday, they shouldn't've set the boundary for Friday at midnight. That didn't go over too well.

I'm surprised. A professor objected to a student adhering to the rules pedantically? What's University for!

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

#215

Post by beojan »

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…

> 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".

There is: the four-clause (original) BSD license (https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-4-clause/). Pretty much no one uses it anymore because things quickly get unwieldy if you have to mention ten or twenty projects you used code from in all advertising.

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

#216

Post by darepublic »

sushicalculus wrote: post #149
steerablesafe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Yes there needs to be a blockchain named gratitude; the shoulders of giants

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

#217

Post by soumyadeb »

Can there be a license - Permissive Open source for the rest of the world except the cloud providers? Or some kind of anti-monopolistic rule to protect open-source?

The cloud providers taking over open-source projects, launching their own forks (with restrictive licenses) etc isn't great for the open-source ecosystem. If you take away the incentives for the developers (respect, fame, etc) to write open-source software, then isn't it kind of doomed in the long run?

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

#218

Post by nitrogen »

matthewaveryusa wrote: post #200
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 really don't understand this reasoning of "there's not a license" Take an existing one you like and amend whatever you want to it.

IIRC the GPL, for example, is itself covered by copyright and doesn't permit modification of its own text.

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

#219

Post by asim »

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…

Polyform Shield is what you're looking for https://polyformproject.org/licenses/

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

#220

Post by minerjoe »

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…

Could we write a license so that if a big company uses my software they have to send me a pony? A real live pony?
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