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AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
231–240 of 673 posts
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#232It does seem like the license should have asked for a mention if that's what he wanted. However. He has every right to point out that they are using his code. And I think it would be at least polite to mention that, and it is in my opinion impolite not to mention it. And actually a little misleading when they don't mention using an open source system that is similar. And it's not like the fact that he didn't say that…
Worth noting: he _has_ a competing business. It was started before Amazon launched theirs in fact. Checkly, his startup, does synthetic monitoring, which Amazon got into after he was already into it.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#233[deleted]
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#234Situations 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?
You could. No big company would use your software.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#235Earlier 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…
I think it comes back to politeness, somewhere in amazon there is product manager that saw or was shown Tim's repo and saw an opportunity(nothing wrong with that). It would have been a nice thing to do to give him a shoutout just like it was a nice thing to do of Tim's to release his code under a permissive license. There must be a mountain of code forked by large companies that if given some sort of recognition woul…
lol. That's almost certainly not how this worked.
This worked by:
- The PM set some broad brush requirements.
- An engineer saw there was some useful code.
- They/their infrastructure checked that it was under a sensible license.
- They added it
- They released it
- Someone noticed that their product was being used under the license that they had released it under.
- ..
- Big deal?
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#236Are there open source licenses that specifically ban major cloud providers from using software and letting others use it on Apache 2 terms? Specially license tailored against every one of them, by name?
CockroachDB changed their license to address this specific issue. See https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/licensing-faqs.htm...
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#237Earlier 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.
>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. Thanks for informing us with the clarification. The original tweet was 11:16 UTC. This HN thread was submitted 11:23 UTC. That twitter reply showing the acknowledgement in "NOTICES.txt" was later at 11:54 UTC.…
I'm not sure the timeline is important, other than to say HN posters shouldn't submit incendiary tweets as HN topics without some sort of corroboration. Especially when the person who tweets and posts on HN are the same.
Here's the timeline I saw:
11:16 - A person blames AWS of something without additional context and understanding
11:23 - Presumably the same person posts on HN (to signal boost? farm karma from the anti-Amazon crowd sure to pop up? both?)
Never:Never - OP apologizes for rousing the HN pitchfork mob
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#238Earlier 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?
>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?
Did you copy their inventions 1:1 and rebranded them as your own? No you didn't. You just used them which is different.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#239Earlier 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…
> 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?
All the time. One I use every day? Emacs. (Which long predates anything web or cloud related.) For a more recently developed example? Guix.
Setting aside the fact that a very large portion of the software I use outside work is free software.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#240Earlier 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?
No, but they do it typically: "Announcing AWS X, our implementation of {open source project}" (they do this with MongoDB, ActiveMQ, etc). The product mentioned here is more than just a managed version of the open source project; it is a major component however. (good example is Redshift, though when they announced it they barely mentioned the role Postgresql plays in that to be honest) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aw…
Every talk AWS does about Redshift they mention that it’s based on Postgres. They tell you to download a Postgres driver to connect to it with any language besides Java for which a JDBC driver is provided.