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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

#241

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

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[...] after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes.

That's because of developers' (read: devops folk) own narrow focus of open source. When someone talks about open source having won, they're referring to how their company has three dozen services published on GitHub that can somehow be strung together to approximate 60% of what their company is actually putting in people's hands at the end of the day. That's open source for you.

Stallman and his acolytes had it right all along about focusing on free software as a philosophy meant to empower users and not career programmers (who already generally make more than the average household...). It doesn't matter if a smattering of SaaSsy services are open source if (a) it's mired in the sort of headaches that are par for the course in devops today with respect to actually being able to run the thing, and (b) the app that real, actually people are jabbing with their fingers and literally touching is still proprietary.

So it's not a problem of too much open source; it's a problem of not enough, and a problem of eschewing with the user-focused underpinnings of free software along the way, to instead follow the career devopser's AWS/GitHub/whatever-powered path while advertising it as win. To borrow liberally from Alan Kay, the computing revolution hasn't been won—because it has not yet even happened.

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

#242

Post by shawnz »

numlock86 wrote: post #225
shawnz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Motivate them to be mindful of the shoulders they stand on. What makes you believe they are not? Or rather, what do you think they are apparently obligated to do? What's the issue here? > The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post is at the top of a popular tech forum. I don't see the anti-Amazon part. What I do see is a developer that either has a license issue or simply wants some attention.

> What makes you believe they are not?

The OP seems to be disappointed with how they handled it, and an Amazon agent even replied to agree and apologize. Plus, this is not the first time that people have reported similar feelings about Amazon's lack of appreciation for the permissive open source code they use.

> what do you think they are apparently obligated to do?

I don't know exactly, but I think it starts with making efforts to maintain good relationships with the open source community members who work for free to enable Amazon's (and others) products to exist. Regardless of whether they explicitly demand it up front.

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

#243

Post by tnolet »

Lightbody wrote: post #232
ilaksh wrote: post #26

It 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.

Yes, AWS’s canary service competes directly with my company https://checklyhq.com

This is fine of course. We have many competitors.

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

#244

Post by barkingcat »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #237
jasode wrote: post #110

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. 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 a…

Hacker news never reads original posts either way, let alone followups to original posts :)

I'll be downvoted, but that's a symptom of how poorly the audience of this site understands the issues at hand. (myself included)

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

#245

Post by LoSboccacc »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #124
LoSboccacc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...you can just add a clause E: who downvoted this, care to explain? have you ever eard of the jslint license? you can add the fuck you want to one's software terms

I did not downvote, but license proliferation is a big problem in free software. People cannot combine software with incompatible licenses.

> People cannot combine software with incompatible licenses.

well yeah, that the point, you either demand a nod, or suck it up and stop asking things that weren't in the license

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

#246

Post by loufe »

smusamashah wrote: post #113

> Oh @awscloud I really do :Two hearts: you! But next time you fork my OS project https://github.com/checkly/headless-recorder and present it as your new service, give the maintainers a short "nice job, kids" or something. Not necessary as per the APLv2 license, but still, ya know? He is only nicely and asking for recognition/attribution while acknowledging that it's not required per licence. I don't know why people…

To be fair: as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Amazon did in fact credit him, and he admitted his mistake later in the Twitter thread.

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

#247

Post by Xylakant »

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…

The primary problem is that 4-clause BSD is incompatible with the GPL since it adds restrictions to distributing the software (notably the advertising clause)

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

#248

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

Intermernet wrote: post #166
tannhaeuser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?" Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad those two languages are open source.

I'd bet that this outlook is the sort of narrow-sighted, can't-even-understand-the-question sort of thinking that the person you're responding to had in mind when asking the question—as what not to focus on when talking about the successes of FOSS. That even with the point made in a very straightforward way it gets responses like this is a huge signal of what sort of problem we're dealing with.

Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".

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

#249

Post by rbanffy »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #228
rbanffy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of thousands of authors if it were not. It would have a dozen proprietary forks.

The GPL doesn't have this advertising clause - it's largely specific to some BSD variants.

That's why Linux doesn't come with a 10,000+ page tome listing names ;-)

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

#250

Post by mekal »

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…

I think recognition by AWS would have been nice (win-win for both parties) but lack of it does not warrant public shaming.

If someone doesn't thank you for your "free" services, then keep your head down, plow ahead and take comfort in knowing you're doing a good enough job for a company like Amazon to use your stuff. And if that's not enough, send them a private message and let them know how you feel.

Given that everyone thinks like me, I wonder if some of the "Your license didn't say they couldn't." comments might be a defensive reaction to what they see as an unjustified public shaming. Like an unjustified honk on the road. This is twitter at its best right? Someone says something that pushes the right buttons (intentionally or not), people kick it up a notch by reacting defensively and we're off to the races!

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