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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

#271

Post by tinus_hn »

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.

That’s the easy 90% of the work. The rest is the hard 90%.

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

#272

Post by wpietri »

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?

If your understanding of somebody leads you to obvious absurdity, one possibility is they're being absurd. The other is that you misunderstood them. I think it's worth exploring both paths before posting to suggest somebody's a fool.

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

#274

Post by serguzest »

code4tee wrote: post #97
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…

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.

hi! I want to work for amazon, can you forward my resume to your boss please?

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

#275

Post by monsieurbanana »

ivanbakel wrote: post #211
dalbasal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you also dislike interacting with people, seeing how there's no such thing as an exhaustive list of things to do and not to do?

This is not even an analogy, it's what is being discussed. AWS didn't do anything illegal with regards to their usage of open-source, but we live in a society, and we do have innumerable tacit rules. One of them is that you should give credit to where credit is due.

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

#277

Post by gus_massa »

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.

In a somewhat similar scenario, we had some discussions about what "Friday midnight" means. So just to be super clear, we finally put "Thursday, 11pm".

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

#278

Post by young_unixer »

frabert wrote: post #80
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…

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 you feel attribution is important, choose a license that makes it legally binding.

Some of us think copyright is unfair and we want to use it as little as possible. That means using MIT or BSD licenses.

That doesn't mean we are against attribution. We are only against the use of coercion to get attribution.

We can say "It would be nice if you give attribution" without saying "I'm going to use my legal rights to coerce you into giving me attribution"

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

#279

Post by offtop5 »

soumyadeb wrote: post #217

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 softwar…

What about the new Amazon Intern who finds an awesome open source project.

She now gets fired because open source means open only for some.

The main value add is AWS is hosting it. Amazon isn't being an angel, they could of easily given the author a solid 20k donation as a thank you. Apart of releasing MIT or Apache licensed code is knowing someone else might take it and make millions.

If you want to restrict your software usage you can use GPL.

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

#280

Post by petercooper »

xtracto wrote: post #270
madeofpalk wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this conversation is not about the bare legal minimum. no one is disputing they have acted legally.

Funny, these kind of threads sound similarly to how some companies I have worked for sound when talking about working on Saturdays: Me: Do we have to come to work on Saturdays? Boss: You dont HAVE to... but you know, people come and do work to go the extra mile. Me: Ok, but If I don't come, there's no problem right? Boss: Well, no, there's no problem. But you know, there's lots of work and it is great when people pus…

Sure, but this is a situation about social norms rather than passive aggressive employer behavior.

Typically when a product or service is released, if it's built significantly upon something else, you at least throw out a quick acknowledgement. Sure, it's not the law, it's just polite/kind/whatever nice word you prefer to use.

All sorts of communities have various 'norms' of this nature which you are totally entitled to ignore but that doesn't mean they're not there.

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