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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

#301

Post by dragonwriter »

rbanffy wrote: post #188
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.

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.

> Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of thousands of authors if it were not.

Why? There's plenty of permissive F/OSS projects with large numbers of contributors.

> It would have a dozen proprietary forks.

Probably, but proprietary forks don't stop F/OSS contributions. They can even be the source of them, as upstreaming everything that isn't secret sauce reduced the cost of maintaining the proprietary fork. A number of the big sources of F/OSS contributions to Postgres are maintainers of proprietary downstream distributions (I don't know that all are strictly forks, since I think the proprietary bits of at least some are using the extension mechanism.)

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

#302

Post by mlyle »

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…

So you're saying the only courtesies we should render to others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by license agreements or other contracts to give?

Out with social norms and niceties, and in with black letter law?

I don't want to legally demand a specific acknowledgement; I know that this can have unintended consequences and greatly complicates adoption.

Also: If my stuff is used at the periphery of something you're doing, I don't really care. On the other hand, if you get to market by largely just repackaging what I've made, it seems that by social norms I'm due a hat tip, whether or not it's legally demanded.

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

#303

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

CydeWeys wrote: post #153
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…

Why so high? Why not, say, $10M? If you want to be paid for your work, why let most of even the Fortune 500 still use it for free?

You'll have less users with such a license, in reality only a tiny percentage of even huge companies use your code in a way that is annoying or make you feel like you should get something back for it and it's hard to target such companies specifically rather than crater the popularity of your project entirely.

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

#304

Post by marcinzm »

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…

That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their business to or sell services to any larger company. Which covers a lot of smaller companies. The license would trigger all sorts of legal red flags during due diligence for either case. And not just with the companies it's supposed to cover but any large company (ie: what if they one day trigger the clause, how well defined is the clause, what if they are partially owned/invested in by a larger company, etc, etc, etc).

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

#305

Post by pornel »

dsabanin wrote: post #198

Open source is getting perverse. Individual developers spend their free time developing a solution without making as much as a cent, while giant corporations are making billions on it. How did that become a thing?

That was always the plan. That's the essence of the difference between Open Source and Free Software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

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

#306

Post by cdnsteve »

toyg wrote: post #195
cdnsteve wrote: post #132

Congrats, your work was good enough to turn into a commercial project by a major top 3 cloud provider. That would make me feel like I would stand a little taller! You basically created a new AWS service, as v1, that's pretty cool to add to a CV ;) Just be patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of your Lambo now.

> Just be patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of your Lambo now. This is sarcasm, right? Right? Situations like this are precisely why the industry pushes so hard for APL and BSD/MIT, and against A/L/GPL: because you do the work and they make the money.

Yes, I thought that was fairly obvious.

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

#307

Post by varispeed »

pas wrote: post #203
varispeed wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So someone launches a new company that provides services for everyone, including billion dollar companies. Basically unless you put a non-commercial license on it, any effort to limit its use will be easily circumvented.

You cannot circumvent that. If you want to do a service for a company that has a multi billion company in the chain then you would have to get full commercial license and when that happens you simply raise an invoice to the client that covers this cost. It is pretty simple and you cannot get around it.

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

#308

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

Essentially, you don't believe there is any gray area for something to be legal and yet a dick move.

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

#309

Post by rfrey »

Chris2048 wrote: post #298
rfrey wrote: post #173

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…

Describing the latter as "exploitation view" is the kind of bad-faith label ala pro-life vs anti-abortion. I see not problem with a lack of attribution, but that means I support "exploitation"? why not describe your own position as the "egocentric" view?

I accept that criticism, I'll be more careful with labels. I've been using "exploitation" for so long in the ML sense of "exploitation vs exploration" that I forgot it can have negative overtones. Or maybe I ignored those overtones because of personal bias.

Definition 2 of exploitation: "the action of making use of and benefiting from resources."

Definition 1: "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work.".

I don't like being accused of bad faith though, I do put a lot of effort into strong-manning positions I disagree with.

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