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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

#311

Post by matthewaveryusa »

nitrogen wrote: post #218
matthewaveryusa wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is super interesting, I was actually thinking about it as I was writing that response. Isn't that non-enforceable? As in, if you write a legal document, and then make that document law, and then copyright it, it would mean that you wouldn't be able to modify the law without breaching copyright law. Is this really true and enforceable?

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

#312

Post by varispeed »

jaywalk wrote: post #208
varispeed wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh the good old companies paying in exposure... If you make a profit from using someone else software you should pay them (plus appropriate tax) regardless of the software license.

If someone wants to get paid by people who profit off their software, they should license it in a way that requires that. Otherwise, tough luck.

This is a loophole that allows big companies to avoid hiring engineers and paying right tax. Not sure why would you support this?

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

#313

Post by rbanffy »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #293
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.

> " Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of thousands of authors if it were not. " Aren't the BSDs a counterexample to that?

How many authors they have? My impression is that the number is much lower.

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

#314

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

> "Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies."

People start looking at things differently when they're asked to pay for them and they start comparison shopping. Would people pay for LibreOffice over MS Office? Would people pay for GIMP over Photoshop? Some would, most wouldn't. It would kill corporate adoption of FOSS and, since most FOSS development is done by people employed by corporations, that would shrink the userbase and reduce the sustainability of FOSS.

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

#315

Post by rbanffy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #301
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.

> 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…

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

Companies invest in developing Linux to create a commodity they can leverage to sell their products and services. The GPL ensures the investment remains a commodity and cannot be used in proprietary products that can't be also leveraged by the initial contributor.

There was a lot of BSD in the core of every proprietary Unix, each tied to a given manufacturer.

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

#316

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #289
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?

The irony is these corporations don't even value the software because they don't pay for it. Giving your software to them is like telling them your time is worth nothing. I preferred the days when there was a mass of small developers selling software to what we have now. It feels like we have gone backwards.

> "The irony is these corporations don't even value the software because they don't pay for it. Giving your software to them is like telling them your time is worth nothing."

I said that in the '90s, because it was obvious even back then, and it was drowned out by the "We're gonna destroy all the evil proprietary software giants and all code will be free forever, yeah!" chorus. It's nice to finally be vindicated.

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

#317

Post by duckerude »

nitrogen wrote: post #218
matthewaveryusa wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're allowed to modify it as long as you make it very clear that the new license is distinct from the old one: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL

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

#319

Post by thayne »

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.

Ah, yes, he is acknowledged in a text file that almost no one will read.

Obviously there is no legal requirement, but would it be that hard for Amazon to include a "forked from..." or "built off of...", etc. to the announcement and product pages, if it really is heavily based off of another work?

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

#320

Post by duckerude »

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.

Rolling your own license isn't trivial. You could end up with something that nobody wants to touch because the legal implications are unclear, or something that's unenforceable, or both.

Somewhat relevant: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...

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