I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I told Tim privately and publicly ( https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024 ), I hadn't been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team to see how we can improve in his regard. AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-p…
AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
331–340 of 673 posts
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#332Can 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 so…
Maybe there is a way to define "bad" practices in OS outside of license. Similar to how monopolistic practices are banned in business because they are unhealthy for the broader ecosystem. Just asking
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#333I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I told Tim privately and publicly ( https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024 ), I hadn't been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team to see how we can improve in his regard. AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-p…
Good job taking responsibility, Matt. Handling this the right way. I do think there's a larger discussion about trillion dollar companies just forking a project and announcing it as a new feature for their platform without even talking to the original creator. If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a start. It's open source. You don't have to reach out. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with…
Just don't repeat Microsofts smooth talk, make-your-own and ghost strategy ;-)
It is possibly even worse than just forking.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Totem has an example https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem/-/blob/b4050524d6cd961b...
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
Nothing you do for your employer as part of work should be considered "courtesy" or a "social nicety".
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#336I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I told Tim privately and publicly ( https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024 ), I hadn't been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team to see how we can improve in his regard. AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-p…
Good job taking responsibility, Matt. Handling this the right way. I do think there's a larger discussion about trillion dollar companies just forking a project and announcing it as a new feature for their platform without even talking to the original creator. If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a start. It's open source. You don't have to reach out. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with…
I know its not required by licensing - but "legal" doesn't always mean "right".
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is also rude to sell someone else's work without permission. But if they choose a software license without a non-commercial clause, it is no longer rude: and this implies that the absence of a feature in a license is a kind of approval of its opposite.
If you choose a license without an attribution clause in it, you are admitting, publicly, that you do not care about attribution - not that you require, nor that you forbid it, just that you are ambivalent. If somebody goes on to use your code without attribution, you are wrong to then point out that they have been "rude" to you, because you have already declared your indifference.
I'm not suggesting that unwritten rules are bad. I'm suggesting that trying to introduce unwritten rules to a system where written rules (i.e. licenses) already exist is a bad thing. Software licensing already sits at the intersection of legal and social obligations, because attribution is a feature with essentially no legal impact; treating a software license as a social contract is not a mistake.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#338Earlier 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.
I would hardly call that a rant. And I would hardly call a deeply buried source reference the kind of collegial social acknowledgement he was hoping for. So perhaps, as somebody very concerned about inaccuracy, you could correct your errors here?
Business offering a software service and open-source developer are not colleagues. One is selling a service, the other is writing code, there is simply no comparison.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
Except MacOS X, the major proprietary Unixes all predated permissively-licensed releases of BSD, and the early permissively licensed releases were under a copyright cloud for years that prevented anyone from relying on them for commercial downstream distributions.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#340There 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…
How is he not complaining. He totally is.