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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

#351

Post by MatthewMcDonald »

pokemapper wrote: post #58

Here's another example of AWS interactions with OSS: instead of contributing a perfectly good and non-AWS dependant feature to an upstream project (PGBouncer, for a strictly PostgreSQL-level useful feature) they decided to rather stretch it and publish their changes as a _patch_ to the upstream project instead, with a different, restrictive license that only allows its usage on AWS services, together with examples on…

It's worth mentioning that this isn't just a case of people not being able to use the patch outside of AWS; the patch is actually impeding pgbouncer from implementing a similar feature:

> We'd like to rewrite such features for pgbouncer from the ground up but it is impossible to prove to the lawyer that the re-writing is not kind of "derivative works". I believe it is not what you expected, as an opensource project that derived benefit from the whole pgbouncer community.

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

#352

Post by sequoia »

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…

The issue is wanting to have it both ways.

- I don't want to use restrictive (GPL) license like those business-hating FSF folks–I want people to use my software _freely_

- Hey! A big business used my software in a way that rubs me the wrong way (in this case, without giving prominent enough attribution)! Not nice!

What's not nice about it? You use a permissive license but you're going to get upset if people follow the letter of your license? This doesn't make sense. This might make sense if there were not alternative licenses but there are, and the author chose not to use them. This seems like playing a mind-game. "It's permissive! Use it how you like! (but I'm going to be upset if you don't follow the unwritten attribution guideline I have in my head)." How is it fair to expect other parties to meet your secret expectations?

What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?

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

#353

Post by branon »

throwawgler87 wrote: post #347
unreal37 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Legally no, morally yes

Legally no, morally no, ethically yes?

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

#354

Post by andi999 »

ratsimihah wrote: post #10
andi999 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a typo and shd ve GPLv2?

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Thanks. But is this standard to abbreviate to APLv2? I only knew the language APL and the apache license is normally abbreviated apache-v2, or so, isnt it?

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

#355

Post by _verandaguy »

riffraff wrote: post #223
_verandaguy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe CC-BY[0] covers this. Worth noting that CC is more of a generalist license than software, though, so you may not have as fine-grained control as with BSD/GPL/MIT etc. [0] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

would CC-BY require that the licensed work get mentioned in _the product announcement_ ? It seems to me it would just require mentioning it in some CREDITS.txt or whatever, which the other lincenses also do.

Good catch. I think you could get somewhat around this by running a CC-BY-SA, which requires that Amazon disclose the source of their forked product, which in turn would include a credit.

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

#356

Post by franklampard »

thayne wrote: post #319
code4tee wrote: post #97

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. 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?

Can you show me an example of any other project released from FAANG doing that? Curious what the expectations are.

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

#357

Post by sslayer »

cacois wrote: post #336
unreal37 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 honestly think there's room for more than gratitude with, as you said, a trillion dollar company. I know its hard to find a balance when we want free and open tools, developed in a spirit of sharing and enabling innovation. But something feels slimy about an enormous company deriving a huge amount of revenue from a FOSS project, when they could easily compensate developer(s) with barely an impact to their bottom li…

I think the legal aspect of the licensing determines what is "right", otherwise the definition of "right" can be interpreted different ways. Don't be fooled, both parties entered into a contract. One when they published the software, and one when they used the software. Any expectations outside of that are left undocumented.

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

#358

Post by tzs »

varispeed wrote: post #312
jaywalk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not a loophole. A loophole is when you have some case or situation not covered by the rules allowing someone to get away with something that the rules were not meant to allow.

E.g., a company arranging for its shareholders to be able to report dividends as capital gains rather than ordinary income by doing a fractional stock split followed by a mandatory buyback instead of declaring a dividend, with the split/buyback designed so that each shareholder ends up with exactly the same percentage ownership they had before and with cash equal to the exact amount that would have been otherwise distributed as a dividend [1], that's a loophole.

An author picking an open source license that specifically and intentionally allows anyone to use their software and make money from it without having to give the author anything is not a loophole.

[1] Yes, this actually happened around 100 years ago. The rules on buybacks were changed to fix it. But them some legitimate cases of buybacks that should have been capital gains became ordinary income, so more fixes were needed. The result is that what once needed at most a line in the tax code, if it even needed mention at all, became several paragraphs. This is why we do not have a small, simple tax code--there is a massive incentive for people to find even the tiniest loophole and exploit it, and so you end up with multiple paragraphs for things you at first would think could be done in a sentence. (And don't say a flat tax would help...almost all of the complexity in the tax code is in determining what gets taxes, not how much the tax is once you have figured out the what).

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

#359

Post by mynegation »

tylerhou wrote: post #300
xtracto wrote: post #270

Earlier 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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ChQK8j6so8

Ah beat me to it! )) This movie was an instant classic.

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

#360

Post by franklampard »

08-15 wrote: post #261
cmaker10 wrote: post #48

Could everyone take a moment here and reflect on their hostile attitude towards an open source author who just wants to be treated fairly (in a moral sense)? My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.

He used a permissive license so that everyone, including Amazon, can use his code without any strings attached. Presumably because he wants his software to spread far and wide. This is the typically stated reason why people use permissive licenses, isn't it? Therefore, shouldn't he be thanking Amazon for spreading his software?

Acknowledgment is included also. He probably expects an blogpost from AWS thanking him specifically?

That’s pretty much unrealistic, given how many pieces of oss a project uses.

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