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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

#451

Post by eecc »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #429
masukomi wrote: post #346

I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to productize a thing they either offered the core developer(s) enough $ to work on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to do that with a guarantee that as long as it was a product, and they wanted to work on it, they'd be allowed to continue. Problem with offering job is the likelyhood of getting redirected to some other unrelated work. instead of forking they coul…

> this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source. I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment. The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their…

Bravo, that’s more or less the TL;DR of all BSD, GPL/Apache endless flame.

I love how these reckonings and syntheses are coming.

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

#452

Post by gowld »

tnolet wrote: post #331
mjasay wrote: post #297

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…

OP here. Matt and I are chatting about this. We will work it out. As per my tweet, it's not about the letter of the licensing, it's about the spirit.

You mean it's not about the letter or the spirit of license at all; it's about the spirit of plagiarism, or sociability, or something.

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

#453

Post by heavyset_go »

funkaster wrote: post #411
EpicEng wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source. Then use a different license. Hoping that a company like Amazon finds it in their hearts to always do what _you_ consider "the right thing" is just a loser of a strategy. You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides. Good l…

This is what people don't get when arguing against GPL: "oh, it's such a restrictive license! so viral, blah blah blah". In this case, it would've probable not changed the outcome, but could give the author some leverage for either compensation or mention. IANAL, but my understanding is that GPL would require you to keep the same terms and mention explicitly the original source.

AGPL would also force Amazon to open-source their changes to services that they release that use AGPL code.

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

#454

Post by Gehinnn »

frabert wrote: post #288
wpietri wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of sense to it. Every contract, every law states what we see as the bare minimum required not to be actively harmful. They're society's skeleton. But bodies are more than bone, and societies are more than people doing the bare legal minimum. Look at what the law requires of parents, for example. Food, shelter, clothing, school attendance, a lack of physical abuse. But parents who do the legal minimum a…

I'd call this wishful thinking and something that's been proven time and time again to be not working as well as it should, in practice.

I think it worked with Microsoft. They have a much better image now with regards to open source.

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

#455

Post by pbhjpbhj »

unethical_ban wrote: post #408
EpicEng wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source. Then use a different license. Hoping that a company like Amazon finds it in their hearts to always do what _you_ consider "the right thing" is just a loser of a strategy. You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides. Good l…

"Don't like how shitty people can be? I don't care" - that is how this kind of comment reads. But let's move on. Interesting idea for a license. Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.

Like CC-BY-NC (Creative Combine, Attribution, Non-commercial). If you want to use the work commercially (ie for business purposes, commercial doesn't require selling) then you must negotiate licensing terms (or infringe copyright [Fair Use / Fair Dealing aside].

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

#456

Post by benjaminjosephw »

dingaling wrote: post #420
tnolet wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. Matt and I are chatting about this. We will work it out. As per my tweet, it's not about the letter of the licensing, it's about the spirit.

> it's not about the letter of the licensing, it's about the spirit If it's not in black and white then it's not part of the license. Spirit isn't defined. To paraphrase Theo de Raadt, if you're not happy for your code to be used in a puppy mulching machine then don't license it under a permissive license.

Open source culture is so much more than the licenses. A license dictates what is legally permissible but it doesn't mean that there aren't other cultural expectations that go with that.

Eric Raymond famously wrote about the customs of open source in Homesteading the Noosphere: "I have observed these customs in action for 20 years, going back to the pre-FSF ancient history of open-source software. They have several very interesting features. One of the most interesting is that most hackers have followed them without being fully aware of doing so."[0]

It is possible for us to have norms of mutual respect beyond what is legally required. I think those norms are actually at the heart of open source and have been since the beginning. I hope we never abandon them just because they are "not in black and white".

[0] - http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homestead...

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

#457

Post by kemitche »

sequoia wrote: post #352
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 th…

There is, and will always be, a gap between what is strictly allowed/legal, and what is considered ethical/courteous.

There's a number of things that are strictly speaking legal, but still considered rude. Often, the reputation of a person or business is based at least in part on whether they do the legal bare minimum, or if they hold themselves to some level of higher standard.

I also think there's a difference between attribution because a license requires it (commonly buried several links/pages deep in some obscure "Here's a laundry list of ALL the open source packages we used to build this"), and acknowledging that a _specific_ library powers the core of a new product. I don't know of any license that marks that line.

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

#458

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dheera wrote: post #404
masukomi wrote: post #346

I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to productize a thing they either offered the core developer(s) enough $ to work on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to do that with a guarantee that as long as it was a product, and they wanted to work on it, they'd be allowed to continue. Problem with offering job is the likelyhood of getting redirected to some other unrelated work. instead of forking they coul…

Not only that, but there is no mention of the original author on their press release. All they say is "Amazon launches CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder". https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-cl... I wonder if FOSS licenses can be modified such that if you are claiming in press that you are "launching" something and it is substantially based on something open source you must state the original autho…

Surely the answer is "of course you can", just tack on "all media mentions must have an approved attribution without which all license terms are null and void" to any license and viola!?

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

#459

Post by coddle-hark »

masukomi wrote: post #346

I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to productize a thing they either offered the core developer(s) enough $ to work on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to do that with a guarantee that as long as it was a product, and they wanted to work on it, they'd be allowed to continue. Problem with offering job is the likelyhood of getting redirected to some other unrelated work. instead of forking they coul…

On the other hand, I don’t write FOSS in the hopes that some corporate overlord will eventually recognise my work and essentially buy the project from me with a job offer. I write FOSS because fuck you I have a computer and an internet connection and I’m going to do whatever I want. If you want to fork it, go ahead, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend my time (paid or unpaid) writing features that only make sense to Amazon.

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

#460

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ghaff wrote: post #436
bhhaskin wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. There are a lot of open source licenses. If you care about that sort of thing then choose a license that doesn't allow it for commerical use.

There is no open source license [1] that prohibits commercial use. [1] Specifically, no OSI-approved open source license but that's what most people equate with "open source license."

Don't CC-NC licenses count?
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