AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by pydry » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

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.

I really wish a license like this existed, especially for libraries.

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

#492

Post by pwdisswordfish4 » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

franklampard wrote: post #356

thayne wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell, can you show an example from the author's own company? That company's about page has a blurb on contributing back to open source that seems to be on par with what Amazon does to contribute to open source, and the author is sponsoring 4 people on GitHub, but where are the loud proclamations that people are clamoring for in this thread? Whose shoulders are being stood on there? Is checklyhq.com really running a SaaS offering without benefiting from many, many more people than the outward stance suggests?

This whole thing is very reminiscent of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People are very sensitive to the injustices they perceive themselves as having to endure especially in relation to those wealthier than them. But where's the willingness to jump out of local scope and apply the same principle globally (and reflexively)? It seems to be absent.

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

#493

Post by munk-a » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #393

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. 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…

I think it should be possible to modify the GPL3 to disallow any usage in a for-profit setting - then you could individually re-license the code for different users to privately consume (and, optionally, free them from the burdens of the GPL3's copy-left infection). There'd be some issues, any commits you pulled in from the community wouldn't be eligible for re-licensing unless your PR acceptance flow included securing re-licencing rights from them - standard GPL3 copy-left code can't be converted to a private license without the agreement of the original authors.

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

#494

Post by GordonS » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

asim wrote: post #219

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…

Polyform Shield is what you're looking for https://polyformproject.org/licenses/

I've seen these Polyform licenses touted on HN a couple of times recently.

I really do think we need a couple of new licenses along these lines to become popular enough to be generally accepted. Having said that, I struggle to really grok the language in these licenses; it could be that I'm just more familiar with MIT, BSD and the like, but with the Polyform licenses I'm always left with questions about what I can and can't do.

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

#495

Post by dooglius » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

greensoap wrote: post #479

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].

Please don't encourage or suggest the use of CC anything for code. It just wasn't designed for code and creates huge ambiguities on the rights you intended. https://creativecommons.org/faq/#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Common... As stated on the Creative Commons website (licensed under CC-BY): Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we st…

It says

>Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available

But as far as I am aware, there are no comparable software licenses that prohibit commercial use. So, the CC NC licenses seem to be the only option here, even if supposedly imperfect.

Do you have an example of an ambiguity with regard to non-commercial use?

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

#496

Post by staticassertion » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

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…

And companies still get chastized constantly on HN for not being free enough. Open core? Not free enough. Common clause? Not free enough. I've been seeing it here for years.

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

#497

Post by munk-a » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #487

suyash wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet AWS wouldn’t even touch it if it was under GPL, most companies have made it forbidden to use because of reasons you stated.

And would that be a bad thing? If the tool is good, FOSS users will get a competitive advantage over AWS.

I had several discussions with fellow students in Uni about GPL vs. BSD licensing and BSD licensed code is, IMO, more free and more accessible - it really depends on what you want out of your code. Is your goal to provide a useful tool as a one-off that anyone can pick up and use? Then BSD is for you - otherwise, if you have expectations around self-maintenance of the code by consumers then you want to lean more toward GPL. The thing you get out of GPL that you lack with BSD is the ability to pull back changes and bug fixes from users - usually by explicitly excluding those parties which for legal/whatever reasons aren't comfortable re-sharing bug fixes.

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

#498

Post by sslayer » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

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…

Everyone hates capitalism particularly when they fail to capitalize on it.

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

#499

Post by rorykoehler » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

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…

Surely you should be sending him a significant pay check. You're worth billions and just ripping off other peoples projects?

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

#500

Post by munk-a » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

graton wrote: post #490

suyash wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet AWS wouldn’t even touch it if it was under GPL, most companies have made it forbidden to use because of reasons you stated.

FYI: Linux is licensed under GPL v2. AWS uses Linux extensively.

Amazon has a legion of lawyers and probably quite a few technically apt ones that are actually comfortable diving into questions around whether a chef/ansible/whatever script to provision a linux box will go against GPL - and additionally whether pre-baked containers qualify or if a service to dynamically build pre-baked containers would qualify...

These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue.

This is a very, very, complicated situation.