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

#501

Post by new_realist » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #480

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #429

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. 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…

Open source software is something that has no meaningfully similar parallel in any other industry, and that has created untold billions (trillions?) of value across the world while also allowing literally anyone to carve out a piece of that value. That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon i…

Patents and copyright are the parallels in other industries, although they compensate inventors more. Eventually it all goes into the public domain.

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

#502

Post by GordonS » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #418

richardwhiuk wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could. No big company would use your software.

Idk, a pony sounds cheaper than a single day of work for one dev at a FAANG company. I'd have to at least consider the pony option.

True, but have you ever been involved in purchasing at a big company? Trying to procure and ship a pony would take longer than just writing the software yourself (I'm not even joking).

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

#503

Post by didibus » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #302

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…

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…

> 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?

Isn't that the whole point behind the rule of law and the civil society?

Anything that isn't well understood or known in advance of someone engaging in an activity, and then later faces unfair retribution because apparently they didn't do what wasn't told to them that needed be done, or did something that wasn't told to them shouldn't be done.

All these "social norm" sounds like guilt trip and power grabs to me. You did something you said was free and that you were giving it to me no string attached, then you come back and guilt trip me saying that there were in fact strings attached and that you expected things in return.

Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist, or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to big corps. And I actually wonder how the courts normally handle this, when someone who put the conditions forward first was in a position where they couldn't have anticipated the event and thus couldn't have pre-conditioned it. I'm not too sure how to handle it myself, but here I'm guessing is a lesson to learn for others, choose your license carefully, think about the various possibility.

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

#504

Post by atonse » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #324

atonse wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ... they tell you that not because they're bending over backwards to give postgres credit. They're doing it to tell you that the barrier of entry to this database is nearly 0 if you are already using Postgres.

You haven’t watch the reInvent talks have you? But if you try to use the same schema design from a standard Postgres database and use the same query patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to Postgres which is a traditional database.

No I totally get that. It is designed for data warehousing workloads rather than transactional. I'm saying that I have seen it more as a feature of "you use your existing tools and drivers" since it speaks the postgres wire protocol.

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

#505

Post by purpleidea » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #493

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…

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 securi…

> I think it should be possible to modify the GPL3 to disallow any usage in a for-profit setting

That's not how GPLv3 works. Both in terms of selling [1] and in terms of additional permissions under section 7.

GPLv3 without a CLA essentially requires you make the modified code available, but not when it's behind a cloud/webservice. For that you need AGPLv3.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

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

#506

Post by wussboy » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

sslayer wrote: post #498

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #429

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. 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.

That’s fantastic. Did you come up with that?

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

#507

Post by kortilla » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #480

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #429

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. 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…

Open source software is something that has no meaningfully similar parallel in any other industry, and that has created untold billions (trillions?) of value across the world while also allowing literally anyone to carve out a piece of that value. That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon i…

It’s open source, if you’re mad a company used the software in a way you don’t like, you’re not really getting it.

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

#508

Post by kortilla » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:50 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.

Why do you think it’s shitty for Amazon to use an open source project this way? Do the licenses really mean nothing and the unwritten expectation is that the author of open source software should get rich if a someone else successfully productizes it?

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

#509

Post by momokoko » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:52 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…

I would disagree in the specific case of AWS.

We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back.

Like hiring on the core developers or making a large amount of code fixes and feature development contributions.

Amazon does neither of these things.

Take a look at any highly successful society or community. There is a large amount of gifting and selfless behavior

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

#510

Post by kortilla » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

oauea wrote: post #365

wang_li wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're arguing that people should get both the good will of having an open source license and the profits of a closed source license. Which comes across as disingenuous.

No, it's just good sense. If you're adopting an open source project then you clearly think the project has merit. So the people who created this project should be considered for maintaining the company fork, since they clearly know what they're doing.

That doesn’t follow. There have been many projects that I’ve seen forked internally because the original author didn’t know how to write tests, maintain performance, etc.

Open source projects are often very poorly maintained so being the steward of one that’s interesting does not actually qualify you to productize it for a company.