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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

#621

Post by sillysaurusx »

barumi wrote: post #591
cacois wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even agreed-upon contracts can be predatory. Maybe there should be a license that says "free and clear for everyone but trillion-dollar companies, because they should really compensate developers for value". I personally think it would be a great look for Amazon if they made it a policy to compensate developers from whom they derive significant economic value. Because they can, and because the developers deserve it.

If developers expected to get compensated for the work they explicitly and voluntarily released for anyone and everyone in the world for absolutely free, wouldn't they have released it under different terms? I mean, it sounds awfully dishonest to do a 180 on the expectations once a user with a deep enough wallet happens to be singled out.

It doesn’t seem dishonest. Companies do it (market segmentation).

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

#622

Post by solidsnack9000 »

ketzo wrote: post #551
kortilla wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a difference between what is legally required and the greater good. Obviously, no one involved in this post is guilty of any literal crime. As you're suggesting, the license is the license. But OSS is a fragile and wonderful thing, and an entity with the resources and clout of AWS would (at least in my opinion) do well to tend that garden rather than strip it bare.

Part of the evolving legal landscape is narrowing the gap between what is legally required and the greater good. It's not about eliminating the gap but we definitely want to rethink things when it's a gaping fault.

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

#623

Post by aabbcc1241 »

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…

The FOSS developer and big company are doing different thing/role.

One is doing development, which requires innovation and time; other is providing service, which requires economy of scale and network effect.

It might be better if the end user tips like likecoin, which will automatically divide the tips to direct and indirect upstream contributor.

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

#624

Post by BeetleB »

petercooper wrote: post #611
BeetleB wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, but this is a situation about social norms rather than passive aggressive employer behavior. Every time I come across a thread - on any forum - where people are educating others that something is a social norm, it is because it is not. They merely want it to be. If you have a good number of people disagreeing on it, take it as a humble suggestion that norms differ across geos, industries, culture, etc. Don't…

Every time I come across a thread - on any forum - where people are educating others that something is a social norm, it is because it is not. Crediting the work of a project you directly forked to create your own is a social norm in the open source world. Happily, Amazon has now edited the post to include such a credit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-cl...

> Crediting the work of a project you directly forked to create your own is a social norm in the open source world.

This is merely repeating the same statement over and over ("Yes it is" "No it isn't" "Yes it is" "No it isn't" ad nauseum). It's not furthering the conversation.

That Amazon decided to do it has no bearing on whether it is a norm or not.

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

#625

Post by BeetleB »

mlyle wrote: post #617
BeetleB wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying "thank you" and giving credit to someone who did you a solid is pretty universally a norm. How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live? Where people do something for the common good and most consumers do not say "Thank you". Have you done this exercise? > Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms This is a convenient, self-fulfilli…

> How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live? I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you. > This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative. So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refu…

> I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you.

Then I hope you've noticed that there are instances in society where "Saying thank you and giving credit to someone who did you a solid" is not the norm.

> So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them.

We are in agreement here.

> Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise. Which is orthogonal to what I'm saying.

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

#627

Post by pabs3 »

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…

Does AWS have a policy of directly funding existing upstream developers/maintainers of projects you are using?

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

#628

Post by ineedasername »

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…

This is nice to hear.

Regarding "giving back" by a company like Amazon, we often talk about the problem of open source maintenance being thankless and difficult due to time commitment and lack of compensation, etc. Personally I don't think direct $$ compensation is the answer, but how about a policy that, for example, dedicated X number of developer hours to the main branch? As in, Amazon tasks a few developers to each give 10 hours of time in direct collaboration with the maintainer(s) to perform tasks the maintainers may have in their queue. That way "giving back" for a project you use is specific and alleviats some of the burden of running a project for exactly those projects from which Amazon benefits.

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

#629

Post by pabs3 »

branweb wrote: post #598
barumi wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon stealing OSS products and repackaging them (...) Since when does providing managed services started to pass off as "stealing"? Am I stealing FLOSS projects as well if I install them on a production environment? It makes zero sense to try to pull this sort of bait-and-switch scam with FLOSS. If you release a project into the world while explicitly stating that everyone in the whole world is free to use it as…

I think you have a point. But there does seem to be a difference between say using FLOSS project X as a dependency in my app vs AWS tweaking it, introducing it as a direct competitor to X, and leveraging their huge marketshare to sell it. Seems like not illegal, not even sure if it's ethically shaky, but there does seem to be a difference right?

TBH, in that scenario, AWS are usually growing the market for X such that the share of the market for X taken by the X developers probably increases after AWS joins the market for X.

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

#630

Post by 29athrowaway »

pabs3 wrote: post #627
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…

Does AWS have a policy of directly funding existing upstream developers/maintainers of projects you are using?

Given the massive amount of revenue they're making off Linux, they should be at list platinum tier Linux Foundation members, but their logo is nowhere to be seen here...

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/

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