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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

#661

Post by mlyle »

didibus wrote: post #612
mlyle wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it isn't nice when someone complains they're not getting a thank you for something they choose to do willingly and weren't asked to do. If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways and that people/entities that exc…

> If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways Yes and this is what I'm criticizing. If I am in dept, then say so and make it explicit to me before I take the dept unknowingly, otherwise I'm sorry, but I will in turn sha…

> To me, social norm is just another form of force to impose ones will on others. And thus an attack on liberty. And the idea of a social contract is that I consent to give away some liberties for being able to participate in a functioning society. But when the social contract isn't explicit, and expectations arn't stated, I find that unfair, no matter if the force is physical or psychological.

Welp, good luck with that. There's tens of thousands of social rules that are understood by 99% of people, and you're not going to find an explicit list somewhere of how far to stand away from someone when talking to them, to what kinds of initial conversations are appropriate, to saying "thank you" after someone gives you something, to attributing an idea to someone else, etc. And failing to follow them will rapidly earn you scorn.

> For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor?

If the product is 98% built upon some open source stuff, you put in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph description that it's "built upon" or "powered by" or "makes use of." Even a footnote might be OK. This is pretty obviously the right thing to do, and it's also helpful to your users in understanding what your product is.

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

#662

Post by fallenpegasus »

nanoscopic wrote: post #635
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…

Please release my rewrite / serialization library for Apache Avro. I wrote it in 3 different languages for Amazon when I worked there, and went through all sorts of discussions to have them release it, and they refused for no meaningful reason that I could see. The only reason I was ever given was "we use it and think it is great therefore we won't release it." The implication was "If what you wrote was junk we'd let…

I'm the Principal Engineer for the Open Source Program Office at Amazon. We've gotten much better about being responsive and inclined to open source projects like that.

Email me at atwoodm@amazon.com, and tell me what the internal code names for your projects were, and were you were in the org. I'll see what I can do.

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

#663

Post by fallenpegasus »

ineedasername wrote: post #628
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 ea…

I am a Principal Engineer in the Open Source Programs Office at Amazon.

This is something we are very aware of, and discussions about this cross my desk weekly.

One big problem of the many problems I face regarding such proposals is the people who are the best at writing open source who need the money the most are not the people who are good at writing grant proposals and are good at sucking the money out of such funding systems.

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

#664

Post by thayne »

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.

Blink? Not an exact parallel, but afaik, google clearly gave credit to webkit. And I think Apple gave credit to KHTML for Webkit (and in fact worked with the khtml team for a while).

But even if FAANG don't typically give credit to projects they fork, that doesn't mean it is ok. That's like saying all the big political parties gerrymander, so gerrymandering is ok.

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

#665

Post by rorykoehler »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #647
rorykoehler wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why? It was knowingly and intentionally released to the world for free, to do with as anyone wishes. No one is ripping anyone off.

Technically true (only). Amazon are devoid of ethics but we know that already.

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

#666

Post by skyzyx »

Amazon did the same thing to me — the AWS SDK for PHP. Except that they hired me, but then began telling me what I could and could not do with the project, how I was/wasn't allowed to talk about it, and forced me to drop support for services that they didn't want to support + I wasn't allowed to communicate to customers why.

A couple of years later, they brought on the creator of Boto (AWS SDK for Python), but I bitched at them so much to make absolutely sure that what happened to me wouldn't happen to Mitch. Boto is still an independent OSS project today.

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

#667

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ghaff wrote: post #579
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't CC-NC licenses count?

No. They're not OSI-approved licenses. It may also be worth noting that Creative Commons put a lot of effort into trying to define noncommercial over time and wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Obviously there are cases that are clearly commercial but many others are far less clear. This was being debated over a decade ago and nothing has really changed: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercia…

It's not my field, but non-commercial has been - to my knowledge - addressed multiple times in USA copyright caselaw. I can't see why that definition wouldn't apply.

FWIW all the supposed complex questions they ask are clear cut. Advertising on a website makes it commercial, using works in a presentation at work makes it commercial, etc., they're all clearly commercial.

A harder question might be "what if I'm not charging and am giving files away" that becomes commercial if it substantially inhibits commercial activities, for example (according to copyright caselaw I've read).

But that doesn't matter that much, was the guy making $10 a month from adsense using your work commercially (legally, yes): it doesn't matter, why bother to sue them (actual damages is going to be tiny). NC is for the company advertising with your work, or ripping off your work, etc..

NC doesn't seem that hard to define but in any situation where it would be worth you suing for tortuous infringement then it's going to be very clear -- unless someone made a lot of money, or you lost a lot of money, then ...

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

#668

Post by skyzyx »

skyzyx wrote: post #666

Amazon did the same thing to me — the AWS SDK for PHP. Except that they hired me, but then began telling me what I could and could not do with the project, how I was/wasn't allowed to talk about it, and forced me to drop support for services that they didn't want to support + I wasn't allowed to communicate to customers why . A couple of years later, they brought on the creator of Boto (AWS SDK for Python), but I bit…

Getting AWS to release code on GitHub? That was me. Allowing AWS developers to communicate with people on Stack Overflow? Me. The creation of the `awslabs` GitHub org? Me. The core concepts behind AWS Lambda? Me. SDK features like _waiters_? Me. Publicly sharing the internal service models so that people could built new tools for AWS? Me.

Me, fighting against the internal Amazon culture tooth-and-nail to try to get them to do things that were in the best interests of AWS customers. Some of the most brilliant and customer-centric people I've ever worked with got ran out of there by management (well, one particular engineering director) after 18-24 months.

All the fighting led to them trying to "manage me out" (making my life a living hell, hoping to make me quit), so I decided to stay for a full 4 years in order to vest every ounce of my stock grants, before walking away in 2014 (six months before AWS released "Lambda").

If things are better there now, that's really great for the people who work there. But it was a hell-scape for me to try to bring AWS into the modern age for open-source software in such a backwards-ass internal culture.

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

#669

Post by iso1631 »

Xylakant wrote: post #461
iso1631 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL3 allows for advertising clauses -- e.g. in flowplayer https://github.com/flowplayer/flowplayer/blob/dev/LICENSE.md "The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below."

The GNU project disagrees: This license is also sometimes called the “4-clause BSD license”. This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the “obnoxious BSD advertising clause”. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause practical problems, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Ori…

https://github.com/flowplayer/flowplayer/blob/dev/LICENSE.md

The Flowplayer Free version is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3 (GPL). The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below.

You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: * If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices;

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

#670

Post by fche »

calcifer wrote: post #593
orangechairs wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon stealing OSS products and repackaging them for profit is a behavior they are replicating over and over. Big and small projects alike are neither protected nor immune (see Mongo, Elastic, Redis,...) To see so much of the developer community respond by placing blame on the developers is heartbreaking and at the root of the tragedy of open source. It's either: your fault for using a permissive license OR shame on…

Of course the blame is on the developers. If you don't want commercial enterprises to repackage your project and exclude you, choose a license that says that! How is this even controversial?

Affero GPL FTW
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