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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

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Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#511

Post by jychang »

lmm wrote: post #506
rpdillon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I'v…

Selling support/services as the maintainer of an open-source service was never a hard-nosed business proposition in the first place. It's like Amazon undercutting your fire station's bake sale.

Yeah, I'm genuinely concerned that members of society can't seem to understand this.

More and more people are just focused on making a quick buck.

I'm getting a feeling that these people would gladly rip off a lemonade stand, and then defend themselves by saying the lemonade stand deserves it.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#512

Post by pabs3 »

pessimizer wrote: post #250
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a risk they knowingly chose to accept when they opted for FOSS licensing. It's not as if people hadn't asked " Well, what if another party tries to fork our open source code for profit? " all the way back when FOSS was starting to gain traction in the 1990s.

OSS licensing. Free Software was designed to avoid this, and has become stricter as the technology changed. Open Source was deliberately designed to thwart this. The entire intention of it was to allow businesses to resell work that was done for free. When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.

Free Software licenses don't restrict profit making, even the AGPL wouldn't stop Amazon from using the same strategy to beat those OSS companies in the market.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#513

Post by aetherspawn »

The one thing that’s good about Microsoft is the support. You can get someone on the phone in less than an hour and they can actually fix the thing.

That’s why it’s so far been hard to go past Outlook Plan 1 for (big scale) email hosting.

Completely agree about AWS, and we use Cloudflare now, but the jury is kind of out on whether CF is largely going the same way.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#514

Post by firesteelrain »

hunterpayne wrote: post #498
firesteelrain wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understand the argument. No one is forcing anyone to make OSS. They do it because they want to. It’s like they are own worst enemy

"It’s like they are own worst enemy" No, you are your own worst enemy. Because of your attitude, OSS is going to go away as will all those economic benefits you are enjoying. But keep up with the its OK to pee in the pool type ethics of yours. Let's see where that gets you in the long run.

Ok -

So you are annoyed I am using something for free and per the license that the authors set themselves and wanted no compensation. Got it.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#515

Post by amluto »

Aperocky wrote: post #504
amluto wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but fundamentally it is "what does this role have access to doing (action + resource)" + "who has access to this role". That is really it from a 10k foot level. Hahahaha. No, fundamentally it is one input into a huge mess that you cannot actually see or audit from a 10k foot level. AWS has produced a long, rambling and imprecise description of (some of?) what’s actually going on. You can read it here: https://docs.…

They are just some slight variation of the fundamental idea. For example resource policy and org SCP are just the same check on a different level (e.g. more of who has access to what). They are attached to Organization and individual resource respectively (vs Account) so they need to exist in a separate place. And then in use they are ALL checked before an access is granted. I don't work for IAM but I worked for seve…

> And then in use they are ALL checked before an access is granted.

I know they’re all checked. What don’t know is how the results of those checks are combined to get the final result. As far as I can tell, the result is not something like OR or AND — it seems like it’s something exceedingly complex and that the output of the policy part may be more complex than just a Boolean value.

Maybe the underlying implementation is fantastic (and my distinct impression is that AWS takes this stuff far more seriously than Azure), but that doesn’t mean that the docs are easy to find or that the system actually makes sense in anything other than an agglomeration-of-backwards-compatible-layers sense.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#516

Post by okdood64 »

faangguyindia wrote: post #8

Why do people even bother with cloud? I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade. People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly. Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It…

> I replaced all of it with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and most stuff from Datastore to Postgres and Mongo with replicas. I added Redis.

But now you need staffing/headcount to be experts in, and maintain, upgrade and be oncall for this stuff?

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#517

Post by trollbridge »

aetherspawn wrote: post #513

The one thing that’s good about Microsoft is the support. You can get someone on the phone in less than an hour and they can actually fix the thing. That’s why it’s so far been hard to go past Outlook Plan 1 for (big scale) email hosting. Completely agree about AWS, and we use Cloudflare now, but the jury is kind of out on whether CF is largely going the same way.

Yes. I feel confident recommending Microsoft 365 to clients because I know if something goes wrong it can actually get fixed.

I lack that confidence with Amazon or Google support.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#518

Post by bluegatty »

rpdillon wrote: post #50
hankerapp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I'v…

"It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good."

It's not 'competition'.

It's carnivorous, predatory.

Consider shifting gears and seeing all of this through the lens of 'power'.

There is no such thing as open/free markets when there is massive power asymmetry.

Anything that a weaker entity produces, will be 'taken' by a more powerful entity via all sorts of mechanisms.

The 'point' of IP/Open Sources liscencing can be whatever anyone wants it to be ...

but consider this: if the 'game' is on a tilted field, then almost all of the economic value goes into the hands of those with the power to reap the surplus - not the creator.

The 'owner' is who has power.

The Kings didn't rule by arbitrary decree - their money came from owning all the land. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how hard you innovate, how much surplus you create - if the landlord says 'I want all of that' and you have no choice.

Your Rent = All The Value of the Stuff You Create with a bit leftover for you to survive.

That is entirely done through legal ownership - not through some kind of forceful cocercion.

Control of distribution, access to financing, entrenched supplier / buyer relationships, barriers to entry, regulatory capture, economies of scale - all of that makes some systems unassailable without some degree of power.

Purely through the lens of power - Open Source is like 'commoditizing' a tiny little part of the system, where the surpluses will get pulled in by the most powerful entity.

In this case: Amazon.

Anyone writing software and 'making it free' - that Amazon can use - is working for Amazon for free.

Again: if you want to see it way.

If you just like 'making stuff' that's perfectly fine as well.

But - the moment you see this as a 'means to income' - then - it's a 'power dynamic'.

This is why better/smarter IP laws should help smaller players.

The whole point of these things is to try to enable actual competition - which is not 'feed David to Goliath' - its supposed to give David a chance.

The 'changing of license terms' by some small vendors is the result of Amazon suffocating them - it's the power system finding it's 'equilibrium' - where the 'creators' are snuffed out - or 'better yet for Amazon' keep working for free.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#519

Post by paulddraper »

NewJazz wrote: post #374
jimbobimbo wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I kinda just expect it to be all “AWS” trust. This would be very unwise from security standpoint. Internal access to customer stuff is granular and made hard for internal staff to gain, to minimize chances of screw up intentional or not.

I agree. Adding a service principal always raises an eyebrow for me, just a blanket "hey we're aws trust me bro" is a little bonkers.

How does this work in Azure and Google Cloud?

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#520

Post by mpyne »

hunterpayne wrote: post #497
mpyne wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do. AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL. On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort... Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business…

Enjoy all new OpenSource projects being open in name only then.

I would argue that was precisely the issue with Redis and its friends. As a rule they want to get credit for being an open source project and contributing to the global commons, but without actually contributing to the global commons.

I'm not going to knock people for charging money to write proprietary software. If that's how you want to approach business dynamics as a software author, then by all means.

But trying to make money by extracting rent through a proprietary hold on your "open source" property, even as you claim to be open source, is too cute by half. Which one is it? The OSI definition hasn't substantially changed since the 90s, it's not like people can act surprised by what counts as open source.

There are ways to try to make money from open source, but they often involve leaning into the commons aspect and then offering a proprietary license as a relief valve for organizations not ready to have to pitch in, but who would be willing to offer up money instead.

Absent that, if you're literally going to be outcompeted on a business perspective on software you wrote, I can scarcely imagine what to tell you.

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