Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
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Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#2This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break or be fired.
Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors.
https://www.geek.com/news/amazonbasics-is-copying-all-the-be...
They have copied software hosted on AWS in the past too, whatever proprietary software you're hosting on AWS is hemorrhaging privileged usage data they will happily use against you.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#3> "It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs."
Basically, there is no such thing as an "Open Source API". APIs are not software, and we've already seen the damage that treating APIs as software (for copyright purposes) can do.
The proper abstraction for APIs (and protocols, and file-formats, etc.) is the standard, which ideally admits the possibility of multiple interoperable implementations, both proprietary and open source (patents being the joker in the deck, unfortunately).
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#4I speak to a lot of Open Source software users in Database space and they tend to love DBaaS offered by AWS and other cloud vendors. It is not convenient for my business but that does not make it a bad thing.
The competition is how great things are born. Some Open Source is being pushed towards proprietary model (Open Core, Shared Source etc) while others will find a way to have sustainable business in the new reality with Cloud Vendors.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#5This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break…
> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform
Why does this sales data belong to the companies and not Amazon, if they are using the platform? Is it unethical to copy a product or software in a non-infringing way?
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#6This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break…
> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors.
At the risk of being accused of whataboutism, _everyone_ does this.
The big-box stores go direct to China, often to the same factories that their intermediates were using. Walmart doubled-down on a direct-to-factory approach starting in 2010, moving from 20% to 80% direct with cost savings of 5-15%.
Your grocery store sells private-labelled goods. This market is expected to reach $220 billion by 2020.
The weakening of established brands has enabled large merchants to leverage sales data to drive product lines that provide good/better/best options to the consumer. The fact that Amazon started to sell their own products shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone in the industry. Ten years ago the complaint from brands was "big box stores are killing us", now it's "Amazon is killing us".
Pointing out that Bezos is the world's richest man and claiming he's exploiting people is a tired ad hominem attack.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#7This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break…
> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform Why does this sales data belong to the companies and not Amazon, if they are using the platform? Is it unethical to copy a product or software in a non-infringing way?
I think that data belongs to the merchants, just like an S3-buckets logs belong to the developer. It has to be that way or who else has a claim on the data? HP for printing it? Microsoft because it was sent by email in Office? The EU suspects it is anti-competitive to allow Amazon as a vendor to cherrypick items to clone based on data Amazon collect as a platform.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#8Unpopular Opinion: Maybe it would be a good if API’s were subject to copyright protection.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#9> "It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs." Basically, there is no such thing as an "Open Source API". APIs are not software, and we've already seen the damage that treating APIs as software (for copyright purposes) can do. The proper abstraction f…
This. If the only thing keeping customers on my platform is an incompatible API, what does that say about me as a vendor?
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#10Unpopular Opinion: Maybe it would be a good if API’s were subject to copyright protection.
Wouldn't that likely lead to all kinds of legal trouble about "your API for the same problem is to similar to ours"?
Is it generally good to forbid making compatible implementations of APIs?