Unpopular Opinion: Maybe it would be a good if API’s were subject to copyright protection.
Wasn’t that part of why Oracle v Google was disliked?
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
#12That's a very wide claim. Amazon may not be the most valued type of open source user, but they are on par with most open source infrastructure historically.
It's as if they are trying to say that only the creators of an open source project can build a SaaS for it. Tell that to mySQL, Postgres, redis, everything apache (Hadoop, Cassandra(which is based on amazon's DynamoDB whitepaper), Kafka, Zookeeper), every programming language ever (Except maybe C#). It has always been the case that open source infrastructure was built by one group and another completely unrelated group, who are much better at cloud anything, built the SaaS offering for it.
If this is Mongo again, it's probably a PR stunt by them to get their failing business model's latest failing hail marry to not completely destroy developer trust (which it will, of course, fail to do).
There is really just one thing to complain about Amazon's use of open source, they aren't supporting back enough for projects they are using. That's it. They should be shunned for it, but that's not earthshattering, and it's definitely not a condemnation of other cloud vendors (Microsoft and Google) who support open source massively.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#13This 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…
I notice you had no reply to his comment about exploitation of workers. Why is pointing out Bezos’ massive wealth disparity “tired”? I think it needs to get brought up in every discussion about Amazon to point out how little he cares about other human beings that he accumulates so much wealth at the expense of tens of thousands of people.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/am…
So Amazon shouldn't be allowed to create any products, or must ignore the data it needs to plan logistics?
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/am…
So Amazon shouldn't be allowed to create any products, or must ignore the data it needs to plan logistics?
If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#16Isn't this what GPLv3 is suppose to prevent ? Commercial Entities seems to hate it, there must be a reason, probably because they cannot 'cheat' with it.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#17Open Source has been so well understood to mean a certain set of things within the technology industry now that making changes to that definition would just cause unnecessary confusion (beyond what already exists between OSS and FOSS ...). Quite possibly the author is just annoyed his portfolio companies get pushback when taking about "source available" or proprietary licenses to potential customers, but leaping from there to "our customers want open source, thus open source must change to mean what we want to give our customers" is fairly dramatic.
Honestly, I think this editorial could have done with toning down the rhetoric a bit - calling people / groups names ("wonk tank") and generally implying those with the opposing view are irredeemably "short-sighted" isn't particularly persuasive and just detracts from the author's points.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#18Unpopular Opinion: Maybe it would be a good if API’s were subject to copyright protection.
If APIs were subject to copyright protection, Linux would probably never have happened. All the commercial UNIXes were licensed descendants of the original Bell Labs UNIX code base; Linux was a unlicensed re-implementation of UNIX by Linus.
[EDIT] The same goes for WINE and the various Windows APIs.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#19Isn't this what GPLv3 is suppose to prevent ? Commercial Entities seems to hate it, there must be a reason, probably because they cannot 'cheat' with it.
IANAL but as I understand it, GPLv3 prevents "tivoization" and AGPLv3 prevents running modified services without releasing the source code. Corporations particularly hate AGPLv3.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#20I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.
If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license.
But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.