Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#101

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

capkutay wrote: post #10

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

There's a busines model for high-fixed, zero-marginal cost economic public goods. It's taxes.

The alternatives have all been found wanting: "intellectual property" (copyright and patents), patronage, religious commissions, advertising.

Busking, performance, physical media sales, merch, loss-leaders, widget-frosting, service/support, and shingle-posting all bypass the HFZMC problem by monetising some alternative good, product, or service.

Several of those specifically tie network-effect, rent-generating monopolies with FCZMC goods. Taxes socialise this process.

What to tax is the next question. Adam Smith preferred wealth and land (means of production).

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#102

Post by busterarm » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

awakeasleep wrote: post #47

busterarm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the benefit of our entire industry.

The long term effects of this remain to be seen. All our cloud providers are currently in growth mode. What will happen when they're in 'mature industry with trapped customers mode'? We know how Oracle handles that situation.

Cloud services adoption rate is 19% and AWS has been around since 2006. The vast majority of companies in that 19% penetration are still in-transition. OpenStack and container orchestration platforms are now a thing.

Not only do we have a long time to figure things out but it's never been easier to be on prem if you need to be.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#103

Post by askafriend » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #68

askafriend wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018. So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.

That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica. Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

The number you're referencing is for 1 quarter and is looking at a blended global average which is brought down by extremely long term investments in places like Africa.

I cited a number that is annual and is looking at North American revenue which is an indicator of mature market potential.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#104

Post by thatoneuser » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

jimrhods23 wrote: post #41

"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free" I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. "It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive" So offering a fr…

Competitiveness isn't just about giving the customer something. Look at Microsoft in the 90s packaging their software. Users got more software but the anti competitive nature of Microsoft bundling was illegal.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#105

Post by busterarm » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

jackbravo wrote: post #87

busterarm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering. It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform. The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud…

Like algolia

From where I sit, Algolia solves a very small subset of problems that Lucene-based search engines do. Often problems people don't actually have.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#106

Post by door5 » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #36

capkutay wrote: post #10

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

Developers made these products. I'm sure they would be just as happy getting paid the same wage and making awesome products without working for a morally bankrupt company, but those opportunities don't exist. FAANG are the only institutions on the planet that have the resources to fund large-scale open source projects.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#107

Post by ibeckermayer » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #82

umvi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?

You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry. Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible. Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big…

Great point re: the oftentimes unseen injustice of financial tyranny. Have you heard of Stellar (https://www.stellar.org)? I don't have any experience actually using them and not sure if the blockchain is the correct way to go, but in principle their idea of a federated network for exchanging any unit the parties agree upon is a good one.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#108

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:25 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #99

james-anthony wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't, because there is nothing wrong with React, or the premise behind the team doing it. People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything. Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associat…

You might be right about that if Facebook wasn't an exceptionally terrible company with rotten leaders. I don't think there's anything wrong with the team behind it. The reason I might choose not to use a technology owned by Facebook is that my use would be promoting it; the more popular React becomes, the more encouraged people are to contribute code to it, which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Nonetheless, the p…

> which helps Facebook in a minuscule way.

Contributing to firefox, openssh, wikipedia and the linux kernel also helps Facebook in various ways. Should we stop doing that?

React is an open source project. Facebook did right by it (unlike other open source projects coming out of FB such as Flow). I find this hardline stance kinda ridiculous when it's one of the rare good things to come out of Facebook. It should be encouraged if anything. But even if not, it is a standalone project and a very good model example of how companies should release stuff as open source, so not contributing to it "because it helps Facebook" is completely missing the point of what open source is.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#109

Post by bartimus » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:32 PM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #36

capkutay wrote: post #10

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…

> yet happily use their Open Source code

It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on.

The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.

Re: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

#110

Post by hnmullany » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

bartimus wrote: post #109

burtonator wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…

> yet happily use their Open Source code It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on. The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.

If memory serves, IBM had a lot of good engineers on Linux back in the day & I think they were responsible for doing a lot of the hard perf. work on multi-CPU scheduling.