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

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

#161

Post by sorryforthethro »

013a wrote: post #96

Mongo and Elastic built all of their technology on top of open source tech. Elasticsearch is built on Lucene. Its written in Java, and I'd bet a penny that they're not paying Oracle for that. Let's just take a quick look at Mongo and Oh look at that they're using dozens of open source libraries, such as zstandard [1] When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source…

This was a conscious decisions by the developers of these libraries, characterized by the cultural shift from GPLv1 to LGPL, explicitly to allow closed-source releases that build on open-source libraries.

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

#162

Post by mammalutte »

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…

If users aren't willing to pay $2-3 per month it simply means that they don't value it that much. They can sell ad space, that's fine, but this does not justify all the data abuse simply because they need to turn a profit. Facebook can close doors right now for what I care; other services such as search engines I would pay a monthly fee if I were sure they didn't try to track me to death.

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

#163

Post by peteretep »

myroon5 wrote: post #117
erichocean wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, they'll demand you tell them where you're getting your (white-labeled) product, as a condition of continuing to sell. That's the truly shady part.

Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this before.

Going to guess this is for compliance and tax reasons, and people are (rightly or wrongly) saying Amazon then use that to poach suppliers

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

#164

Post by vood »

throwaway66666 wrote: post #150
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…

> 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. "We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country.…

Can you elaborate? I'm being from a socialist country would love to deliver the same message to my parents

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

#165

Post by z3t4 »

mammalutte wrote: post #162
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…

If users aren't willing to pay $2-3 per month it simply means that they don't value it that much. They can sell ad space, that's fine, but this does not justify all the data abuse simply because they need to turn a profit. Facebook can close doors right now for what I care; other services such as search engines I would pay a monthly fee if I were sure they didn't try to track me to death.

The market decide the prices. The value of something has very little to do with the price. You can not charge for something if a free alternative exist. The crux is that Google and Facebook are still profitable, even if it's free, so if they used their huge market share in an attempt to increase the price, competitors would pop up and bring the price down. Something being free also lowers the friction to use. A paywall is a barrier to entry.

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

#166

Post by SXX »

ralph84 wrote: post #74
yardie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price. You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify…

I don't think anything you wrote refutes what you quoted. Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. There are a lot more people who run apt-get install than open up pull requests. It'…

> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software.

This is just not the case anymore. I know tons of people who choose to work on open source and I pretty sure none of them did it because of money.

I guess it's might be like that 25-30+ years ago for the people who started GNU and Linux ecosystems when vendor lock-in was big deal and a lot of programming tools were proprietary and expensive include compilers.

And 14 years back when I started to work in web development there was similar situation where a lot of tools and software is proprietary and expensive. Not anymore.

> And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code.

For initial adoption this is still true, but I believe many people who stick with open source products doing it for entirely different reasons. As others pointed out it's might be not the case in rich 1st world countries, but everywhere else people just go with illegal software instead of open source.

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

#167

Post by sgift »

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…

Additionally, I think it's a bit rich when a company that is based 100% on another open source project under a permissive license (Apache Lucene here) cries that someone else uses a permissive license in the same way they do.

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

#168

Post by piokoch »

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…

Exactly, every software solution creator has a choice: be like MongoDB - free, open source to gain traction and users, hoping to monetize this somehow or be like, say, Datomic - fully commercial, less popular, less users, but with viable business model from day 1.

Sometimes the "open" route works well for founders - see RedHat, but that's not easy. Prior to AWS there were also others who were trying to earn money on someone else free product. In the pre-cloud era those "unfair" competitors were easier to beat, AWS is indeed a game changer here.

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

#170

Post by cthalupa »

inapis wrote: post #97
zknz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic.co the n'th most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's n'th most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project, Lucene, made it easier to operate, and then sold access to it.

This is disingenuous. Yes elastic cloned an open source project and improved it in some measure but also made the access free for a decent chunk of the features. Most of what is under the paid license in the elastic stack has less to do with lucene itself and more to do with quality of life improvements in deployment, security, analysis etc. There are enough improvements over and above the lucene project to make elas…

How has AWS added a paywall? They charged you for hosting ElasticSearch on their infrastructure and their management, yet there was no difference in the software.

When they decided to implement features that were only available in the proprietary version of ElasticSearch, they open sourced it.

Charging for infrastructure and management of said infrastructure is not the same as placing a paywall on software.

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