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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

#181

Post by GoblinSlayer »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #94
munk-a wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is for a quarter, so $2 a month or $24 on the annual plan. One day I'm going to build this premium Facebook clone that respects user privacy! Come on Hacker News, make it so I don't have to!

dreamwidth.org

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

#182

Post by GoblinSlayer »

askafriend wrote: post #53
gonehome wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they offered that option. I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.

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.

They will still monetize network effect and monopoly status, which paying users will still contribute to.

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

#183

Post by TheTruth1234 »

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…

Keep kissing corporate @rse.

Some people don't use FB.

Some people would say FU to the thought of paying $2-3 to FB for anything.

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

#184

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kemitchell wrote: post #35
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…

> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise. When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, an…

Elastic doesn't care about freedom, they complained that they lost an opportunity to monetize it, copyleft will be equally destructive for them. Also Amazon released the sources, no?

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

#185

Post by TelmoMenezes »

oefrha wrote: post #179
webmobdev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I addressed that: The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

What a gross mischaracterization of open source. > The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime. > The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. No, releasing open source code doesn't imply signing away copyright or ownership. For…

> Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime.

Companies are not people. It is nonsensical to say that someone is being grateful or ungrateful to some abstract legal construct.

If the executives of some company decide to let their employees work on open source projects, it's because they think this will improve profitability in some way: advertisement, attracting talent, benefiting from free work, facilitating adoption, etc.

Most of these companies benefit from open source way more than they contribute. Which is fine, but let's not assign human emotions to things that are not human. Being grateful to a corporation is the same as being grateful to your coffee machine for making coffee when you press the button.

I am very grateful to people who contribute to open source on their free time.

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

#186

Post by sumedh »

zknz wrote: post #23
zelon88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangem…

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.

Do you think that someone with 1 million dollars has the same power and influence as someone with 1 billion dollars?

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

#187

Post by blazespin »

ctvo wrote: post #157
thatoneuser wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - damn these businesses for using open source rather than building common tools from scratch. Cleary they are just as bad as a company with about a trillion dollar market cap that deliberately cannibalizes fledgling companies once said companies have bled themselves dry exploring a new market. When will the corporate shilling on HN end?

Your moral position is based on market capitalization? The core piece of ElasticSearch's technology is Lucene, an open soure project. Elastic the company uses this open source work to become a 5 billion dollar company. The core piece of AWS's ES service is ElasticSearch, an open source project. Amazon the company uses this open source work to further enrich themselves. Amazon is bad because they're a 1 trillion dolla…

Yes, the whole argument is based on anti trust. Did you not read the article?

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

#188

Post by blazespin »

meowface wrote: post #143
thatoneuser wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - damn these businesses for using open source rather than building common tools from scratch. Cleary they are just as bad as a company with about a trillion dollar market cap that deliberately cannibalizes fledgling companies once said companies have bled themselves dry exploring a new market. When will the corporate shilling on HN end?

Mongo and Elastic would probably continue doing the same thing if they became Amazon's size. If something is unethical in the business world, it should be unethical regardless of your company's size. Although I don't personally find the integration of open source software into a commercial project to be unethical, if the license is adhered to.

This is not how anti trust works. The idea is that once you gain certain monopolistic powers you have to play by different rules.

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

#189

Post by zby »

This story is not about AWS contra Open Source - it is about cloud computing versus selling software licenses: https://hackernoon.com/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-efcdcfb... . I am waiting for AWS to publish their fork under an Open Source license (maybe even be more Open Source than Elastic), this would not change anything for them, and still kill Elastic.

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

#190

Post by coredog64 »

busterarm wrote: post #28
staticassertion wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…

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…

At my previous employer we used the AWS managed ES product for an ELK stack that was ingesting terabytes per day. It was painful, and we eventually moved off it, but it was still valuable for the training wheels it provided. If the developers had been better at logging it’s possible we would have been happy to continue on the managed product.
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