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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

#21

Post by hannob »

For people who haven't followed this: The headline is as misleading as it can be.

The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source, because he doesn't like what that entails (as it also means "amazon enjoys the same freedoms as everyone else"). But they like to confuse it as much as they can.

This would be much less of an issue if these people were upfront: "We don't like Open Source, so we try something else". But they don't want to do that because they know Open Source has a good reputation, so they try confusion and deception.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#23

Post by morpheuskafka »

Amazon has continually moved to keep source open. They have actively worked to distribute Open Distro Elasticsearch (keeping it under a fully-free license), Apache Corretto (binaries for the OpenJDK to make it more accessible to end-users), etc. Using similar APIs increases consumer choice and interoperability, making it easier to go from open to hosted but also from hosted to open.

These proposed licenses neither are open-source nor free software and are very poor ideas. The SSPL clearly breached the boundaries of open source and the OSI's opinion was only "premediated" in the sense that that was the agreed-upon definition.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#24

Post by forrestthewoods »

tobylane wrote: post #11
forrestthewoods wrote: post #8

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?

Yes. That’s why it’s an unpopular opinion! But I’m still not sure it’s a wrong one.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#25

Post by enitihas »

threezero wrote: post #13
gav wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is Bezos's wealth related to anything? Just because he owns more % shares in Amazon than other founders do in their companies, that makes Amazon exploitative? The Walton family has a similar net worth. Does that add to Walmart's exploitative nature. Does an increase or decrease in Amazon stock price make them good and bad, because the wealth of Bezos changes?

If you want to make an argument of Amazon revenue and growth, fine. If you think their shares are not as divided as other companies and that makes them exploitative, I am not sure what your argument is.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#27

Post by [deleted] »

enitihas wrote: post #25
threezero wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is Bezos's wealth related to anything? Just because he owns more % shares in Amazon than other founders do in their companies, that makes Amazon exploitative? The Walton family has a similar net worth. Does that add to Walmart's exploitative nature. Does an increase or decrease in Amazon stock price make them good and bad, because the wealth of Bezos changes? If you want to make an argument of Amazon revenue and…

[deleted]

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#29

Post by sheetjs »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I 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.

The article title is actually "Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses", OP was editorializing. In fact, your sentiment is explicitly stated in the article:

> Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#30

Post by toomuchtodo »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #9
webmaven wrote: post #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 f…

This. If the only thing keeping customers on my platform is an incompatible API, what does that say about me as a vendor?

That you’re not going hungry while one of the most valuable companies in the world doesn’t extract value from your work.
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