Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

20 years on AWS and never not my job

daemonology.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 73 posts

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#21

Post by surgical_fire »

gobdovan wrote: post #9

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough. The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency,…

> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.

They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.

The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers, etc.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#22

Post by direwolf20 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #21
gobdovan wrote: post #9

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough. The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency,…

> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization. They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers. The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers,…

Or SSPL, which extends AGPL with even more sharing requirements.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#23

Post by graemep »

surgical_fire wrote: post #21
gobdovan wrote: post #9

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough. The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency,…

> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization. They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers. The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers,…

I know this is true of AGPL, but GPL3? I thought the people who objected to GPL3 were those distributing software to their users (e.g. was a reason Apple switched from bash to zsh). I cannot think of aything in GPL3 that would be a problem for hyper-scalers.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#24

Post by arjie »

Fantastic piece of lore. Fascinating to read the journey. But also hearing some of the names here (Tavis Ormandy is famous for his role on Project Zero, for instance) and knowing that even top engineers can bomb interviews for making poor choices.

Nothing useful to add except that I Like these blog posts from someone who actually did a bunch of things. Nice round-up of the past.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#25

Post by wasmainiac »

surgical_fire wrote: post #21
gobdovan wrote: post #9

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough. The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency,…

> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization. They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers. The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers,…

> They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.

Laws are only as good as their enforcement, in business at least. Unfortunately I have seen first hand that no one cares about licensing if they can’t get caught.

Businesses licenses are good because you can offer support and other benefits to encourage payment.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#26

Post by anilgulecha »

I understand people have a viewpoint here about not giving time to large behemoths. I'll counter with a story and perhaps a larger point.

Back in 2006/7 I had an idea for a project for which, in all enthusiasm, I setup a mailing list, but ended up never pursuing it. It's a very unique name.

In 2012, another developer landed on the same name for their project, but saw that the mailing list was taken up and reach out inquiring if he could take over, and I obliged because here's another person doing something in cryptography and open source, 2 of my favorite things then (and now).

The project was "scrypt" and the developer was Colin! :) I knew nothing about Colin or tarsnap then, IIRC.

Sometimes you just do kindnesses of which you're able, with people who you feel a sense of community with, without expectation of anything commercial. Karma adds up, and it's benefits are large, though hard to always articulate.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#27

Post by andrewstuart »

I was an early adopter and huge fanboy for AWS.

At some stage I realised AWS is extremely expensive, extremely slow, extremely ridiculously complex and also a parasitic attitude to open source.

I realised I should instead go all in on Linux on virtual machines on other platforms.

AWS I’m done.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#29

Post by erincandescent »

bob1029 wrote: post #13

I strongly disagree with the part about IAM roles for EC2 > a useful improvement (especially given the urgency after the Capital One breach) but in my view just a mitigation of one particular exploit path rather than addressing the fundamental problem that credentials were being exposed via an interface which was entirely unsuitable for that purpose. What alternative interface does the author propose we use to secure…

Scaleway's equivalent only allows connections from ports You can do similar with vsock(7) sockets. This also has the advantage that it's harder to trick an application into making a connection to a vsock socket.

Both of these have the weakness that it is not entirely atypical to give processes CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE so they can listen on "privileged" sockets, but they work against anything without that.

Even better, you could put bootstrap credentials in DMI data or similar, where it'll end up (on Linux) inside a sysfs directory which can only be read by root.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#30

Post by christophilus »

rcbdev wrote: post #20
few wrote: post #18

> In April 2024 I confided in an Amazonian that I was "not really doing a good job of owning FreeBSD/EC2 right now" and asked if he could find some funding to support my work, on the theory that at a certain point time and dollars are fungible >I received sponsorship from Amazon via GitHub Sponsors for 10 hours per week for a year For whatever reason, I remember being shocked that you were only charging $300/hr [1] w…

American hourly rates in IT are truly nuts. I wonder if the value-add to hiring American is really worth it, in German-speaking EU you'd get real top-notch engineering for 120€/h. Even less further eastwards.

$120/hr gets you a very good developer in the US, too. Just not in the Bay Area or Seattle.
Post reply on HN