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AWS gives open source the middle finger?

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Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#211

Post by pferde »

sah2ed wrote: post #180
pferde wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... wow. Are you saying that the employers could (or even should) demand that employees do nothing else during their free time except rest, so that they are well rested for their on-the-clock time? No late night TV for you, no early morning pool swimming session, and don't even think about taking up that physically demanding hobby, because we need you 100% focused on the job!

No. I specifically said remaining hours . To recap: - 8hrs for work; - 8hrs for leisure (daily commute, family time, hobbies etc); - 8hrs for sleep. Once you take out work time & leisure time all you have left is sleep time. Sleep is unique because it is an exclusive human activity — it can’t be combined with other activities. If someone decides to misallocate rest time, then s/he will become sleep deprived leading t…

In my view, contribution to open source falls under hobbies, so the time comes from the leisure time.

I agree that if someone takes that from sleep time instead, they're harming themselves, but this still is nothing the employer should (be allowed to) care about.

If the employee underperforms at work, the employee gets a warning, and it is up to the employee to review his or her time management, being a responsible adult that they are.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#212

Post by nwsm »

amelius wrote: post #138
spectre256 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "accidentally" worked at amazon for a few weeks when a company I had just joined was acquired by them. I knew it was time to start looking when I was informed that I had to get prior permission to do ANY open source contributions even on my own hardware on my own time. That's just not feasible logistically and above and beyond the general "don't write open source that competes with us or on our our time/hardware wi…

I don't see how that is legally enforceable if they pay you only for 8 hours/day as opposed to 24 hours/day.

They aren't paid hourly, and the employee signs the contract saying they are okay with not being able to do thing on the side without approval.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#213

Post by Pfhreak »

eclipxe wrote: post #91
Pfhreak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other companies have exemption policies, or mechanisms to get approvals. Amazon does not. Your choices were work privately on your own project or leave (or risk being fired for violating the policy.) Amazon was more aggressive (in my opinion) and much stricter than any other company I've ever worked at. Edit: I researched a lot of the other tech companies. Here's Google's documentation, for example, which outlines an…

Amazon has an exemption policy.

Not to the game development policies.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#214

Post by toyg »

rjf72 wrote: post #209
mcv wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they have money and don't use it to support the community. Nobody is saying it explicitly, but of course we want small indie people to be able to use stuff for free while rich corporations foot the bill. But it's hard to codify that in a way that doesn't explicitly so, and it's hard to enforce a rule where something is free only if you're small or poor, but it costs money if you're big and rich. And to see th…

It's not at all hard to have a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise. This is an extremely typical model for many products today whose licenses you could use as inspiration. See for instance things like Microsoft's Visual Studio. And the nice thing is that contract law is really quite powerful and very much on your side when it comes to enforcement. You d…

It's not unreasonable to wish for a middle ground where small actors don't have to pay and big actors do.

> a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise.

That's basically what Mongo have switched to. Unfortunately, this broke other bits of community, because playing with licenses is actually not that easy.

My point is that, maybe, we need a new license that can reflect the changed times. GPL 3 wanted to be that license, but it doesn't look like it succeeded. The new licenses attempted piecemeal by this or that company (like Mongo) will always fail to cut it, because the are typically not written by people with significant experience and knowledge in this particular field (license-writing).

Maybe it's time for interested companies and expert stakeholders (FSF etc) to come together and try to agree on something that could move us all forward.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#215

Post by freehunter »

sokoloff wrote: post #164
askmike wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not advertising their replacement as MongoDB, either. I don't really agree there. The service is called documentDB and this is how they describe it [1]: > Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) > Fast, scalable, highly available MongoDB-compatible database And the first 2 sentences: > Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document da…

I think the plainest and most obvious reading is that this is not MongoDB but that the migration from MongoDB over to this not-MongoDB would be easy because of the compatibility with MongoDB.

Agreed. Like how Digital Ocean lists their storage as S3-compatible. Amazon's on the other end of it there, Amazon's product's APIs have been copied and a competitor uses Amazon's product name in the competitor's marketing.

Digital Ocean is not advertising that they're AWS S3, just that they're S3 compatible. Like a processor that's x86 compatible, even though it's not actually an Intel 386, 486, etc. Like when computers used to advertise they were IBM compatible even though they're not an IBM PC. Like when store brands of toothpaste say "comparable to Colgate FreshWhite" but they're obviously not Colgate. Like when a startup calls themselves "Uber for horse rental" even though they're obviously not Uber.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#216

Post by warpech »

geezerjay wrote: post #124
toyg wrote: post #123

A lot of people are focusing on the bitchiness, but to me this is actually interesting from the perspective of (F)OSS evolution. This scenario is one of the many where (F)OSS explicitly protects downstream users: company reduces availability, user forks. It just so happens that the traditional players (the small, indie user va the big, bad corp) are actually mirrored (big, bad user vs small, indie corp). This has bee…

> it didn’t protect them from rich freeloaders. You offer a free software package to the world, so that anyone can use it as they see fit. Some guy uses your software package. How exactly has that guy became a freeloader in this story?

Freeloader on open source software is someone who runs profit by selling it to a major market without contributing back to the project.

Why? Because the freeloader increases the demand side for the software (more users translate to more feature requests, more bug reports), without increasing the supply side (resources for people who work it).

This puts pressure onto the project that is hard to sustain in the long term and MongoDB took a step to fight it.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#217

Post by apacheCamel »

sah2ed wrote: post #180
pferde wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... wow. Are you saying that the employers could (or even should) demand that employees do nothing else during their free time except rest, so that they are well rested for their on-the-clock time? No late night TV for you, no early morning pool swimming session, and don't even think about taking up that physically demanding hobby, because we need you 100% focused on the job!

No. I specifically said remaining hours . To recap: - 8hrs for work; - 8hrs for leisure (daily commute, family time, hobbies etc); - 8hrs for sleep. Once you take out work time & leisure time all you have left is sleep time. Sleep is unique because it is an exclusive human activity — it can’t be combined with other activities. If someone decides to misallocate rest time, then s/he will become sleep deprived leading t…

I think what the post above yours is trying to say is that the company I work for has no say what I do with my 8 hours of sleep time. If I want to only sleep for 4 hours but I come to work and get my job done, who cares? It is my time anyway and they aren't paying me to sleep so why should they have a say? If my work is suffering, sure, they have a right to fire me but if I get my work done in the 8 hours, they have no say over the other 16.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#218

Post by chooseaname »

spectre256 wrote: post #10
Pfhreak wrote: post #3

I left AWS after six years of working there wholly because of their restrictive policies about developing software in your spare time -- especially if you were thinking about working on a game. I recognize this article is about a product offering of AWS, and not their internal policies towards contributing to open source, but the two are linked in my mind and I'm not all surprised to see a headline like this.

I "accidentally" worked at amazon for a few weeks when a company I had just joined was acquired by them. I knew it was time to start looking when I was informed that I had to get prior permission to do ANY open source contributions even on my own hardware on my own time. That's just not feasible logistically and above and beyond the general "don't write open source that competes with us or on our our time/hardware wi…

> ... I had to get prior permission to do ANY open source contributions even on my own hardware on my own time

Why do we put up with this!? The foundations of our industry go back to how much early developers share with one another!

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#219

Post by chooseaname »

Bahamut wrote: post #16
spectre256 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "accidentally" worked at amazon for a few weeks when a company I had just joined was acquired by them. I knew it was time to start looking when I was informed that I had to get prior permission to do ANY open source contributions even on my own hardware on my own time. That's just not feasible logistically and above and beyond the general "don't write open source that competes with us or on our our time/hardware wi…

Problem is, you could potentially encroach on a big company's interests without knowing so, i.e. they're working in [insert space] in secret, or create an ethical issue for the company. Truth is, excepting maybe Netflix, the rest of FAANG requires you to get approvals.

It's entirely possible that the big company's interests could encroach upon my open source project, too. Why do they get a pass?

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#220

Post by freehunter »

JohannesH wrote: post #134
nybble41 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this even have to do with Open Source? MongoDB isn't Open Source; not any more. Their new Server Side Public License is not an OSI-approved Open Source license, and the intent of the license change goes directly against the 6th criteria of the Open Source Definition ("No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor").

While I agree with what you said it is important to note that the OSI isn't the defining authority on what is to be considered open source.

The problem is assuming "open source" is a generic term. It's not. It's a term invented by OSI, so they get to define what it means.
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