So Amazon is not a good citizen open-source wise. Some companies doing this has been the state of affairs as long as open source exists, and the world has not ended. Eventually the cost of maintaining forks will force them to engage with the community. Customers will want newer features available upstream. Amazon will contribute things back that make their own life easier. Other companies will struggle with open source business models. Engineers will favor companies that open source interesting projects. Everybody will be fine.
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
#32Earlier 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…
So you’re using whataboutism as an argument. I never said the Waltons weren’t exploitive. My argument is that Bezos is at the extreme for exploitive behavior considering his massive wealth. He could make less money and give his employees more. He could change company policy to improve employees’ lives. Instead he hoards wealth and sucks as much out of his employees as possible.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Amazon shouldn't be allowed to create any products, or must ignore the data it needs to plan logistics?
If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.
> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices...
it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#34I 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.
I don't think it's that hard to understand. To some degree, Amazon's behavior is exploiting an idealism that has given us software such as Linux that we're all benefitting from today, and it's easy to see why a starry-eyed engineer would want to carry on that legacy and create a project such as Redis with a permissive license.
What you say ("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.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it. However, in many cases, it's not the obvious decision for reasons related to the project's genesis (e.g. Spark or Mesos being student projects), and in others, it's not the route taken because of an idealistic impulse that I think would be really unfortunate to see squashed.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#35I 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.
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Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#36> "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…
It's certainly an interesting point of view. Take something that's commercial, for example, like Microsoft's docx format. If Open Office/Libre Office implements support for docx, is it hijacking proprietary formats, and siphoning customers off of proprietary projects? (edit: as it has been pointed out, .docx is a bad example, because it was standardized, but the point stands, I believe.)
I hate that this stuff hits HN front page. It worries me that we're developing a culture where I as an individual must adhere to some moral framework when writing code, lest I violate some social open source norms. To me, this is deeply poisonous to the spirit of open source.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform Why does this sales data belong to the companies and not Amazon, if they are using the platform? Is it unethical to copy a product or software in a non-infringing way?
I think that data belongs to the merchants, just like an S3-buckets logs belong to the developer. It has to be that way or who else has a claim on the data? HP for printing it? Microsoft because it was sent by email in Office? The EU suspects it is anti-competitive to allow Amazon as a vendor to cherrypick items to clone based on data Amazon collect as a platform. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/am…
Would you apply that logic to any reseller? The corner market shouldn't be able to tally how many apples it sold? That just doesn't seem like a consistent legal principle to me. Clearly if you allow someone to sell your product you are implicitly allowing them to record the fact that they did.
There may be an antitrust argument here, but this data ownership thing seems like a non starter.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#38We have two contrasting terms that work perfectly well right now:
Open Source, a set of licenses that allow users to run and modify software for personal or commercial purposes without your permission.
and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it.
These two terms already perfectly encapsulate the entire range of new licenses that are being proposed for databases like Mongo.
But a nontrivial number of proponents for SSPL dislike this distinction because they want the goodwill and reputation that comes from being able to say, "we're Open Source." They want to be categorized the same way as MIT or GPL licenses, even though they fundamentally disagree with the worldview behind them.
> The OSI believes it owns the definition of open source and refuses to update the definition of open source, which is short-sighted and dangerous.
No. The OSI believes that Open Source has a widely agreed-upon definition, and that definition shouldn't be hijacked just because it's inconvenient for some company's software monetization strategy. The level of condescension in this article is really infuriating. Literally nothing is preventing any developer or company from using the SSPL right now: nobody will judge you, nobody will call you evil, the only thing the Open Source community is requesting is that you do not call it Open Source.
Open Source was not invented so you could use it as a PR strategy. We don't need your help.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.
> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices... it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.
It's just an analogy, for what they are accused of doing on the retail side of their business.
Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses
#40For 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 d…
Agreed - this is a but misleading.