20 years on AWS and never not my job • Hacker News Board

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#31

Post by noosphr » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

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,…

The GPL3 can be put behind a server and no one will ever see the source code because there is never any distribution.

Only the AGPL is remotely close to forcing hyper-scalars to release the source code of what they provide.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#32

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

anilgulecha wrote: post #26

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 i…

[deleted]

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#33

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

direwolf20 wrote: post #22

surgical_fire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The SSPL is not an open-source license.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#34

Post by ignoramous » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

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.

> German-speaking EU you'd get real top-notch engineering for 120€/h

No disrespect to German-speaking engs, but Colin isn't merely "top-notch", he's "the top".

Huge salaries (like those paid to "top" athletes in "top" professional team sports) aren't unheard of in Tech anymore. For instance, Google paid $2b+ to acquihire Noam Shazeer of c.ai back. Meta was rumoured to be paying $20m+ salaries to poach OpenAI researchers based in Zurich.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#35

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #19

iceman28 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a different time when software was seen as something that was built together and everyone was interested in learning the best from one another.

No, it was really not. His tale is from mid-2000s, not from mid-1980s. In mid 2000s these companies were already operating in the billions and their engineers were already well compensated, and it was known. Hell, "Cracking the Coding Interview" came out in 2008. Getting a job at those companies at the time was already something coveted because of how well they paid.

> In mid 2000s these companies were already operating in the billions and their engineers were already well compensated, and it was known.

Perhaps in the USA, but in many other countries this does for sure not hold.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#36

Post by spicyusername » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:23 AM UTC

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.

Those pay packages are basically only on the west coast and in New York, a "small" region of the U.S.

100-200k, is what you'd expect elsewhere. Which is still pretty good, just not astronomical.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#37

Post by lnz_me » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:26 AM UTC

Netflix is a big FreeBSD user and a big AWS user, do they run FreeBSD on AWS? Would be the obvious sponsor to me as they rely heavily on the infrastructure built by volunteers like Colin

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#38

Post by surgical_fire » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 11:46 AM UTC

wasmainiac wrote: post #25

surgical_fire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hey, nothing wrong with closed source, BSL, etc. I am fine with it. I am the last person that will say someone should give out their work for free.

What I object to is companies releasing software with permissive licenses, and then getting butthurt that others profit from it, or trying to rug pull the permissive licenses after a community adopted and contributed to it.

If you want to play the OSS game, then play it right.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#39

Post by CoryOndrejka » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

> in fact in one of Jeff Barr's AWS user meetups in Second Life

There's so much about that phrase that makes me smile. Easy to forget that Second Life was also one of the earliest users of AWS, S3 first. Jeff Bezos had personally invested in our 2005 round (a round that made Linden Lab a unicorn before that was a thing) and pointed us at Jeff Barr and the work coming from AWS.

In return, Jeff Barr started hosting AWS meetups in Second Life -- this was the era of lots of groups setting up Second Life outposts, from Jonathan Coulton to Reuters.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#40

Post by cxr » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 12:43 PM UTC

wasmainiac wrote: post #25

surgical_fire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Laws are only as good as their enforcement

The claim is that those licenses are deemed no-touch within those companies—it's the companies themselves that insist on the software and their business not mixing, e.g. Apple continuing to ship old versions of GNU programs like Bash and then eventually moving to zsh rather than provide updated versions that are GPLv3.

Neither GPLv3 nor AGPLv3 say anything about businesses not being able to use the software.