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AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

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Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#321

Post by qw3rty01 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #282
jasode wrote: post #42

There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the content of Tim Nolet's twitter post. (Probably because the short headline has pitchfork raising overtones.) - He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses - He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thank…

Isn't there a requirement to acknowledge the original author for all copyrighted work, no matter how permissive the license is? That is, the only way to not make it a requirement is to put the work in the public domain, and in some countries, it is not even an option. That is, how can you know who the copyright holder is if you don't do that? Considering that not all projects are littered with (c) Stack Overflow User…

No, acknowledgement is only required if the license requires it.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#322

Post by chuckSu »

barkingcat wrote: post #244
whoknew1122 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the timeline is important, other than to say HN posters shouldn't submit incendiary tweets as HN topics without some sort of corroboration. Especially when the person who tweets and posts on HN are the same. Here's the timeline I saw: 11:16 - A person blames AWS of something without additional context and understanding 11:23 - Presumably the same person posts on HN (to signal boost? farm karma from the a…

Hacker news never reads original posts either way, let alone followups to original posts :) I'll be downvoted, but that's a symptom of how poorly the audience of this site understands the issues at hand. (myself included)

This!

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#323

Post by iso1631 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #122
lwh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original BSD license had this "advertising clause" and it was removed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_... Personally I'd rather have their source be released like AGPL, as that would credit the authors and let me see their changes.

Because it’s a great idea but for instance the Linux kernel would have to come with documentation that mentions the tens of thousands of authors. A massive undertaking that doesn’t help anyone, really.

Something like https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...?

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#324

Post by scarface74 »

atonse wrote: post #294
scarface74 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every talk AWS does about Redshift they mention that it’s based on Postgres. They tell you to download a Postgres driver to connect to it with any language besides Java for which a JDBC driver is provided.

Well ... they tell you that not because they're bending over backwards to give postgres credit. They're doing it to tell you that the barrier of entry to this database is nearly 0 if you are already using Postgres.

You haven’t watch the reInvent talks have you?

But if you try to use the same schema design from a standard Postgres database and use the same query patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to Postgres which is a traditional database.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#325

Post by unreal37 »

mjasay wrote: post #297

I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I told Tim privately and publicly ( https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024 ), I hadn't been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team to see how we can improve in his regard. AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-p…

Good job taking responsibility, Matt. Handling this the right way.

I do think there's a larger discussion about trillion dollar companies just forking a project and announcing it as a new feature for their platform without even talking to the original creator.

If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a start.

It's open source. You don't have to reach out. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with what you did. But you can do better. A trillion dollar company can do better to act grateful to be in the position that it's in. To be seen as a leader in a space instead of as a consumer of free work.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#326

Post by benjaminjosephw »

loriverkutya wrote: post #119
dak1 wrote: post #62

I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't." Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land. Either we as a community hold ourselv…

Corporations have nothing to do with community or people or ethical standards or environmental stuff or privacy. For a company an open source license is nothing else than the code and a license. For them, this is a very narrow legal question. Corporations does not care about much but shareholders' interests. If you want to change that, you need to come up with a different system than capitalism, which encourages the…

Capitalism doesn't _require_ the heartless pursuit of shareholder value. You're confusing the system with one particular ideology.

Changing incentives, standards and cultural norms absolutely is possible within a capitalist system. In fact, it's required. Otherwise, capitalist economies quickly descend into oligarchies with skewed markets that favor those with all the capital.

If profit were the only motive without any other rules in play, that wouldn't be capitalism at all. We need interventions in order to preserve a healthy system. To suggest otherwise is to defend an ideology that isn't capitalism itself.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#327

Post by cutemonster »

barkingcat wrote: post #244
whoknew1122 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the timeline is important, other than to say HN posters shouldn't submit incendiary tweets as HN topics without some sort of corroboration. Especially when the person who tweets and posts on HN are the same. Here's the timeline I saw: 11:16 - A person blames AWS of something without additional context and understanding 11:23 - Presumably the same person posts on HN (to signal boost? farm karma from the a…

Hacker news never reads original posts either way, let alone followups to original posts :) I'll be downvoted, but that's a symptom of how poorly the audience of this site understands the issues at hand. (myself included)

I read the original posts. In my experience, most people do.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#328

Post by unreal37 »

loufe wrote: post #246
smusamashah wrote: post #113

> Oh @awscloud I really do :Two hearts: you! But next time you fork my OS project https://github.com/checkly/headless-recorder and present it as your new service, give the maintainers a short "nice job, kids" or something. Not necessary as per the APLv2 license, but still, ya know? He is only nicely and asking for recognition/attribution while acknowledging that it's not required per licence. I don't know why people…

To be fair: as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Amazon did in fact credit him, and he admitted his mistake later in the Twitter thread.

There is no evidence that they "credited him" explicitly, merely that his source code, which they copied, included a link to his website.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#329

Post by jitendrac »

That is totally fair according to the license used, even I don't find anything bad with it. Rather its a good portfolio item for oss developer.

Next thing which developer can do is, check if amazon is up-streaming new updates and bugfixes to their product, are they contributing to the existing open issues for bug-fixing,if yes that's win-win for both.

if you are planning to leverage the project for commercial product, I would suggest future dual-licensing clause which is like "Any contribution to the project will be licensed under AGPL, and XYZ LLP will get its copy as a full ownership with WTFPL license exclusively". Add an enterprise plan for your product where big corps can purchase its code license directly from you for fair price to get it under GPL/Apache license. just my 2 cents.

Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

#330

Post by iso1631 »

Xylakant wrote: post #247
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Documentation is not the problem. The problem is that, the advertising clause requires ALL promotional materials to include these acknowledgements, for ALL software that has been used in the software. It was not a problem for BSD back then, since UCB was the only developer. But for projects with multiple copyright owners, such as the Linux kernel, a Linux distro poster would contain a thousand lines of acknowledgemen…

The primary problem is that 4-clause BSD is incompatible with the GPL since it adds restrictions to distributing the software (notably the advertising clause)

GPL3 allows for advertising clauses -- e.g. in flowplayer

https://github.com/flowplayer/flowplayer/blob/dev/LICENSE.md

"The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below."

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