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20 years on AWS and never not my job

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Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#41

Post by djoldman »

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,…

If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license.

It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..."

Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability.

That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think they need to at some point.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#42

Post by cxr »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #33
direwolf20 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The SSPL is not an open-source license.

> It's deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

From "The SSPL is Not an Open Source License" https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...>

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#44

Post by tiffanyh »

lnz_me wrote: post #37

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

I don’t think they do.

Netflix uses FreeBSD specifically for their custom-built CDN/streaming servers, which are hosted directly with ISPs … not on AWS. Their user-facing catalog app, however, runs on Ubuntu servers hosted on AWS.

At least that’s what I recall reading here on HN.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#45

Post by gobdovan »

djoldman wrote: post #41
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,…

If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license. It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..." Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability. That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think th…

I am saying this is exactly what's happening, but with more robust language. If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access.

So you see formulations that target infrastructure resale rather than specific entities, such as:

"For the avoidance of doubt, the following scenarios are not permitted under the license:

* A managed service that lets third party developers ... register their own [SERVICE] service endpoints and invoke them through that managed service."

"You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software."

"If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License [...] where 'Service Source Code' is defined broadly to include the entire hosting stack (monitoring, backups, etc.) to ensure a level playing field"

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#46

Post by MobileVet »

CoryOndrejka wrote: post #39

> 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…

I’ll never forget seeing Second Life for the first time at a conference, in Flagstaff I think. You guys had a single folding table booth (as we all did) and computer running Second Life. Our team thought it was pretty cool and we talked about it quite a bit back at the office later. It was either 2002 or 2003.

We were with Evolution Robotics and were showing off the ER1, a new hobbyist robot.

Good memories for sure!

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#47

Post by loloquwowndueo »

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.

They just want to earn at least the same as a plumber.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#48

Post by evantbyrne »

christophilus wrote: post #30
rcbdev wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The going rate for 1099 work tends to be higher than this to account for risk, unbillable work, and increased tax rate. Agencies that lend out their developers to clients charge 2-3x this. Remember that engineers can work remotely now which makes regional rates much fuzzier.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#49

Post by gobdovan »

queenkjuul wrote: post #15
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,…

I'm "lucky" to not be smart enough or important enough to think about this. Regardless, i wholeheartedly agree -- at this point, anything i personally could release publicly, will either be fully open source, or completely private. And I'm only choosing open source if I'm relatively sure it's not gonna make some asshole tons of money.

That's in the ballpark how big corps use open source strategically. They try to kill everyone value extraction moat at any other layer than the ones they dominate. So they commoditize their complement [0]. They don't care if you make money based on their OSS, as long as you race to the bottom against anyone else who also has access to it and turn anything but the corp's profit center into a ubiquitous commodity. So they make the "asshole"'s incentives line up with their own.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#50

Post by cperciva »

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…

What alternative interface does the author propose we use to securely exchange credentials?

If you read the linked post you'll see that at the time I suggested using XenStore to pass credentials to the OS kernel. Obviously a different approach would be needed with Nitro but if anything it would be easier now.

Once the kernel had them they could be exposed to applications via a synthetic filesystem which, crucially, can have ownership and permissions set on it.

I'm absolutely not arguing against IAM Roles for EC2. I'm arguing that they picked the worst possible interface over which to transmit those role credentials.

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