That's what the GPL is intended to prevent.
AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
521–530 of 673 posts
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#522I 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…
“It’s always day one at Amazon” is their motto meaning they’ll hustle and squeeze out as much profit as possible without a thought of contributing back if it doesn’t increase their bottom line.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#523What I don't quite understand is the logic of choosing a license which explicitly allows this and then getting mad that someone does what the license allows to do, why did you choose that license then?
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#524Without knowing the details and veracity of the claims, I think there is a real danger with big companies like Amazon using their weight to take others' innovations and reap the rewards for themselves.
Now that it's a megacorp, Amazon's employees are no longer the presumably highly talented people that got it started. That is, their newer successes are not a result of disproportionate talent or hard work that would make those successes deserved. Instead it's just another big company that has big capital. And all a big company with big capital needs to do is keep an eye on early successes elsewhere to get into the game, throw lots of resources at the problem, leverage their big mature sales and marketing channels, and see the Dollars roll in. This is not what a healthy market is meant to reward.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#525I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to productize a thing they either offered the core developer(s) enough $ to work on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to do that with a guarantee that as long as it was a product, and they wanted to work on it, they'd be allowed to continue. Problem with offering job is the likelyhood of getting redirected to some other unrelated work. instead of forking they coul…
> this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source. I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment. The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their…
The best strategy for OSS is to use copyleft licenses or EPL.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
>this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source. Then use a different license. Hoping that a company like Amazon finds it in their hearts to always do what _you_ consider "the right thing" is just a loser of a strategy. You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides. Good l…
"Don't like how shitty people can be? I don't care" - that is how this kind of comment reads. But let's move on. Interesting idea for a license. Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.
isn't this what redis did when they created their new license?
In effect, if you sell redis as a service (which, and IANAL, as I understand doesn't mean you sell a service supported by using redis) you must pay them in some way.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source. I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment. The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their…
I would disagree in the specific case of AWS. We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back. Like hiring on the core developers or making a large amount of code fixes and feature development contributions. Amazon does neither of these things. Take a look at any highly successf…
No they are not contributing. I was working at a big german car maker for the last 5 years and fighting with them so they would allow the devs to upstream all the patches they made just so we would not need to maintain those patches, so it would be cheaper for them. But after 5 years there was still no process for any dev to do that.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source software is something that has no meaningfully similar parallel in any other industry, and that has created untold billions (trillions?) of value across the world while also allowing literally anyone to carve out a piece of that value. That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon i…
It’s open source, if you’re mad a company used the software in a way you don’t like, you’re not really getting it.
Exactly. Don't use an open ended license and then complain about it. If you want to restrict use, then license it appropriately. Very simple and obvious.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source software is something that has no meaningfully similar parallel in any other industry, and that has created untold billions (trillions?) of value across the world while also allowing literally anyone to carve out a piece of that value. That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon i…
Patents and copyright are the parallels in other industries, although they compensate inventors more. Eventually it all goes into the public domain.
That 'eventually' means several lifetimes in practice so it's effectively non-existant.
Re: AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely the answer is "of course you can", just tack on "all media mentions must have an approved attribution without which all license terms are null and void" to any license and viola!?
It would be nice if that were incorporated into a well-known, publicized, and lawyer-vetted license. The problem is if I tack it on myself, nobody will ever touch or use my code even in the ways I want them to, because people fear obscure licenses if they don't have lawyers. If I release code as GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, people will use it without second thoughts. IF I release code as "BSD with modifications" people wil…
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