AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

An OpenTracing Aws X-Ray integration would rock. I work on the project and would love to collaborate with anyone interested.

Plenty of companies would also use the non-AGPL software without any strings attached, and not contribute patches anyway. You may be lucky enough to get bug reports, though (and, in effect, become a free labor source for a corporation). So what's the point? Most of the time, this kind of position just comes across as a vague, empty posturing, to be quite honest. "I could definitely be a good friend to you, you see... if you cooperate and help out your new friend".

It sounds like a very obvious choice when you phrase it as "we wouldn't contribute patches to you", but that's just a way of holding out a carrot and hoping for people to bite, phrasing it as a "your loss" scenario. At least it is, to me. What am I losing, exactly? My code is right there. I haven't lost anything at all, except maybe some vague, hypothetical possibility of a little extra help -- which, in general, seems to rarely materialize in the way people imagine anyway, for a host of reasons (companies are slow, they're lazy, their hacks are incomplete and unsuitable for an upstream, they're anti-OSS contribution in general and only disallow using the GPL, but disallow contributing to anything, etc).

There is plenty of software that, very arguably IMO, should be available under non-GPL terms for a host of reasons, it's true (even the FSF agrees with this, to help support and promote e.g. interoperable, royalty-free codecs, algorithms, which benefit from public domain availability). And licensing is also a complicated legal, political and, at some level, personal topic as we pick licenses that we believe represent our goals and values. We should treat it that way.

But phrasing the scenario in such a manner, where there's a narrative that "The only thing the AGPL will do is ensure I write 0 patches (even though I would have likely written 0 patches in any case), so uhhh, think about that", feels like an attempt to poison the well, even if you didn't intend it to be. We could just as easily turn it around: if you literally aren't going to contribute patches, to return some of the benefit bequeathed to you by the virtue of using my code -- why should I even care a tiny bit about you or your company, or whether you "need" to use my software to achieve your own goals? Clearly, you don't need it so badly that you're willing to agree to the rules. Why bother? So you can just freeload on the people who do agree to the rules?

If this isn't your intent or I'm being overly presumptuous, I apologize. But even then, I still dislike the narrative that pops up around these arguments, even if I may be reading too much into your particular comment.

Turns out X-Ray is sampling service, it drops data. You can use it to debug recurring problems, but it's no use when debugging a particular incident with the customer on the phone. Bummer.

To provide a performant and cost-effective experience, X-Ray does not collect data for every request that is sent to an application. Instead, it collects data for a statistically significant number of requests. X-Ray should not be used as an audit or compliance tool because it does not guarantee data completeness.

https://aws.amazon.com/xray/faqs/

Same for AWS Shield & Google's Project Shield.

> difference between something that's pure distributed tracing (this) and something that does metrics/monitoring as well (TraceView, New Relic, ...)

I don't see the distinction you're making, as neither seems to record all traces for accurate audit. Am I missing it?