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> It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who di

> It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. Have you seen the degree of investment Microsoft has made lately in Open Source? It's an upside-down world where Microsoft if a bigger champion -- and funder -- of open source than a company like Google which was built on Open Source software.

DannyBee 8y ago
Here, i'll make a provocative statement: Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on[1]. As for funding, that's definitely not true by the numbers last i looked (and definitely was not true in the past). Without concrete disagreements, this is just handwaving. So if you make some, i'm happy to argue with real data. [1] The only cases i can think of that this isn't true is when the Googler who worked on it left before they got a chance to do that (and nobody has picked it up since)
- lacker 8y ago
  Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on. Chrome or Android seem like good counterexamples, where the software that most people use (Chrome, or Android + Google Experience) is specifically kept in two separate buckets, open source and closed source, so that Google can strategically keep some parts open and some parts closed.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    Err? They are certainly not useful counterexamples. That is open source software Google made itself. The original complaint was about taking other people's open source (mongodb) without contributing back. Not "failing to release stuff it made itself". That's a completely different thing. Even there, what i said is still true: Google has released every meaningful patch to the open source software it used in making Chrome/Android.
- darkarmani 8y ago
  At least 10 years ago, i thought google had a lot of custom linux kernel patches that weren't public.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    For production server kernel: The only kernel patches these days i'm aware of that aren't upstream are hardware drivers for very custom hardware, or ones we released but upstream didn't want and we still maintain. Like any sane kernel team, google tries to minimize it's difference with upstream since it has huge maintenance cost.
mrkurt 8y ago
Yeah! It's weird, MS seems pretty well behaved. But they also offer stuff like this, I doubt Salvatore is seeing much benefit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/
gigatexal 8y ago
But the companies that shepherd and develop the open source software and let the community use it for free has to be supported somehow. So unless the cloud companies want to fund these companies and thereby fund the developers of the open source software directly then these kinds of licenses make sense.
super3 8y ago
The total cloud market is around $180B. 90% are on running Linux, and 2/3 are running on OSS. If it is not in the billions its not enough.
- golubbe 8y ago
  To put that $180B in perspective, the TOTAL revenue of the public OSS companies (or those that were public recently before being acquired) is roughly $5B. That includes Red Hat, Mongo, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Elastic, and Mulesoft. If 2/3 of a $180B market is driven by open source, and we want the cycle of innovation to continue, it's in everyone's best interest to find ways to connect open source cloud usage to direct open source monetization.
Twirrim 8y ago
Amazon also spends a lot of time and effort on Open Source software, including the Linux kernel. They also contribute money to various open source foundations and target funding for various groups like OpenSSL. Microsoft gets all the news because it's a drastic change from normal behaviour. Amazon, Google, Oracle et all just keep steadily contributing stuff. A lot of the work is also deadly boring and not headline capturing stuff. Few simple queries to show the work they're doing just on the kernel: Amazon: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=amazon.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Google: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=google.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Microsoft: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=microsoft.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Oracle: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=oracle.com https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
yarrel 8y ago
The foxes purchasing the henhouse isn't them championing chickens...

DannyBee 8y ago

Here, i'll make a provocative statement: Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on[1]. As for funding, that's definitely not true by the numbers last i looked (and definitely was not true in the past). Without concrete disagreements, this is just handwaving. So if you make some, i'm happy to argue with real data. [1] The only cases i can think of that this isn't true is when the Googler who worked on it left before they got a chance to do that (and nobody has picked it up since)

lacker 8y ago
Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on. Chrome or Android seem like good counterexamples, where the software that most people use (Chrome, or Android + Google Experience) is specifically kept in two separate buckets, open source and closed source, so that Google can strategically keep some parts open and some parts closed.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Err? They are certainly not useful counterexamples. That is open source software Google made itself. The original complaint was about taking other people's open source (mongodb) without contributing back. Not "failing to release stuff it made itself". That's a completely different thing. Even there, what i said is still true: Google has released every meaningful patch to the open source software it used in making Chrome/Android.
darkarmani 8y ago
At least 10 years ago, i thought google had a lot of custom linux kernel patches that weren't public.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  For production server kernel: The only kernel patches these days i'm aware of that aren't upstream are hardware drivers for very custom hardware, or ones we released but upstream didn't want and we still maintain. Like any sane kernel team, google tries to minimize it's difference with upstream since it has huge maintenance cost.

mrkurt 8y ago

Yeah! It's weird, MS seems pretty well behaved. But they also offer stuff like this, I doubt Salvatore is seeing much benefit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/

gigatexal 8y ago

But the companies that shepherd and develop the open source software and let the community use it for free has to be supported somehow. So unless the cloud companies want to fund these companies and thereby fund the developers of the open source software directly then these kinds of licenses make sense.

super3 8y ago

The total cloud market is around $180B. 90% are on running Linux, and 2/3 are running on OSS. If it is not in the billions its not enough.

golubbe 8y ago
To put that $180B in perspective, the TOTAL revenue of the public OSS companies (or those that were public recently before being acquired) is roughly $5B. That includes Red Hat, Mongo, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Elastic, and Mulesoft. If 2/3 of a $180B market is driven by open source, and we want the cycle of innovation to continue, it's in everyone's best interest to find ways to connect open source cloud usage to direct open source monetization.

Twirrim 8y ago

Amazon also spends a lot of time and effort on Open Source software, including the Linux kernel. They also contribute money to various open source foundations and target funding for various groups like OpenSSL. Microsoft gets all the news because it's a drastic change from normal behaviour. Amazon, Google, Oracle et all just keep steadily contributing stuff. A lot of the work is also deadly boring and not headline capturing stuff. Few simple queries to show the work they're doing just on the kernel: Amazon: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=amazon.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Google: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=google.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Microsoft: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=microsoft.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Oracle: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=oracle.com https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

yarrel 8y ago

The foxes purchasing the henhouse isn't them championing chickens...