7 ms·

That's why I think MongoDB's new license which prevents AWS etc from hosting as a service without open sourcing makes sense (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i

by amasad 8y ago

That's why I think MongoDB's new license which prevents AWS etc from hosting as a service without open sourcing makes sense (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452). Amazon barely contributes anything back to the community and is known for destroying OSS businesses.

softwaredoug 8y ago
I wonder with Amazon if we’re seeing a failure mode of Apache and BSD licenses, and if the future OSS might trend back towards more aggressively being copy left... or some place in between.
- benologist 8y ago
  Amazon sell thousands of things under their own brands that they cherry-picked from their vendors' products and sales data. It is unlikely to matter if your software is open source, it just means making an alternative which they've already done for everything from chairs to Java. If they're going to compete on $1.28 shower hooks there's no proprietary SaaS with millions in MRR on AWS that will be too hard to copy. https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011 https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011
- talawahdotnet 8y ago
  I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host. To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The thought of it all being proprietary is what would scare me.
  - jf- 8y ago
    If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software, then it is proprietary software. I think amazon are unlikely to give up any competitive advantage they are not forced to give up.
    - SquishyPanda23 8y ago
      > If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software I'm not sure I'm reading your statement correctly, but it sounds like you're saying that anything not developed under a copyleft license is proprietary. If it was important for authors to receive contributions from derivative works, why would they have selected a license that doesn't require that?
      - jf- 8y ago
        I don’t see how you interpreted it that way - anything released with a proprietary license, or closed source and not released at all, is proprietary. The fact that it’s derivative of an MIT or similarly licensed work makes no difference.
        SquishyPanda23 8y ago
        Yes, sorry, I thought you were giving it a normative interpretation, but you were just stating a fact. I agree that your statement is correct.
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      The innovations Amazon ads are useless outside of Amazon. Everything is about scaling open source systems inside of the Amazon ecosystem. It's not going to be usable or useful anywhere else.
      - jf- 8y ago
        That’s difficult to discuss without knowing the details, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t anything that is of use to someone outside of amazon, even other cloud providers. There must be some efficiency gains somewhere that would benefit the original software.
        jhall1468 8y ago
        Maybe minimal benefits to other cloud providers, but hardly something you'd need in the core library. I think Amazon should contribute more to open source, but I certainly wouldn't think any company should release something that would only benefit it's competitors.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    Good luck self-hosting DynamoDB and your AWS Lambdas...
    - talawahdotnet 8y ago
      All the more reason for an AWS managed version of MongoDB and Knative...
      - jhall1468 8y ago
        The only reason that's never going to happen is because Mongo's licensing prevents it.
    - Dunedan 8y ago
      There are DynamoDB Local[1] and AWS SAM CLI[2], both from AWS, which allow you to self-host DynamoDB and AWS Lambda functions. ;) That said, I agree with your argument, but found it rather funny that you just picked two AWS services you can indeed run locally. [1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBLocal.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg... [2]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/ https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/
      - becauseiam 8y ago
        DynamoDB is really only good for testing since it uses SQLite underneath.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        These are meant for anything more than dev testing though. All the big clouds offer various dev/local versions of their hosted products that are usually just wrappers around sqlite or rocksdb to emulate the interfaces.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    It is essentially a case of letter vs spirit - using it unmodified doesn't require a contribution. I never got hired by Amazon but I believe their work is technically schema and configuration. No license I am aware of calls for such radical transparency.
- SquishyPanda23 8y ago
  I'm actually not sure how this is a failure mode of those licenses. I thought the point of permissive licenses over copyleft licenses is that you're explicitly granting companies the right to make money off your code without giving anything back.
  - bradleyjg 8y ago
    Right. These licenses are a thin layer on top of public domain mostly to disclaim liability. The whole point is that you don’t care what anyone else does with it. If you want a quid pro quo, then you should have been using copyleft (or something else) all along.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Yeah, what has failed is the idea that licenses are all basically the same and thus you should choose whatever license all the cool kids are using lately. We're seeing that licenses matter and you can't choose a permissive license and later complain about "the spirit of open source".
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    You might be interested in this work: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html
  - simonh 8y ago
    It's the difference between believing that what matters is user rights and sharing code, and believing that what matters is the world containing more cool stuff. Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license". It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?". The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.
- sciurus 8y ago
  I don't think the existing permissive to copyleft spectrum is what matters here. MongoDB, for example, was previously licensed under the AGPL, which is the most aggressive OSI-approved copyleft license I can think of, but they still felt the need to adopt a controversial new license targeted at cloud providers. For another example, Redis Labs didn't decide to adopt a stronger copyleft license for their extensions, they decided to make them proprietary.
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    See RPL 1.5, OSL 3.0, QFPL. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/24/How-to-Speak-Copyleft.html#prior-art https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/24/How-to-Speak-Copyl...
- oh-kumudo 8y ago
  I am quite on fence about this topic. I think the best way for Amazon to do is to make contributions to the OSS organizations that helps them making so much money, if they choose not to give their source code back to the community.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Even GPL wouldn't stop Amazon from offering API interfaces to services built on GPL software. They're not selling/distributing the software. AGPL and similar provisions might work, but then you risk alienating most commercial interest. Many either don't understand or don't want to take on any risk associated with some kinds of licensing or barriers in certain situations. Right now I've had to work around calling a GPL executable (pngquant), simply because we don't want to have to require it as a separate install. So switched to an alternative implementation. It just depends on where you are, where your business is, and what you're working towards/against. It's hard to find a balance. And it will take some time to flush out. MongoDB and Redis come to mind here. They have to make some money to pay their bills and developers, also profit isn't a bad word. At the same time, huge cloud providers are offering services using their software and the devs make nothing. I get both sides here. There's no perfect solution here.
talawahdotnet 8y ago
I fully agree that AWS should do a better job of contributing back to OSS communities both in terms of code, money and man hours, however I don't think most ppl appreciate that a lot of AWS' secret sauce just doesn't make sense to open source even if they wanted to. They build their own custom nitro ASICs to integrate with KVM, for networking, storage, security, etc. That code doesn't make sense anywhere but AWS. They build things in ways that are tightly integrated with their internal systems and at a scale that few have experience with. Take their new Envoy based service mesh for example, I really do hope that they make meaningful contributions back to the main project, but I also suspect they will doing lots of custom integration with their own hardware and internal network that will never make sense to support in an OSS project. Who knows, their Annapurna Labs divsion might even be building a custom card that includes Envoy functionality. As to them being known for destroying OSS businesses I am drawing a blank there, can you provide some examples?
- thefounder 8y ago
  What about DynamoDB? I'm pretty sure they could open source a lot but they just don't want. Google had the same pathetic excuse when asked why they don't open source appengine or datastore.
  - talawahdotnet 8y ago
    I mean it would be cool if they did, but the secret sauce behind DynamoDb is really the scale, without it it probably wouldn't have the performance characteristics end users are looking for. Nor do I think AWS ever wants to be in the business of supporting a non-managed piece of software.
  - mbell 8y ago
    > What about DynamoDB? From what I recall DynamoDB is a somewhat hacky API layer over a bunch of MySQL clusters. I'm not sure anyone would, or should, attempt to use a non-managed version of it.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
SquishyPanda23 8y ago
I'm super interested in Amazon being known for destroying OSS businesses. Can anybody expand with some examples I can dig into?
cthalupa 8y ago
Amazon just open sourced the hypervisor used for Lambda and Fargate ( https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker ) When the Spectre/Meltdown hit, Amazon also open sourced the mitigation used for the AWS version of Xen ( http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/xsa254/README.vixen http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/xsa254/README.vixen ) If you search the Linux git commits for people with @amazon emails, you'll find contributions, bug fixes, etc. I don't think it's fair to say that barely anything is contributed back.
- cdibona 8y ago
  Firecracker is a forked copy of Crosvm. Looks like they did so late last year?
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    I'm not strong enough in Rust or familiar enough with the Crosvm and Firecracker codebases to say, but it looks to me to have pretty majorly departed from it's progenitor at this point. It was announced last week during reinvent.
p-h 8y ago
Can someone explain to me why the AGPL did not cover the case of a SaaS provider hosting their modified version. I thought that that's exactly what the AGPL was for.

by amasad 8y ago

softwaredoug 8y ago

I wonder with Amazon if we’re seeing a failure mode of Apache and BSD licenses, and if the future OSS might trend back towards more aggressively being copy left... or some place in between.

benologist 8y ago
Amazon sell thousands of things under their own brands that they cherry-picked from their vendors' products and sales data. It is unlikely to matter if your software is open source, it just means making an alternative which they've already done for everything from chairs to Java. If they're going to compete on $1.28 shower hooks there's no proprietary SaaS with millions in MRR on AWS that will be too hard to copy. https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011 https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011
talawahdotnet 8y ago
I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host. To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The thought of it all being proprietary is what would scare me.
- jf- 8y ago
  If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software, then it is proprietary software. I think amazon are unlikely to give up any competitive advantage they are not forced to give up.
  - SquishyPanda23 8y ago
    > If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software I'm not sure I'm reading your statement correctly, but it sounds like you're saying that anything not developed under a copyleft license is proprietary. If it was important for authors to receive contributions from derivative works, why would they have selected a license that doesn't require that?
    - jf- 8y ago
      I don’t see how you interpreted it that way - anything released with a proprietary license, or closed source and not released at all, is proprietary. The fact that it’s derivative of an MIT or similarly licensed work makes no difference.
      - SquishyPanda23 8y ago
        Yes, sorry, I thought you were giving it a normative interpretation, but you were just stating a fact. I agree that your statement is correct.
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    The innovations Amazon ads are useless outside of Amazon. Everything is about scaling open source systems inside of the Amazon ecosystem. It's not going to be usable or useful anywhere else.
    - jf- 8y ago
      That’s difficult to discuss without knowing the details, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t anything that is of use to someone outside of amazon, even other cloud providers. There must be some efficiency gains somewhere that would benefit the original software.
      - jhall1468 8y ago
        Maybe minimal benefits to other cloud providers, but hardly something you'd need in the core library. I think Amazon should contribute more to open source, but I certainly wouldn't think any company should release something that would only benefit it's competitors.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Good luck self-hosting DynamoDB and your AWS Lambdas...
  - talawahdotnet 8y ago
    All the more reason for an AWS managed version of MongoDB and Knative...
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      The only reason that's never going to happen is because Mongo's licensing prevents it.
  - Dunedan 8y ago
    There are DynamoDB Local[1] and AWS SAM CLI[2], both from AWS, which allow you to self-host DynamoDB and AWS Lambda functions. ;) That said, I agree with your argument, but found it rather funny that you just picked two AWS services you can indeed run locally. [1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBLocal.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg... [2]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/ https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/
    - becauseiam 8y ago
      DynamoDB is really only good for testing since it uses SQLite underneath.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      These are meant for anything more than dev testing though. All the big clouds offer various dev/local versions of their hosted products that are usually just wrappers around sqlite or rocksdb to emulate the interfaces.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  It is essentially a case of letter vs spirit - using it unmodified doesn't require a contribution. I never got hired by Amazon but I believe their work is technically schema and configuration. No license I am aware of calls for such radical transparency.
SquishyPanda23 8y ago
I'm actually not sure how this is a failure mode of those licenses. I thought the point of permissive licenses over copyleft licenses is that you're explicitly granting companies the right to make money off your code without giving anything back.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  Right. These licenses are a thin layer on top of public domain mostly to disclaim liability. The whole point is that you don’t care what anyone else does with it. If you want a quid pro quo, then you should have been using copyleft (or something else) all along.
- wmf 8y ago
  Yeah, what has failed is the idea that licenses are all basically the same and thus you should choose whatever license all the cool kids are using lately. We're seeing that licenses matter and you can't choose a permissive license and later complain about "the spirit of open source".
- kemitchell 8y ago
  You might be interested in this work: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html
- simonh 8y ago
  It's the difference between believing that what matters is user rights and sharing code, and believing that what matters is the world containing more cool stuff. Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license". It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?". The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.
sciurus 8y ago
I don't think the existing permissive to copyleft spectrum is what matters here. MongoDB, for example, was previously licensed under the AGPL, which is the most aggressive OSI-approved copyleft license I can think of, but they still felt the need to adopt a controversial new license targeted at cloud providers. For another example, Redis Labs didn't decide to adopt a stronger copyleft license for their extensions, they decided to make them proprietary.
- kemitchell 8y ago
  See RPL 1.5, OSL 3.0, QFPL. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/24/How-to-Speak-Copyleft.html#prior-art https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/24/How-to-Speak-Copyl...
oh-kumudo 8y ago
I am quite on fence about this topic. I think the best way for Amazon to do is to make contributions to the OSS organizations that helps them making so much money, if they choose not to give their source code back to the community.
tracker1 8y ago
Even GPL wouldn't stop Amazon from offering API interfaces to services built on GPL software. They're not selling/distributing the software. AGPL and similar provisions might work, but then you risk alienating most commercial interest. Many either don't understand or don't want to take on any risk associated with some kinds of licensing or barriers in certain situations. Right now I've had to work around calling a GPL executable (pngquant), simply because we don't want to have to require it as a separate install. So switched to an alternative implementation. It just depends on where you are, where your business is, and what you're working towards/against. It's hard to find a balance. And it will take some time to flush out. MongoDB and Redis come to mind here. They have to make some money to pay their bills and developers, also profit isn't a bad word. At the same time, huge cloud providers are offering services using their software and the devs make nothing. I get both sides here. There's no perfect solution here.

talawahdotnet 8y ago

I fully agree that AWS should do a better job of contributing back to OSS communities both in terms of code, money and man hours, however I don't think most ppl appreciate that a lot of AWS' secret sauce just doesn't make sense to open source even if they wanted to. They build their own custom nitro ASICs to integrate with KVM, for networking, storage, security, etc. That code doesn't make sense anywhere but AWS. They build things in ways that are tightly integrated with their internal systems and at a scale that few have experience with. Take their new Envoy based service mesh for example, I really do hope that they make meaningful contributions back to the main project, but I also suspect they will doing lots of custom integration with their own hardware and internal network that will never make sense to support in an OSS project. Who knows, their Annapurna Labs divsion might even be building a custom card that includes Envoy functionality. As to them being known for destroying OSS businesses I am drawing a blank there, can you provide some examples?

thefounder 8y ago
What about DynamoDB? I'm pretty sure they could open source a lot but they just don't want. Google had the same pathetic excuse when asked why they don't open source appengine or datastore.
- talawahdotnet 8y ago
  I mean it would be cool if they did, but the secret sauce behind DynamoDb is really the scale, without it it probably wouldn't have the performance characteristics end users are looking for. Nor do I think AWS ever wants to be in the business of supporting a non-managed piece of software.
- mbell 8y ago
  > What about DynamoDB? From what I recall DynamoDB is a somewhat hacky API layer over a bunch of MySQL clusters. I'm not sure anyone would, or should, attempt to use a non-managed version of it.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago

SquishyPanda23 8y ago

I'm super interested in Amazon being known for destroying OSS businesses. Can anybody expand with some examples I can dig into?

cthalupa 8y ago

Amazon just open sourced the hypervisor used for Lambda and Fargate ( https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker ) When the Spectre/Meltdown hit, Amazon also open sourced the mitigation used for the AWS version of Xen ( http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/xsa254/README.vixen http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/xsa254/README.vixen ) If you search the Linux git commits for people with @amazon emails, you'll find contributions, bug fixes, etc. I don't think it's fair to say that barely anything is contributed back.

cdibona 8y ago
Firecracker is a forked copy of Crosvm. Looks like they did so late last year?
- cthalupa 8y ago
  I'm not strong enough in Rust or familiar enough with the Crosvm and Firecracker codebases to say, but it looks to me to have pretty majorly departed from it's progenitor at this point. It was announced last week during reinvent.

p-h 8y ago

Can someone explain to me why the AGPL did not cover the case of a SaaS provider hosting their modified version. I thought that that's exactly what the AGPL was for.