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Rubs me the wrong way when a cloud computing company repackages open source code and starts making huge money without contributing. Rubs me the wrong way when

Rubs me the wrong way when a cloud computing company repackages open source code and starts making huge money without contributing. Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor.

michaelmrose 8y ago
> Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor. What do you propose in that scenario. Copyrighting api has never been a thing prior and likely wont be as soon as the whole affair is appealed yet again. Why should you be able to control who makes a compatible part? Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? Lets do it one better fueled by gas bought at a station willing to give the manufacturer a kickback. Perhaps to license the design of the pump connection. This future is so fundamentally broken and stupid we would do better to abolish all forms of intellectual property rather than fall into this moronic trap.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  > Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? DRM for machinery is absolutely already a thing. What about shifting open source licenses so that duplicating an open source API in a proprietary product, or using a product that does so, is a violation of the license agreement?
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    You have to be party to such a license in the first place do you expect anyone to be stupid enough to sign up for that bullshit?
djur 8y ago
This is what web hosting companies have been doing for many years. It's not new to AWS or cloud computing. There's an entire industry built up around running and maintaining open source software for customers. Redis Labs itself is part of that industry, selling a service called "Redis Enterprise Cloud". I imagine that somewhere in that stack they're using open source software that they don't contribute to, don't you?
- kemitchell 8y ago
  > Redis Labs itself is part of that industry, selling a service called "Redis Enterprise Cloud". Correct. But Redis Labs very visibly and substantially funds development of the BSD-licensed Redis core database. Some of "open source hosting" companies did the same. I always think of Heroku hiring Matz, as an example.
LeonidasXIV 8y ago
This is what everyone is doing. Look at your node_modules folder. How many of those modules has your company contributed to? I think even 1% would be a tall estimate.
brown9-2 8y ago
The idea that they are making money by simply repackaging the project or reimplementing the API is wrong. Customers are paying them to maintain and operate the hosted version of these projects. That’s valuable in itself and should not be seen as stealing money from the software’s authors.

michaelmrose 8y ago

> Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor. What do you propose in that scenario. Copyrighting api has never been a thing prior and likely wont be as soon as the whole affair is appealed yet again. Why should you be able to control who makes a compatible part? Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? Lets do it one better fueled by gas bought at a station willing to give the manufacturer a kickback. Perhaps to license the design of the pump connection. This future is so fundamentally broken and stupid we would do better to abolish all forms of intellectual property rather than fall into this moronic trap.

anth_anm 8y ago
> Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? DRM for machinery is absolutely already a thing. What about shifting open source licenses so that duplicating an open source API in a proprietary product, or using a product that does so, is a violation of the license agreement?
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  You have to be party to such a license in the first place do you expect anyone to be stupid enough to sign up for that bullshit?

djur 8y ago

This is what web hosting companies have been doing for many years. It's not new to AWS or cloud computing. There's an entire industry built up around running and maintaining open source software for customers. Redis Labs itself is part of that industry, selling a service called "Redis Enterprise Cloud". I imagine that somewhere in that stack they're using open source software that they don't contribute to, don't you?

kemitchell 8y ago
> Redis Labs itself is part of that industry, selling a service called "Redis Enterprise Cloud". Correct. But Redis Labs very visibly and substantially funds development of the BSD-licensed Redis core database. Some of "open source hosting" companies did the same. I always think of Heroku hiring Matz, as an example.

LeonidasXIV 8y ago

This is what everyone is doing. Look at your node_modules folder. How many of those modules has your company contributed to? I think even 1% would be a tall estimate.

brown9-2 8y ago

The idea that they are making money by simply repackaging the project or reimplementing the API is wrong. Customers are paying them to maintain and operate the hosted version of these projects. That’s valuable in itself and should not be seen as stealing money from the software’s authors.