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Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipula

Aws is copying others’ efforts and earning billions. Nothing is being given back to the community, instead Amazon execs buy Bay Area luxuries. Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. Elastic, mongo, Kafka, redis, all are being preyed upon.

benologist 8y ago
This has been part of Amazon's business model for years, they have 10,000s of products copied from their vendors. They have even copied stuff hosted on AWS in addition to open source software deployed on AWS. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...
mises 8y ago
> Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. How? Redis is trying, and got backlash. Mongo is trying, and got backlash. Confluent is trying, and got backlash. We've rather got to pick our poison here: do we want companies to open their code and have it used for managed services/cloned, or do we want them to close it and keep making cool tech? I recall reading about the model Google used to use for this sort of thing: open your source code about three to five years after you stop using it. This gives something to the community, while still allowing you to maintain a competitive advantage, run a managed service, etc. Particularly for those who run a SAAS model, it lets them gain widespread adoption before a competitor can spin up an instance of their stuff and undercut them slightly. Oh, and for those saying "use the Red Hat model", the Red Hat model can't work for everyone. Red Hat had a new idea and essentially no competition for enterprise linux at the time, and so didn't have to deal with the competition. They got a chance to build a customer base before Oracle knocked their product off. And even then, Oracle did completely rip off their work. That's the risk you run with open-sourcing your codebase, and not every company is built to work that way; not our job to tell them they should redo their business model to allow it.
- andreareina 8y ago
  A lot of conversation around the backlash was about the insinuation that the new licenses were open when they weren't. "Apache 2 + Commons Clause" is an abuse of both the Apache license and the concept of the commons; the SSPL was submitted to the OSI for approval when it clearly did not meet the definition.
wgjordan 8y ago
> Nothing is being given back to the community To be specific and on-topic, Open Distro for Elasticsearch is being given back to the community under an Apache 2.0 license.
prepend 8y ago
It’s by design of the Apache license that aws can canopy and earn billions. That’s the whole point. It’s a feature, not a bug. If a creator thinks that it is wrong to take without giving, there are lots of other licenses for different philosophies.

benologist 8y ago

This has been part of Amazon's business model for years, they have 10,000s of products copied from their vendors. They have even copied stuff hosted on AWS in addition to open source software deployed on AWS. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...

mises 8y ago

> Stop aws manipulating innovative projects in the name of managed services. How? Redis is trying, and got backlash. Mongo is trying, and got backlash. Confluent is trying, and got backlash. We've rather got to pick our poison here: do we want companies to open their code and have it used for managed services/cloned, or do we want them to close it and keep making cool tech? I recall reading about the model Google used to use for this sort of thing: open your source code about three to five years after you stop using it. This gives something to the community, while still allowing you to maintain a competitive advantage, run a managed service, etc. Particularly for those who run a SAAS model, it lets them gain widespread adoption before a competitor can spin up an instance of their stuff and undercut them slightly. Oh, and for those saying "use the Red Hat model", the Red Hat model can't work for everyone. Red Hat had a new idea and essentially no competition for enterprise linux at the time, and so didn't have to deal with the competition. They got a chance to build a customer base before Oracle knocked their product off. And even then, Oracle did completely rip off their work. That's the risk you run with open-sourcing your codebase, and not every company is built to work that way; not our job to tell them they should redo their business model to allow it.

andreareina 8y ago
A lot of conversation around the backlash was about the insinuation that the new licenses were open when they weren't. "Apache 2 + Commons Clause" is an abuse of both the Apache license and the concept of the commons; the SSPL was submitted to the OSI for approval when it clearly did not meet the definition.

wgjordan 8y ago

> Nothing is being given back to the community To be specific and on-topic, Open Distro for Elasticsearch is being given back to the community under an Apache 2.0 license.

prepend 8y ago

It’s by design of the Apache license that aws can canopy and earn billions. That’s the whole point. It’s a feature, not a bug. If a creator thinks that it is wrong to take without giving, there are lots of other licenses for different philosophies.