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How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Is that what open source is?

tedivm 7y ago
Creating open source software is a choice. No one is required to do it. That choice has both benefits and potential negative consequences if your goal is to commercialize. The benefits include things like volunteer labor, more alpha testers, and community goodwill. The negative is that you have less control over how your software is used. I don't have an answer to how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software. I do know that redefining open source is not the way to handle it though.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  > how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software AWS has more than enough resources to re-implement (or fork/maintain) your software. So if you write a license that pisses off your own community and prevents AWS from using it, then that's probably what they're going to do, and now you have no users. The answer to AWS running a hosted version of your software is, encourage it and ask for patches and contributions back.
- dorfsmay 7y ago
  Exactly, and they made the choice to no longer do it. Feel free to fork it and maintain their effort.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Which if fine. They're allowed to do it. The community of people who use and contribute to the project also get to be mad about it. Look, if Sentry wants to make money selling their software they should have just been proprietary from the beginning.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rstupek 7y ago
Yes it actually does mean that is what open source is.
latortuga 7y ago
AWS is emphatically NOT "taking the code", they have a license for it. If you don't want people to use your work commercially, then don't license it to them to use it commercially. It's pretty simple. Once you tell people what they can and can't use your software for, then it is no longer free; you don't get both.
- pas 7y ago
  I would have no problem with AWS were their shit open source. Starting from all the ugly Perl, that holds whatever obscure nefarious systems in perpetual black magic motion. But they take the successful open source thing, skin it, provide something similar with the same API, and that's it. This contributes back nothing to the community. It actively distorts the cashflows. (Because instead of hiring someone to set up a let's say ES cluster, or buy it from elastic co. they buy it from AWS.)
  - _msw_ 7y ago
    For what it's worth, here is an Amazon contribution to Sentry.... https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/pull/4231 https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/pull/4231 Many developers at Amazon love(d) using Sentry, and one wanted to contribute (in a small way).
- atonse 7y ago
  But that's exactly what they're doing. They're saying you can use it for anything except building a competing product.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >then it is no longer free; you don't get both. You drew a line in the sand, do not presume that someone else will draw the line in the same place. For example, some people draw the line at GPL. I, personally, greatly prefer a BSL license to a fully proprietary license. That means, from me, they do get both.
  - unionpivo 7y ago
sokoloff 7y ago
I don’t propose we do that. Open means open. If you don’t want it to be open, don’t make your code open. (It’s not open by default.) If you do, don’t be surprised or dismayed when someone takes you up on the offer you created.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  > If you don’t want open, don’t make your code open. There are more things than the extremes.
  - tedivm 7y ago
    This is pretty extreme though- three years is a lifetime in the software world, and the original codebase being open source means you likely accepted a lot of code from people who thought they were contributing to an open source project.
    - feross 7y ago
      All of the code you contributed before this change remains open source. You’re free to fork the project.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >I don’t propose we do that. Open means open. I don't think we need software Manichaeism. Software can be as open or closed as anyone likes with many degrees in between. It is preferable for everyone to have software that is relatively permissive but has barriers in place as to not run into a tragedy-of-the-commons like situation where large companies simply take the code of small innovators wholesale and profit off their work without contributing back. License extremism is silly. Why would we be better off if sentry completely closed down their source code, thus robbing everyone of running and using sentry themselves?
  - unionpivo 7y ago
    Not all use of code is just running it as is. Sometimes you want to take a pice of it and use just that in your system. Maybe you want to fork it and do your own thing with it. You can do that and all the other things you can think of with open source, not with BSL (or you would need army of lawyers). BSL is just better proprietary licence. It definitively isn't open source. I think of it as better way to do shareware. But there is big difference between shareware and open source and we don't want to muddy it.
ensignavenger 7y ago
Nothing is broken, nothing to fix.
skywhopper 7y ago
To be fair, hosting a managed service of something, whether the software is open source or not, is a complicated and difficult task. So, AWS charging for a hosted version of something is not an "upcharge" but a payment for actual services rendered.
driverdan 7y ago
Can you cite any AWS products that do that? Providing a paid, hosted version of an open source product isn't selling software, it's selling hosting.
okbake 7y ago
Maybe we need a new license that is similar to existing open source licenses with the addition that it can't be used by FAANG.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Does it matter if they do that or do their own thing with an interoperable API (possibly starting with a code base forked from the last open source release)? Do you think that AWS can't afford the engineering to do the second if there is a business opportunity and the first is foreclosed by licensing terms? Aside from all the other arguments, I don't think this licensing gambit has a chance of actually protecting substantially against the problem that supposedly motivates it, except by reducing the profile of the product to a level where AWS has no reason to care about releasing a compatible service.

Creating open source software is a choice. No one is required to do it. That choice has both benefits and potential negative consequences if your goal is to commercialize. The benefits include things like volunteer labor, more alpha testers, and community goodwill. The negative is that you have less control over how your software is used. I don't have an answer to how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software. I do know that redefining open source is not the way to handle it though.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
> how we can stop AWS from reselling open source software AWS has more than enough resources to re-implement (or fork/maintain) your software. So if you write a license that pisses off your own community and prevents AWS from using it, then that's probably what they're going to do, and now you have no users. The answer to AWS running a hosted version of your software is, encourage it and ask for patches and contributions back.
dorfsmay 7y ago
Exactly, and they made the choice to no longer do it. Feel free to fork it and maintain their effort.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Which if fine. They're allowed to do it. The community of people who use and contribute to the project also get to be mad about it. Look, if Sentry wants to make money selling their software they should have just been proprietary from the beginning.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

rstupek 7y ago

Yes it actually does mean that is what open source is.

latortuga 7y ago

AWS is emphatically NOT "taking the code", they have a license for it. If you don't want people to use your work commercially, then don't license it to them to use it commercially. It's pretty simple. Once you tell people what they can and can't use your software for, then it is no longer free; you don't get both.

pas 7y ago
I would have no problem with AWS were their shit open source. Starting from all the ugly Perl, that holds whatever obscure nefarious systems in perpetual black magic motion. But they take the successful open source thing, skin it, provide something similar with the same API, and that's it. This contributes back nothing to the community. It actively distorts the cashflows. (Because instead of hiring someone to set up a let's say ES cluster, or buy it from elastic co. they buy it from AWS.)
- _msw_ 7y ago
  For what it's worth, here is an Amazon contribution to Sentry.... https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/pull/4231 https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/pull/4231 Many developers at Amazon love(d) using Sentry, and one wanted to contribute (in a small way).
atonse 7y ago
But that's exactly what they're doing. They're saying you can use it for anything except building a competing product.
marcinzm 7y ago
>then it is no longer free; you don't get both. You drew a line in the sand, do not presume that someone else will draw the line in the same place. For example, some people draw the line at GPL. I, personally, greatly prefer a BSL license to a fully proprietary license. That means, from me, they do get both.
- unionpivo 7y ago

sokoloff 7y ago

I don’t propose we do that. Open means open. If you don’t want it to be open, don’t make your code open. (It’s not open by default.) If you do, don’t be surprised or dismayed when someone takes you up on the offer you created.

the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
> If you don’t want open, don’t make your code open. There are more things than the extremes.
- tedivm 7y ago
  This is pretty extreme though- three years is a lifetime in the software world, and the original codebase being open source means you likely accepted a lot of code from people who thought they were contributing to an open source project.
  - feross 7y ago
    All of the code you contributed before this change remains open source. You’re free to fork the project.
Barrin92 7y ago
>I don’t propose we do that. Open means open. I don't think we need software Manichaeism. Software can be as open or closed as anyone likes with many degrees in between. It is preferable for everyone to have software that is relatively permissive but has barriers in place as to not run into a tragedy-of-the-commons like situation where large companies simply take the code of small innovators wholesale and profit off their work without contributing back. License extremism is silly. Why would we be better off if sentry completely closed down their source code, thus robbing everyone of running and using sentry themselves?
- unionpivo 7y ago
  Not all use of code is just running it as is. Sometimes you want to take a pice of it and use just that in your system. Maybe you want to fork it and do your own thing with it. You can do that and all the other things you can think of with open source, not with BSL (or you would need army of lawyers). BSL is just better proprietary licence. It definitively isn't open source. I think of it as better way to do shareware. But there is big difference between shareware and open source and we don't want to muddy it.

ensignavenger 7y ago

Nothing is broken, nothing to fix.

skywhopper 7y ago

To be fair, hosting a managed service of something, whether the software is open source or not, is a complicated and difficult task. So, AWS charging for a hosted version of something is not an "upcharge" but a payment for actual services rendered.

driverdan 7y ago

Can you cite any AWS products that do that? Providing a paid, hosted version of an open source product isn't selling software, it's selling hosting.

okbake 7y ago

Maybe we need a new license that is similar to existing open source licenses with the addition that it can't be used by FAANG.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Does it matter if they do that or do their own thing with an interoperable API (possibly starting with a code base forked from the last open source release)? Do you think that AWS can't afford the engineering to do the second if there is a business opportunity and the first is foreclosed by licensing terms? Aside from all the other arguments, I don't think this licensing gambit has a chance of actually protecting substantially against the problem that supposedly motivates it, except by reducing the profile of the product to a level where AWS has no reason to care about releasing a compatible service.